When I heard this book was coming out, I got excited. I pre-ordered it as soon as I could, rejoiced when it finally arrived in the mail, and had to practice a lot of discipline to avoid reading the entire thing in a single sitting. Did it live up to the hype? Let’s look at Pepper Page Saves the Universe! by Landry Q. Walker and Eric Jones.

First of all — Walker and Jones — weren’t they the creators of Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8^th Grade? Yes, indeed, they were, and when the team behind one of the most fun superhero comics in ages gets back together, you get whatever they’re making. This isn’t a pure clone of the Supergirl comics, no matter how much we might like to see that series continue, but it has some fun similarities.

We start out in the distant future where Pepper Page is a lonely 15-year-old orphan. She’s an awkward nerdy kid with only a couple close friends, Tally and Zola, and a deep, obsessive love for ancient comic books, especially about the superheroine Supernova.

But she’s got angry rivals, particularly the jock Strona, who’s furious with Pepper for constantly missing games of Holo-Ball. And she has to deal with an unfriendly teacher, Professor Killian, who’s pompous and sneering and maybe a liiiiiittle bit shady. So Pepper just doesn’t enjoy school at all. The only thing she wants to do is hang out with her friends and read her Supernova comics.

Things start to go really wrong one night when Pepper and her friends escape Strona and her bullies by hiding out in the school. They soon find Professor Killian in the midst of some sort of strange hyper-tech project — and cruelly experimenting on a stray cat! Pepper tries to intervene, but finds herself — and the cat — caught up in a field of quantum energy. Killian only expresses disappointment that she’s ruined his experiment, kinda proving that he’s a lot past just kinda shady — and then Pepper vanishes into the timestream.

And things get really weird at that point, what with the blasts of light, the gigantic voice of the cosmos, the furious blobs of evil eyeballs, and the all-seeing glowing heads — which tell Pepper that she herself is Supernova, that she always has been, that she always will be. But that couldn’t possibly be true, right? Right?

That’s right around the mid-point of the story — and beyond that be spoilers, so we won’t get into it.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Such a big thumbs up. This comic is just fantastic from beginning to end. I loved pretty much everything from first page to last.

The plotline is plenty of fun. It starts out with low-stakes, high school melodrama stuff, sometimes even moving downright slowly to make sure everyone gets the idea of how miserable Pepper’s life is, and by the time it crescendos up to the cosmic scale, things have gone way beyond high stakes — and it’s still a story of Pepper’s struggles. It’s just her struggles writ on a much wider scale. Plus there’s energy blasts and super-powered punches, so that’s pretty great, too.

Characterization is excellent, too, though the best developed characters are (obviously) Pepper and Mister McKittens, the hyper-intelligent, utterly droll cat who serves as Pepper’s personal sounding board and infodump generator.

The artwork by Eric Jones (and colors by Michael Drake and Pannel Vaughn) is absolutely spectacular. It’s got a lot of appealing cartoony qualities, but when it comes time for someone to get rocketed through space, to get blasted by quantum energy, to transform themselves, or to get thunder-punched clear across the city, that’s when the art jumps up to another level entirely, full of energy, motion, and power. It turns a thoroughly excellent and fun comic into a joyously, thrillingly exciting one.

Looking for a great comic to share with a younger reader? Looking for a great comic to share with a grownup reader, too? You’ll definitely want to pick this one up.

Okay, let’s get another review done! It’s part comic book, part children’s book, part musical tribute, and 100% fun — it’s The Princess Who Saved Herself by Jonathan Coulton, Greg Pak, and Takeshi Miyazawa!

Mayhap you are familiar with Jonathan Coulton, the Internet’s favorite musician, yes? And mayhap you are familiar with his wonderful song, “The Princess Who Saved Herself”? If not, here ’tis:

It’s fun and jaunty! Hit the replay button, memorize the words, sing it all day long!

