Mediocre kids comics are incredibly difficult for me to review. While I’m often accused of being immature and even childish, I am, in fact, technically a grown-up. And I’m a grown-up without any kids, so I can’t even pressgang a J. Caleb Jr. into reading a comic for me and telling me what he thought of it. The best I can do is try to remember what I liked as a kid, and ask myself if the Caleb from back then would have dug something or not.
Great kids comics are a completely different matter though. Because if they’re good enough comics, then they tend to transcend any narrow and—let’s face it—artificial definition of their own audience. Aside from some allowances for age-appropriate content, a great comic is one that you should be able to enjoy no matter what age you are, right?
Andy Runton’s Owly, James Kochalka’s Johnny Boo, Jeff Smith’s Bone and Shazam!, Dark Horse’s Little Lulu reprints, Debbie Huey’s Bumper Boy, Art Baltazar and Franco’s Tiny Titans…I appreciate all of these first and foremost as comics, and then, if asked to, as kids’ comics.
Erik Craddock’s Stone Rabbit #1: BC Mambo (Random House), the first in a series of digest-sized kids’ comics, certainly has its charms, but it just doesn’t belong in that company. Instead, it belongs in the mediocre (and thus hard to review) category.
Craddock, whose previous work includes illustrating Manga Claus, is certainly a strong artist. His character design is quite accomplished, a touch of Japanese influence (particularly in their range of expressions) on top a foundation of animation influence atop a bedrock of plain old drawing chops. His lead character, an unnamed anthropomorphic white rabbit, seems more than ready to run off the page and into other media; heck, many panels look like paper stills from a modern cartoon show with dialogue bubbles added on.
Craddock also knows his way around a visual gag, and the 96-page narrative is completely propulsive, each panel just plain rushing into the next in a way that’s breathlessly exciting without ever becoming exhausting.
If Craddock’s a good story teller, however, he doesn’t have a story to tell here.
Our hero, who is, judging by the cover, perhaps named Stone Rabbit, lives in a place called Happy Glades, where he hates Mondays, likes sugary breakfast cereal and observes that though there are over 500 channels, there’s nothing ever on television.
His life gets much, much more exciting when he discovers a hole hidden under his bathroom rug, and then he and a bottle of barbecue sauce that was in his bathroom for some reason (that reason being that it will later be important to the plot) get sucked into the hole.
This leads to a 15-page sequence of him running into and away from some extremely well-designed dinosaurs and other prehistoric creatures (I particularly liked the bugs and marine life) before falling into a village of cave rabbits who worship him like a god. Then the villain, a cave man who plans to conquer Pangea using giant robots, slave labor, the invention of currency and the invention of fast food franchising, enters the picture, and the rabbit must vanquish him and ruin his plans.
It’s all rather haphazard, but without seeming truly random; rather Craddock’s manipulation of elements is apparent enough to make them obvious, but still wild enough to make the events themselves seem rather meaningless.
There’s also a sort of forced, artificiality to the adventure, from tired old jokes that even audience members with less than a decade of media consumption may find stale to the protagonist having a catchphrase (which the glossary on the inside back cover tells us is supposed to be his catchphrase).
I enjoyed some aspects of the book quite a bit, but on the whole it seemed hollow and somewhat cynically produced to me. But then, like I said, I am a grown-up (and a somewhat cynical and hard to please one at that), so I may have some problems evaluating this beyond saying that it’s not a great comic, nor does it transcend the age group it was created for.
But if I try to remember what I liked as a kid, and ask myself if the Caleb from back then would have dug this or not, then I guess I can say he probably would have. He liked dinosaurs and running around a lot, and this does have both of those. He might have been aware that this was a kid’s comic and thus it wouldn’t have been his favorite or anything, but he certainly would have enjoyed reading it.
