The World’s Worst Superheroes. By David Walliams. Illustrated by Adam Stower. HarperCollins. $15.99.
You have to give David Walliams credit: he has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of comedic ideas for the preteen set, so many that some of his stories overflow with capsule descriptions of characters that could be protagonists in their own right but with whom he apparently just couldn’t be bothered because he is too busy making other characters into protagonists. Less attractively, Walliams has an equally seemingly-inexhaustible supply of fascination with the grosser bodily functions, and if that seems age-appropriate for his target audience, it also seems inappropriate for just about everyone else – and, truth be told, for the more-refined members of the preteen age group. Assuming there are some. Which Walliams assumes there are not.
All the Walliams character-comedy elements are on clear display in The World’s Worst Superheroes, which bounces from hilarity to ridiculousness to complete stupidity to total grossness to unbounded hilarity with seeming randomness – the excellent Adam Stower illustrations of various and sundry weirdly powered characters pulling everything together, to an extent, while thoroughly exploring elements of Walliams’ fondness for the gross, to an additional extent.
Walliams is quite thoroughly British, as he shows in the opening story here, Wonderqueen. This is the tale that will have the least resonance across the pond, since it requires an understanding of the limitations of queenliness, the importance of corgis, and the transformative abilities of royal objects such as the orb and scepter (spelled sceptre since, again, this is British). One thing that will not be at all difficult for readers to grasp, though, is the supervillain that Wonderqueen must battle: Donald Trump (“No one knew he was a SUPERVILLAIN, as he seemed like such a buffoon” – in case you wondered about Walliams’ political views). Trump transforms into a “HALF MAN, HALF JELLYFISH” and wanders around the palace stealing objects until Wonderqueen eventually overcomes him with weapons such as the “Supersceptre laser blaster,” albeit not without occasional mishaps: “A lightly-singed pigeon fell out of the sky and hit her on the head.” Anyway, the evil Stinger ends up in the water with snapped tentacles, and Wonderqueen returns in triumph to Buckingham Palace, and it really, really does help to have some familiarity with British royal customs to gain a full measure of hilarity from this story.
Everything else in The World’s Worst Superheroes is more readily accessible. Sometimes too accessible. In line with his grossness preoccupations, Walliams proffers Greeniegirl, the tale of Sibyl, “the snottiest girl in the world,” who “produced enough snot to feed an army. If that army ate snot. Which they wouldn’t, because snot tastes DISGUSTING.” But not to Sibyl – which is the whole point of a story in which she gets sent to “The Maximum-Security School for Revolting Children,” whose headmaster, Bloodcurdle, produces copious amounts of earwax and uses them to control the horrible children. These are some of the secondary characters that could theoretically be primary ones if Walliams bothered. Among them are Miss Whippy, Mighty Mess, Polterghoost, Squiggler, Flobber, and The Destructorer – and there are others, each neatly described in a few suitably disgusting lines. They are in the clutches of Professor Nutflake, Dr. Malodour and – well, you get the idea. And if snot is not your thing, you can turn to The Curious Case of the Fantom Farter, starring Professor Phantom aka the Fantom Farter, and if there was ever a title that perfectly described a story, that is it. And the whole thing stinks just about as much as you would expect it to stink.
Thankfully, there is some genuine cleverness in The World’s Worst Superheroes that makes some of the tales much less reliant on poopyness and such. Walliams has a couple of self-referential bits that even adults will enjoy: The Astounding Flea-Man is “a staggering, blockbusting extravaganza” that consists entirely of two pages on which a man who has changed into a flea is squished when someone sits on him. That’s it. Also, in the Greeniegirl tale, one of Bloodcurdle’s “legendary punishments” involves a child, “on pain of death, being made to read a book by David Walliams. Many children chose death.”
Assuming that is not your choice, or the choice of the kids for whom The World’s Worst Superheroes was created, there are a couple of stories here that rely on cleverness and exceptionally amusing Stower illustrations for their effects – and are all the more effective as a result. One is War of the Gods, in which Zeus, Poseidon and Thor are eventually overcome by “Clive, the god of Scrabble,” who “was from a family of pointless gods” – his father, Pete, for example, “was the god of crazy golf.” And then there is Thunderhound Versus the World, in which the unbelievably adorable Bamboozle the dog (you have to see Stower’s art to believe it: unbelievably adorable!) is repeatedly victimized by Vinegar the cat, who goes by the name of Catastrocat and is in cahoots with Professor Beetle, Honk-Honk the “goose with two heads,” and other evil types who, again, could be protagonists if Walliams wanted them to be. Bamboozle aka Thunderhound appears to have only one brain cell, more or less (probably less), and never realizes who is responsible for all the evil things surrounding and attacking him. But he nevertheless manages eventually to rescue 10 dachshund puppies (more adorableness!), one of whom discovers the Thundercave, repairs all the Thundergadgets that Catastrocat had previously sabotaged, and christens himself Thunderpup – which is about as good an ending as any story here possesses.
There is much more to enjoy here. The tale of The League of Retired Superheroes, featuring The Mighty Noob and Emperor Obnox the Obnoxious, who take their longstanding feud (which has already destroyed two planets) to Earth and its determined but distinctly elderly defenders, is especially clever in its concept of superheroes who are well past their prime (and, again, could be stars of their own stories were Walliams so inclined). The Fantastic Forty-Four pits the title characters (many of whom, yet again, could be protagonists) against a gravy monster; the twist here is that 43 of the characters were originally villains, all captured by Doctor Glue, who eventually melts after the climactic battle – but first gets all 43 to agree to continue to be good when he is gone, a promise on which they promptly renege at the end of the story. As for Walliams and Stower, about all they bother to promise in The World’s Worst Superheroes is a collection of utterly ridiculous good (or more-or-less good) characters vs. a completely absurd grouping of evil (or more-or-less evil) bad ones. And that is a promise on which they deliver in all 10 tales here – whether by offering over-the-top grossness or through occasional hints and bits of cleverness atop the steaming mound of unassailable nonsense.
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