So writer Greg Pak and illustrator Takeshi Miyazawa decided they wanted to adapt the song as a comic/kids book. But they did something fun with it — rather than being just a straight adaptation of Coulton’s song, we get a bit of an expansion.

Where the original focused on the dragon and the witch, this one gives us a few more complications, including a giant bee, a plague of darkness, and an unexpected fire — as well as a new motivation for the queen, a new resolution for the whole thing, and a truly wonderful name for the princess.

No, y’all, I ain’t offering no further spoilers. This thing is only about 30 pages — the perfect length for a great mid-afternoon read for younger kids — and you should get all the enjoyment you can outta this thing.

Verdict: Thumbs up. It’s frickin’ delightful, people.

The story gives you a nice jolt of familiarity, especially if you know and love Coulton’s song. And the rewritten and expanded tale also gives you some great surprises, too. Pak has tons of fun with the rhymes here.

Miyazawa’s art is lots of fun, too. It’s wonderfully appealing and charismatic, with metric tons of personality, emotion, and action. And it has lots of cute jokes and details hidden away so you can have fun re-reading it over and over. It really is a perfect combination of writing with art.

Also, props to colorist Jessica Kholinne, who helps make everything pop beautifully.

What else can I say, guys? It’s frickin’ delightful. If you’re a fan of Coulton’s music, if you love fun comics, if you’ve got kids who need this fun and inspiring story, you should go pick it up!

Dang, it is long past time for me to do some more reviews. Let’s take a look at one of the few comics I was able to buy last year: Dracula, Motherf**ker! by Alex de Campi and Erica Henderson.

We start out with a quick three-page preview from 1889 Vienna as Dracula’s brides turn on him, stake him into a coffin, and bury him.

And then we jump forward to 1974 Los Angeles, as a Hollywood starlet worrying about aging decides she may as well let the Lord of Darkness roam free.

After that, we meet Quincy Harker, an African-American photographer working to take pictures of gruesome murder scenes for the tabloids. And when he realizes somethings weird about some of the photos he’s taken, he ends up on the radar of Dracula and his new brides. And his only hope for survival is… Dracula’s old brides?

Does one schmuck with a camera have a hope in hell when matched up against the most powerful vampires on Earth?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Yeah, I didn’t put a lot of plot description up there. It’s not a long book — only about 70 pages long — and the plot is pretty straightforward. It don’t need a complex, convoluted plot to deserve a thumbs-up.

This one started out not being a big favorite — Quincy mostly served as a helpless nobody who had stuff happen to him, or who got helplessly dragged along by others. But that was because I was assuming he was the protagonist, expecting him to be Jim Kelly in “Black Belt Jones.”

But Quincy Harker isn’t the protagonist. The brides are. Quincy is there as a witness, and he has his part to play in the story as our viewpoint character. But Dracula and the brides are the ones who move the story.

And jeezum wow, can we do some screamin’ about the art on this book? So many of us are most familiar with Erica Henderson through her work on the very friendly “The Unbeatable Squirrel Girl,” and this looks like she stored up every dark, bloody thought she’s had for the past decade just so she could unleash it on the page here.

It’s amazing, lush, absolutely glorious. The nighttime scenes of ’70s L.A. are lusciously decadent, the costume design is beautiful, and the design of Dracula himself is like nothing you’ve ever seen before in any medium. Ain’t very much human form for this guy — just eyes, mouths, and a couple of skinny, elongated arms. His design is the type of thing you’ll probably see in a movie someday, from a design studio that’ll probably have to pay Erica Henderson a decent chunk of change.

My lone quibble about this is the title. Dammit, I just want us to be able to say “Motherfucker” in the title of a book or comic and not have to resort to asterisks.

Anyway, this is a great book, and you should definitely go pick it up.

Okay, I’m still in a mood to review some great Halloween stuff, and it’s way past time I reviewed some comics — and this one’s a bit off-beat, as far as Halloween comics go. Let’s take a look at Pumpkinheads, written by Rainbow Rowell and illustrated by Faith Erin Hicks.

