3 out of 5

Why does this take so long to read?  At 226 pages of medium-sized font, navigating its 40 short chapters took an embarrassingly long time, and as I wasn’t exactly not enjoying the read, I kept puzzling over that pace.  Have I gotten reading dumb?

And after a few pages skirted by during which I realized I’d just skimmed and not absorbed, I got it: Wolf is a funny guy, and the world of Roger Rabbit is an interesting one – and there’s even a good mystery here, which is why this hangs on to a third star – but the funny, interesting guy who makes a funny, witty comment after every goddamn sentence is a nuisance.  Eddie Valiant has taken up the task of determining who offed the titular rabbit, hired on by the bunny’s ‘doppleganger’ – a carbon copy of oneself the living, breathing Toons who occupy the world alongside the humans can create – post-the original’s-mortem, and he chews pulp dialogue like a champ, as does (it follows…) Wolf with his shuffling of noir tropes into an amusing mash-up of dimestore detective tale and classic cartoon references.  Alas, Wolf pushes his lead’s sarcasm to a breaking point, very, very literally adding some counterpoint joke after any line of dialogue or observation.  I get it, because they’re endlessly creative and it’s a shame to let that stuff go to waste… but man, he really should have.  Because it slows down the reading rather painfully, separating points of interest by pages and diluting any sense of tension.  You have to struggle to be interested by the Whodunnit, and that’s a shame: there are some good surprises along the way.

By the time you’re inured to the yuks (it starts out amusing, and then more and more distracting until you inevitably – as I did – automatically allow your eyes / brain to skip the jokes to the next plot point), too little has happened in too many pages.  Thankfully, it’s at about the same point in the runaround that the mystery drops some tidbits that reignite interest, and carry you through to the end.

I’m ragging on this, but I should clarify that the experience is sneaky: I really couldn’t comprehend why the book wasn’t more fun until I thought about it.  Besides some distastefully dated snipes regarding sexuality partway through, Wolf’s concepts are pretty cool, and a great justification for experiencing a movie (Who Framed Roger Rabbit) and its source material separately; if the description above hasn’t indicated that this is a vastly different tale, consider that the world of Censored has its own lump of toon-stuff that would have been impossible to visualize, such as the “spoken” word balloons in which the toons talk.  There’s also slightly more depth to the social divide between toons and humans that the film doesn’t have room to get in to.  Neither does Wolf for that matter, what with all his jokes, but you get a deeper sense of a history of mixed cartoon and non-cartoon interests.

And finally, as mentioned, there’s the mystery, which bubbles into the bizarre toward the end, but gives up some good final punches.

Being funny is usually a boon, and certainly inserting humor into an imagined world in which we co-exist with living cartoons makes sense, but you gotta have some restraint.  Gary K. Wolf’s excessive yuks in Who Censored Roger Rabbit? constantly derail the focus from what’s otherwise a fun idea, and a good story.