Unsupervised: A Crabgrass Comics Adventure

Bondia offers another collection of slice-of-life comic strips centered on best friends Kevin and Miles. The comics in this volume tend to have at least two punchlines. When Kevin says, "Turns out I don't have the attention span to hold an effective grudge," another character responds, "One of your most endearing qualities." The extra beat often adds to the rhythm of the joke. Sometimes the punchline requires only one word. In another strip, Kevin and Miles are building a snowman, much too late in the season, out of mud and slush. The artwork sells the joke--it's the most oddly grotesque snowman anyone has ever seen, with a word balloon perched over its head: "BRAAAIINS." The new collection is more ambitious than the first, with longer, more complex storylines, most notably a sequence in which the two boys go to a Mega Wrestling Frenzy match. It takes up nearly a quarter of the book, and parts of it--involving a secret village of mascots--are quite surreal, which will enchant some readers and perplex others. But the sequence features some of the best drawings in the book, including a gloriously lantern-jawed pro wrestler. Kevin presents white, while Miles is Black. These strips not only generate laughs, they usually do it twice in a row. (Graphic humor. 8-12) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.