From that title, you may be expecting something having to do with vengeance demons or gourd-headed scarecrows or something horrific like that. But that isn’t what we have here at all. Instead, it’s a story of a couple high school friends, Josiah and Deja, on one final hurrah before parting ways. The title comes from the setting: the world’s greatest pumpkin patch attraction on the last night of October.

Do we all know what a pumpkin patch is? This is a lo-fi local amusement attraction, usually found in New England and the American Midwest, based around autumn and the harvest. The central attraction is usually a corn maze with a few side attractions — a pumpkin cannon, a potato cannon, a few docile farm animals in a petting zoo, a small barrel train, and some concessions. You won’t find them run by giant entertainment corporations, although they can sometimes grow quite large and make a lot of money for the people running them. They don’t usually have a lot of Halloween content — they may have a haunted hayride and encourage trick-or-treaters, but the appeal is usually the corn maze and maybe the concessions. They’re not always called a pumpkin patch — but it’s called a pumpkin patch in this book, so we’ll stick with that for now.

Our lead characters are Josiah, a tall, shy white guy, and Deja, a shorter, outgoing black girl, on their last night working at DeKnock’s World Famous Pumpkin Patch and Autumn Jamboree. Every year, they’re best friends from September 1 to October 31, and then they barely see each other ’til next year. They work in the Succotash Hut every season, and Josiah is nearly always Employee of the Month. But they’re both seniors, and after tonight, they’ll never get to work together at the Patch again. And Josiah has maintained a years-long unrequited crush on Marcy, the cute girl from the Fudge Shoppe, and Deja is going to make sure he finally — finally! — talks to her. Will the ever-diligent Josiah agree to skip out on work and go wandering all over the park? Will they eat all the amazing concession food?

Verdict: A giant thumbs-up! I read this book at my local library, and I loved it so much, I had to order a copy of my own!

The book certainly isn’t plotless, but if you’re expecting an action-oriented plot, you’ll be disappointed. This is about two friends walking through an amazing autumn-based theme park and talking to each other about life, love, dating, and the future. There’s a kid who steals Deja’s caramel apple, and there’s a goat who runs amok — and that’s about it for the action. But again, there’s more to a good plotline than action, even in comics.

Can we talk about the art? If you read many Young Adult graphic novels, you’ll see Faith Erin Hicks a lot. She’s been doing lovable, expressive, emotive comic art for longer than the current YA comics boom has been going on, and she’s in great form here. Deja and Josiah both look like people you probably knew in high school, and the friends they see in the park all look unique and interesting. She’s a master of characterization, which is so important when you’ve got a comic based around people talking to each other — and when most of the characters are park employees wearing the same same work uniform.

The strongest element in the whole story is nostalgia, primarily for the kind of perfect, pure autumn that mostly exists in dreams. But here, we have lots of the classic signifiers of fall — autumn colors, scarecrows, corn stalks, hay bales, kids in costumes, lots and lots and lots of pumpkins — and you have it inside what may be the largest and coolest pumpkin patch ever. Among the attractions are a corn maze, a hayrack ride, a pumpkin slingshot, a pumpkin drop, Gourdy Golf (a few holes of gourd-themed miniature golf), the Tour de Pumpkin mini-train, Grandma’s Chicken Races, a petting zoo, pony rides, the Haunted Hacienda, and a concert stage featuring John Colorado Springs, the world’s foremost John Denver tribute band.

And then there’s the food. The food! My friends, come marvel at the amazing selection of fun fall foods offered at the various snack stands around the park. There’s the Fudge Shoppe and Pie Palace right next to the entrance, with Pappy’s Apples, selling caramel apples, a little ways down the way. Beyond that, there’s the Chili Fries Stand, the S’Mores Pit, and a cart selling apple cider slushes. After that, there’s the trademark-evading Freeto Pie Stop, then Josiah and Deja’s usual workplace, the bizarrely popular Succotash Hut, followed by the Kettle Corn Kettle, and finally, the Pumpkin Bomb Stand. What’s a Pumpkin Bomb? I won’t spoil the recipe here, but it’s something you’ll want to try for yourself after you read the book.

