I came across this one at Comic-Con as well, though I didn't purchase it. (There's only so much I could carry back home!) The library had it, though, so I was able to check it out and read the whole thing. Trondheim is also the artist behind The Spiffy Adventures of McConey, but Mister O is a different type of comic. It's a wordless book (except for one page which has a Euro symbol in the original version, changed to a dollar sign in the "English" printing), with basically one joke: Mister O, a little round ball with legs and feet, encounters a cliff, and tries to get to the other side. But, of course, he's never entirely successful. Either he doesn't make it, or he makes it and then dies, or makes it and then somehow falls back into the ravine.
It's a little like Wile E. Coyote, in that you know he's never going to catch the Roadrunner, but his attempts are still entertaining. The pantomime is brilliant; no matter what language you read (or none at all), you could enjoy this book. The drawings themselves are quite simple, almost to the point of abstraction. Each page is one cartoon containing sixty tiny panels of Mister O's futile efforts to cross the gap, sometimes by following the other oddly-shaped characters that pass by, and sometimes with his own ingenuity.
Cute, witty, occasionally gross. It should probably be rated PG, but even kids would enjoy most of it.
Fed to jonathan's brain | July 24, 2005
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