Drew and Jot: Dueling Doodles Could Turn Kids Into Comic Artists
- WRITER
- Art Baltazar
- Artist
- Art Baltazar
- Publisher
- KaBOOM!
- Price
- 14.99
- Release Date
- 2019-12-18
Art Baltazar is one of the more respected names in kids' comics, most famous for drawing and co-writing Tiny Titans as well as other cutesified takes on beloved DC Comics characters. He now has a new original graphic novel, the first in a planned trilogy from KaBOOM!, titled Drew and Jot: Dueling Doodles. It's a creative, energetic read that could be the push some young comic readers ]on the path towards becoming comic creators.
Drew and Jot operates on two layers of reality. The first we see is the world of Drew and Jot themselves, a superhero and his dog living in a wacky world presented in scribbly crayons. These characters exist within a sketchbook owned by Andrew, a fifth grader creating his own comic in the more solidly-colored real world.
Andrew soon finds a friend, Foz, to collaborate on his comics with and introduces a new supervillain, Doctor Danger. When Andrew's little sister Patsy steals the sketchbook, new challenges emerge for its characters, and the three kids have to work together to make everything right.
The tone of the book is a lot like a Captain Underpants story, mixed in with a little of the sibling play conflict from The Lego Movie 2: The Second Part (but without that movie's sentimentality). It's successful at presenting ideas that feel like they stepped straight out of a kids' imagination, bizarre and gross and exciting. Baltazar's art style is also well-suited for that task -- simple enough that it looks like a kid could have drawn it while elegant enough to look professional.
There is one major artistic weakness to this book, however: all three of the kids' art styles are exactly the same. The simplicity of Baltazar's style sort of lets the book get away with this, being uncomplicated enough that multiple people could draw it the same way. Still, if the point of the book is to demonstrate the joys of artistic collaboration between differing perspectives with an improvisational sensibility, it might have been more entertaining to detect at least subtle differences in the ways the kids draw their characters.
Drew and Jot: Dueling Doodles wraps everything up in a satisfying enough way to work as a complete book while still lending itself to sequels. There's not that much else to say about it; there's no great depth to it or anything to really expound upon for adult readers.However, it's well done children's entertainment, and it feels like the sort of book that its target audience will love.
Drew and Jot: Dueling Doodles is available in comic stores now and will be available in bookstores everywhere on January 7, 2020.