4 crampons out of 5

Doug TenNapel’s a master of sloppy awesome.  As has been the case with many of his me-aged fans, I fell in love with his character design when I played Earthworm Jim for Sega Genesis.  Some millions of years passed (during which I only aged, emotionally, a first days) and then I was wearing big-boy britches and spending my hard-earned McDonald’s pay on comic books featuring mansies in fancy spandex.  Lo one day did I see on the new release rack ‘Tommysaurus Rex’ by Doug TenNapel.  I’m surprised I knew the name but it was stored somewhere in my lobey folds and I latched onto the book like so many book-latchery things.

TenNapel would consistently put out a graphic novel of considerable length once every year or couple years after this point and I’ve bought them all.  I’ve learned a bit about him since then which has made reading his books an odd experience on occasion, but his art style and abandon to cartoony excess has won me over each time.

But TenNapel’s not perfect.  His stories have tendency to have an idea-of-the-week feel, with a very basic moral structured around a very basic concept that’s brought to life by one push into the world of TenNapel.  This means the stories’ conclusions rarely have much impact and in the case of some of his shorter books – ‘Power Up’ comes to mind – the project itself seems rushed, making pages fly by to slap you into those disappointing endings that much quicker.  Better are his longer books (‘Earthboy Jacobus’) , which give Doug the room to stretch his expressive panels out over a longer span, encouraging him to flex some story-telling strength instead of just ideas, drawings, and funny catch phrases.

A lot of Doug’s work is available through Image comics.  Recently, though, he’s had a couple books put out by Scholastic, formatted with the same professional gloss used for their Bone trades and sized similarly (which is a pleasant mini-trade format, about the height and width of a regular paperback).  Whatever it is about this process – perhaps working with a bigger company, trying to meet quality or story demands, who knows – is actually a boon for TenNapel.  These two books (‘Ghostopolis’ and now ‘Bad Island’) have been some of Doug’s most well-rounded work.

‘Bad Island’ still floats through the general structure I mentioned – it’s a tale about family bonding after a forced vacation strands said family on an island with a strange history and alien creatures – but the scope of the story is on par with one of TenNapel’s early tales – ‘Creature Tech’ – which went far beyond it’s premise to establish worlds never fully explored in the text.  This can seem like shite if not done correctly, but in that story and this one, it instead makes us feel like the story is bigger than it’s pages, instilling that sense of wonder that the best cartoons can.

He’s had some more impactful, and some funnier, works than Bad Island, but on the whole this is such an excellent package from a tireless writer and artist.