And again, don’t get this expecting anything to do with the 1988 horror movie with Lance Henriksen. That one is “Pumpkinhead” — singular. This one is “Pumpkinheads” — plural, and definitely not about vengeance demons.

So is this something you should read? My answer is a loud and enthusiastic yes, particularly if you enjoy great art, characterization, and dialogue, if you love everything having to do with late October and autumn in general, and if you love the idea of eating a lot of great fall food. Go pick it up, guys!

Things are still really busy, and they’re just going to get worse. But I think I do have the time to knock out a quick review of this old-ish graphic novel. Let’s take a look at Weird Detective: The Stars Are Wrong by Fred Van Lente and Guiu Vilanova.

This mystery/horror comic came out in 2017, and its plot focuses on Detective Sebastian Greene, the weirdest officer in the NYPD. No one likes him, and he talks like he learned English from a Speak-and-Spell, but he has the best clearance rate of any detective in the city.

He’s also not human. He’s not even a little bit human.

And he’s in the middle of investigating a series of gruesome murders that he needs to solve if he wants to save the world. Not our world — the world he originally came from. He doesn’t particularly care what happens to our world.

And even worse, the brass is insisting he start working with a partner. Detective Sana Fayez has her own secrets and her own agenda — namely, figuring out what’s up with Greene.

Can Greene and Fayez keep their secrets from each other? Can one horror from beyond the veil of time stop another horror from beyond the veil of time?

Verdict: Thumbs up. The book is full of lots of great characters, very few of them entirely virtuous, but all of them, even the monsters, full of personality. Motivations are clear and sensible — no one is evil strictly for the sake of evil. Even the most horrific creatures are motivated by things like survival, hunger, protection of family, etc.

The central crimes being investigated — the murders of the Juice Box Killer — are excellently creepy, which is a great way to bring readers in and to keep them interested. It’s fun to see Greene and Fayez interact and scheme, but watching them track the real killer is great fun.

Looking for a cool horror story blending Lovecraftian horror with the police procedural? You’ll want to pick this one up.

It’s a great day to review a comic, isn’t it? Let’s take a look at Superman Smashes the Klan by Gene Luen Yang and Gurihiru.

There is, first of all, some actual history behind this, and you can read some of the details in this old review of mine right here. Back in the 1940s, the Anti Defamation League and the producers of the Superman radio show hit on the idea of using the character’s vast popularity to make a difference in some of the nation’s social ills, including racism.

The result was a storyline called “The Clan of the Fiery Cross,” with the Man of Steel battling a stand-in organization for the Ku Klux Klan. The KKK was infuriated about the program, but it was still basically the most popular show on the radio, and it helped significantly reduce the Klan’s power across the nation.

And that brings us to this comic, which is an adaptation of the radio show. It’s got some new or altered characters, some new or altered storylines — in other words, it’s an adaptation, not a transcription.

So our main characters — aside from Superman, Lois Lane, and Jimmy Olsen — are the Lee family, recent Chinese immigrants, particularly the two kids, popular and athletic Tommy and brainy but nervous Roberta.

The Lees’ first days in their new Metropolis home start out rough, with all too many reminders of the racism that plagued anyone who wasn’t white in the 1940s. Besides the occasional slur and rude remark, there’s also the rising threat of the Clan of the Fiery Cross, a hate group that burns crosses in people’s lawns, sets bombs in community centers, and tries all too hard to assault and kill as many innocents as they can.

But luckily, Superman is on the case. He saves plenty of lives, but is dogged by his own doubts and fears, including the strange alien ghosts that only he can see and who claim to be his real parents. Is the Man of Steel losing his mind?

