Harum Scarum
The Hoodoodad

(The Spiffy Adventures of McConey, Volumes 1 & 2 - Lewis Trondheim; found at library)
What a bizarre little comic. It's a series in a town of anthropomorphic animals, yet there are also pet dogs, and at one point they do refer to "humans," meaning themselves.Harum Scarum is about monsters, scientific experiments gone awry, time-travel, evil (but stupid) terrorists, and a rabbit, a dog, and a cat who get mixed up in all this. The Hoodoodad concerns a maybe-maybe-not cursed pebble which falls into the hands of McConey (the rabbit), and the power of belief (or disbelief, as the case may be). Very brief stories, both entertaining and on the odd side, and a few inconsistencies I couldn't quite figure out. In the first one, it seemed that the three were thrown together by fate and circumstances; in the second book, they were pals who had grown up together. It could be that, like Veggie Tales, they are simply playing the parts of various characters in each new adventure. Also, the books are apparently translated from the French, which makes for a strange scene when McConey and Richie (the cat) go into a fancy restaurant. The waiter speaks in French, which Richie apparently fails to understand; how was this scene originally written? Do waiters in snobby restaurants in France speak in English?

Those wacky Europeans. I'm waiting for the next one.

Fed to jonathan's brain | March 10, 2003