Big Nate: Revenge of the Cream
Puffs. By Lincoln Peirce. Andrews McMeel. $9.99.
Cat vs Human: Fairy Tails. By
Yasmine Surovec. Andrews McMeel. $14.99.
Some cartoonists have come
up with characters whose adventures seem to unfold naturally, so carefully have
the characters’ personalities been established over the years. Big Nate and his
friends in Lincoln Peirce’s Big Nate
comic strip are just everyday sixth-graders with few outlandish elements in
their lives – the cats and dogs in the strip may not be totally realistic, but
they do not talk or fly, and there are no supernatural characters or
occurrences driving the action. Instead, the strip’s humor evolves naturally
from the characters’ personalities and the kids’ interactions among themselves
and, in particular, with Nate. There is nothing new in this approach to
cartooning – Walt Kelly perfected it decades ago, and it even predates his
unequalled Pogo – but Peirce uses
this storytelling form particularly well, so that the episodes unfold in ways
that seem inevitable. In the latest Big
Nate collection, for example, Nate’s admiration for Brad Linsky, the artist
who draws Nate’s own favorite comic, “Femme Fatality,” leads naturally to Nate
wanting to use better materials for his own cartooning endeavors (which,
unfortunately, get short shrift in this book and even within this specific
sequence). Nate’s desire for self-improvement – which is at best intermittent,
but does show up in this specific area – leads him to ask his feckless father
to provide “a super heroine-ish nude model or two” for an anatomy study, and to
discover that professional drawing tools are a lot harder to use than he
thought. In another set of strips, Kim Cressly, the large and aggressive girl
who has a crush on Nate – much to his annoyance – discovers that she has a
bigger crush on the even larger and even more aggressive Chester Budrick, one
of those comic-strip characters who are never seen but whose effects are quite
apparent (an approach recalling Charles Schulz’ handling of adults in Peanuts). Elsewhere, Nate hatches one of
his usual over-ambitious plans, this time to make a movie that will bring in as
much money as The Hunger Games, and
this means he recruits plump and gentle Chad to be transformed into a fearless
warrior – although Chad would prefer to spend his time playing with “Andy the
Acorn” and “Mr. Mushroom.” There is more to Chad than appears on the surface,
as Peirce makes clear in a sequence in which Chad is the only remaining player
on Nate’s unfortunately named Cream Puffs baseball team who can pitch, and
manages to surprise everyone, including Nate, by winning the Little League
championship game. None of these sequences is especially notable in terms of
plot – what makes them work is the way they revolve around Nate, depend on his
personality for their effect, and deepen Peirce’s development of his character.
Peirce (pronounced “purse”) gives the supporting cast plenty of personality as
well, but most of the non-Nate characters are comparatively one-dimensional:
Nate’s friend Francis is a typical fact-spouting nerd; Nate’s older sister,
Ellen, is a thoroughly typical foil for Nate, being as responsible and
hardworking as Nate is lazy and inclined to cut corners; Nate’s rival, Gina, is
the annoying school know-it-all; and so on. Nate himself, though, for all his
lack of self-awareness and inflated sense of self-importance, has some genuine
intelligence and ability beneath all the bluster – the way he beats Gina at
chess in this latest collection is a perfect example. Walt Kelly once said that
Pogo was the glue holding the Pogo
strip together. In Peirce’s Big Nate,
Nate is more like the sun around which all the other characters revolve –
although it would be overdoing things to say that Nate casts light on the
others in the strip. Heat, maybe, but not light.
The central characters in
Yasmine Surovec’s Web comic, Cat versus
Human, are cats – well, duh. Humans are never the primary focus of a
“versus” sort of comic. Surovec’s cartoon world is filled with the many-faceted
perfections of felines – the opposite, in this way, of Nate’s world, since Nate
is afraid of cats and constantly tries (unsuccessfully) to show that dogs are
better. Unsurprisingly, the felines are the stars in Surovec’s collection, Cat vs Human: Fairy Tails, in which
humans exist primarily to admire, feed, care for and dote on cats – making
these stories not all that unlike the real world. In this version of
“Rapunzel,” for instance, there is no witch – how Rapunzel got into the tower
is never mentioned – and the prince who climbs up is looking for his cats,
which he and Rapunzel take back to his
castle so everyone can live purringly ever after. In “Goldilocks,” the title
character is a cat looking for a place to sleep and finding all the bears’ beds
unsatisfactory – ending up happily resting in a cardboard box instead. “The
Princess and the Pea” is another sleep story – the crown-wearing cat can
finally fall asleep after finding the pea under a pile of pillows and eating
it. “The Pied Piper” in this version gets the rats out of town and, after the
chintzy mayor refuses payment, gets even by taking away all the town’s cats –
so of course the rats return. “The Little Mermaid” wants to live on land and
play with kitties – which turn out to be mer-cats, so she is unhappy until one
comes back on land to stay with her. The prince in “The Sleeping Beauty” fails
to wake the title character with a kiss and leaves in a huff, declaring the
whole story “a waste of time,” but a kitty’s kiss awakens the princess
successfully and proves that the cat is “her true love.” The variations on classic
fairy tales here are predictable and in most cases mildly humorous, but the
(+++) book will be fun for cat lovers – although of no real interest to anyone
else. Surovec’s art is simple to the point of being simplistic, and while it is
pleasant enough, it fits somewhat better on the Internet than between the pages
of a book, where its lack of detail and much-simplified renderings and colors
are appealing enough on first reading but do not invite many return visits. Cats
have been Internet video sensations pretty much forever, and still are, but not
everything feline translates perfectly (much less purrfectly) to the printed
page.
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