As the attacks by the hate group grow bolder, more desperate, and more destructive, can Superman and the Lees come together to smash the Klan once and for all?

Verdict: Thumbs up. The story is energetic and engrossing, the art is absolutely glorious, and the message is desperately needed nowadays.

My lone criticism is that the story is really episodic, almost random, with the Klan repeatedly hatching various schemes and putting people in danger, just for the danger to be foiled in the nick of time before the next scheme is hatched. But of course, that’s very true to the story’s origins in the radio dramas of the 1940s, which were obviously episodic and often ended with a cliffhanger that would be resolved in the next day’s broadcast. Still, it can take a little time to get used to it…

I feel like the star of the comic is Roberta Lee, who carries most of the weight of the story. She gets to start out nervous and queasy, and she gets to grow in lots of ways, showing off more bravery and much more cleverness and wit.

And Superman is portrayed very interestingly. He has his Golden Age powers — leaping but not flying, less strength, no heat vision, etc. And he also has his first exposure to Kryptonite in this story — another nice nod to the radio series, where Kryptonite originated. And his doubts and fears are well articulated through the weird alien ghosts he starts seeing everywhere.

And Gurihiru’s artwork is just so dang great. The Japanese artistic team always does a great job, and their artwork in this book is just as fun, as beautiful, as wildly charismatic and engaging as ever.

And if you needed another reason to get this book? Listen, you love to see people smashing the Klan, right? Everyone loves to see the Klan get smashed! Smashing the Klan is what America has always done best — and we can continue smashing the Klan today! Huzzah! Klan smashing!

In other words, go get this book for great art and characters, for a fun throwback to classic tales of yesteryear, and for getting to watch hatemongers repeatedly getting beat up.

It’s been ages since I reviewed any comics! Let’s jump back into things with a look at Shadow of the Batgirl by Sarah Kuhn and Nicole Goux.

We start out with Cassandra Cain, brainwashed teenaged assassin, whose conditioning is unexpectedly broken when one of her victims leaves a brief final message for his daughter that shocks her out of her murderous programming. She spends a night in an alley before she’s taken in for a meal by Jackie Yoneyama, an old woman who runs a restaurant. Cass isn’t even able to thank her properly — she was trained by her father solely as an assassin, and she isn’t even able to talk.

Cass runs away and finds herself confused and frightened by the noise and chaos of modern life — and being pursued by the other assassins in her father’s employ. Soon she finds shelter in the Gotham Public Library, where she’s able to hide, learn to read, practice her fighting skills on stacks of books, and eventually start making friends, including a wheelchair-bound librarian named Barbara Gordon and a boy closer to her age named Erik.

Can Cass learn more about the world around her? Can Jackie, Barbara, and Erik help her come out of her shell? Can she defend herself against her father’s villainy and discover what happened to the long-vanished Batgirl?

Verdict: Thumbs up. Sarah Kuhn’s story is fine — a tad slow around the middle, but it picks up wonderfully well before the end. Besides, the slower portions of the story are where the character building comes in — and there’s so much great character detail in here. Lots of comics fans love Cassandra Cain, but this is a graphic novel for younger adults who might not be as familiar with Cass as everyone else is, and this comic gives her space to become a heroic character and a character who readers can love. That’s a great gift — not just to readers, but to Cass as a character, who now gets a new generation of fans.

I’m also a big fan of Jackie Yoneyama. She’s a new character created just for this book, but she was wonderfully realized. And she’s the kind of character who should be present in more comics, and particularly in more Bat comics — a street-level civilian who isn’t a victim, isn’t a crook, isn’t a future hero — just a connection to keep our main characters grounded as part of Gotham City. Even better — a character who runs a restaurant, because superheroes need somewhere to stop and get a bowl of ramen while fighting crime.

And let’s give big props to Nicole Goux’s stunning artwork, which rocks its way across every single page. And colorist Cris Peter really makes this book sing — shadowy libraries and rooftops, brilliant sunsets through windows, gloriously colorful clothing. The art and colors really make this book come to life.

