3 out of 5

Kids books are funny.  What motivates writers who are known for adult-themed material to suddenly switch gears and spit out a children’s book?  Their inner child wanting to contribute back to someone else’s formative years?  Having children and wishing to share something you created before them kids get old and jaded?  Who knows.  But what’s nice about this, when it happens, is that it generally works.  Some of these things are just bids for cash, for sure, and are utter shit.  A lot of kid books are shit.  And I can speak on this with authority, because I’ve read them all and I’m very familiar with shit, so, like, judgments and facts and stuff.  See, kids are dumb, and parents can be equally dumb, and award-winning celebrity-written brightly drawn bullhonky can make its way into your chippin’s syrupy brain and convince them to love Bratz or iPhones or whatever needs to happen.

But then there are those times when it works.  When the writer taps into whatever they wanted to and they spit out something genuine.

I kept expecting ‘Erf’ to take a turn toward non-kid territory – I wasn’t really aware of the whole Kickstarter background, so it could’ve been anything between the front and back cover.  But it stays true.  It’s a pretty simple tale of staying true to oneself, a theme – as stated in a review I read on, uh, comicvine?  Maybe?  And here’s a link so I give proper credit but I’m too lazy to actually go and grab a link? – a theme that’s common in Ennis’ stories already, but here spun with a dash of good ol’ Garth randomness (a la Hitman, a la Dicks) and a nice pun at the end to keep things from getting too moral-y.  It’s not mind blowing – note the 3 out of 5 – but it’s just a nice addition to the shelf, something you can read to a kid with the confidence that you know something about where this writer is coming from, that it’s not just tossed off the cuff.