Do you love Cass Cain, brilliant characters, beautiful artwork? You’ll definitely want to pick this up.

This has been an overwhelmingly rotten year, and if we needed another reminder of that fact, it came Friday night when we learned that John Lewis, civil rights icon and one of the best damn people anywhere, had died at the age of 80.

I suspect y’all will remember that Lewis wrote his own graphic novel, “March,” co-written with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate Powell. I’d previously reviewed Book One and Book Two, but I was surprised to realize I’d never reviewed Book Three — it was released after I’d mothballed the blog in 2016.

So there’s probably no better time to remedy that situation than right now. Let’s look at March, Book Three by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell.

In 1963, the civil rights struggles become more violent, largely because white supremacists were getting more and more frightened and angry. The book opens with the terrifying bombing of the 16^th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham by the KKK that killed four girls. While much of the rest of the country is horrified, whites in the Deep South are largely ecstatic.

From here, Lewis recounts a lot of tough times for the Civil Rights Movement — attempts to register voters in the South that were obstructed by police, judges, and politicians; the death of John F. Kennedy, one of their major supporters; the murders of Mickey Schwerner, Andy Goodman, James Chaney, and far too many other activists; the futile struggle to seat the Mississippi Freedom Democratic Party delegates at the Atlantic City Democratic Convention.

And Selma. The campaign to register voters, opposed with fanatical rage by the police. The brutal Bloody Sunday at the Edmund Pettis Bridge, where Lewis was savagely beaten by police. And the march from Selma to Montgomery.

And finally, the Voting Rights Act of 1964. But the battle didn’t end there.

And the book isn’t a dry recounting of historical events. Lewis tells you the people he worked with, the disagreements, the small moments between friends, the events that mattered, the speeches that drove civil rights forward. Lewis shares meetings with Martin Luther King, Malcolm X, Fannie Lou Hamer, C.T. Vivian, also gone last week, and dozens more. It’s not textbook history — it’s human history, recreated before your eyes.

Verdict: Thumbs up. Lewis brings us the terrors and triumphs of the Civil Rights Movement on a fully human scale. You’re gonna see a lot of stuff in this book that will make you absolutely furious, from the various bigoted sheriffs committing assaults and murders at will (Golly, how the times do repeat themselves) to LBJ, who, though he may have signed the signature civil rights legislation, was still a racist douchebag.

Luckily, you’ll also see plenty of stuff to inspire you, too. Fannie Lou Hamer’s testimony, Lewis’ trip to Africa and meeting with Malcolm X, the march to Montgomery, all the people working together to bring about a more equitable world.

Lewis decided he wanted to write this because he wanted to educate young people about the struggle for equality and the right to vote — but parents should be aware that the book is full strong language and violence. It’s not gratuitous — this is the language white racists used. And the violence is not gory, but the smudged and shadowy depictions of assaults and fires and bombings are their own kind of nightmare fuel.

But even if you’re worried about showing it to your kids, you shouldn’t be afraid of reading it yourself. When I was growing up, my history classes always petered out not long after World War II. The Civil Rights Movement was glossed over, at best. So reading this is a valuable education for adults as well as kids.

This one is highly recommended. Go read it. Go read all three books of this series.

Okay, folks, wanna hear about the weirdest comic I’ve read in a long, long time? Let’s take a look at Apocalypse Taco by Nathan Hale.

Things start out, well, kinda predictably for a middle-grade graphic novel. It’s production night for the high school’s production of “Brigadoon,” and that means an all-night set-building session. Responsible Ivan and deeply irresponsible Axl are the lone junior-high kids on hand, solely because their mother is the drama teacher. The wrestling team raids the drama club’s pizza stash, and eventually, the food runs out, and everyone gets hungry.

Ivan and Axl are assigned to go get food from the nearest McDonald’s, thanks to a handful of MickeyD’s gift certificates. And Sid, a high school girl with her own truck, volunteers to ferry them to the restaurant and back. But Axl manages to lose all the gift certificates, so the three of them decide to stop at the nearest Taco Bear instead, ’cause Mexican food sounds more appealing.

And that’s when things start getting weird.

The Taco Bear is full of customers — but there aren’t any cars in the parking lot. And the doors are locked, so no one can come in. So the kids go through the drive-thru and pick up their order. And the food transforms into shapeshifting flesh monsters.

After throwing the food out the window, the kids race back to the school, only to find that all the drama students are also shapeshifting flesh monsters. And the school itself is a shapeshifting flesh monster.

Basically, everything is a shapeshifting flesh monster at this point.

The kids drive off, pursued by other cars, which are, of course, shapeshifting flesh monsters. They find an ally who’s a ball of arms — and when the arms get cut off, there’s a grad student underneath.

And then everyone gets sucked underground into an immense slime hive of replicating skin bees.

Is there any way for Ivan, Axl, and Sid to escape? Has the world gone completely mad?

Verdict: Thumbs up. But boy, I’ll tell ya, I never imagined I’d find a middle-grade YA graphic novel so absolutely drenched in body horror.

If you’re into body horror, this is pretty great stuff. Besides the flesh monsters disguised as fast-food bags, lockers, cars, and people, you’ve got the grad student/arm monster, you’ve got a monster made of teeth, you’ve got giant mutated bees, you’ve got a vast underground temple of gooey, writhing meat and tentacles.

If you’re getting this for a junior-high or upper elementary school student? Well, read it before you give it to them, and then decide if you think they can handle it. I’m not sure there’s anything as scary as the monster from John Carpenter’s “The Thing,” but the sheer overwhelming volume of squishy tentacle horrors makes for some pretty intense moments.

Okay, as long as I’ve got some new-ish comics to review, let’s keep the reviews going. Time to take a look at Dear Justice League, written by Michael Northrop and illustrated by Gustavo Duarte.

The premise here is pretty simple — it’s a bunch of kids sending fan mail to the Justice League of America, and how the heroes respond. Does Superman ever make mistakes? Oh mercy, does he ever. Does Green Lantern ever consider getting a more fashionable costume? Does Batman have advice for surviving the first day at a new school? Is Cyborg willing to challenge his fans in video game tournaments?

And while all this is going on, the League slowly becomes aware of a new danger looming over the world. Once the emails have been read and answered, will the JLA be able to defeat this new invasion?

Verdict: I really hate to say it, but I’m thumbing this one down. I had high hopes, ’cause the art really does look fantastic and charming, but it was just frustratingly short of actual storytelling.

This was marked as a middle-grade graphic novel, and I feel like that’s a term that needs a better definition. I’ve seen fairly mature works listed as middle-grade, and I’ve seen less mature works, too. I’d been under the impression that middle-grade meant upper elementary to lower high school — but this felt like it was aimed right at much younger kids — and considering how bad some of the jokes are in this book, most of those younger kids still probably thought it was childish.

There’s a lot of stuff in here that’s fine. I love the entire chapter focusing on Wonder Woman — it makes her cool, responsible, and intelligent — and it still spotlights her fun-loving side with the flashback to her childhood. I love Aquaman’s battle with Black Manta. I love the fact that they used Simon Baz as Green Lantern. I liked the chapter with the Flash — it’s light-hearted with low stakes, but it’s an amusing way to deal with childhood bullies/trolls.

And man, is the art ever fun. I’m sure it appeals to kids, but it certainly appealed to me, too. It’s fun and funny and kinetic, and it does a great job depicting the world’s greatest superheroes.

Nevertheless. It felt like a book that wasted a lot of opportunities, like a book that assumed kids couldn’t handle a smarter story. But it’s the first in a longer series of graphic novels, and I hope the next volumes will be better.