3 out of 5

While Drymon delivers his regular creativity-spiked, meta-winking goods in the 2018 Swimtacular – with the equally reliably impressive Jerry Ordway taking some pirate-penciling bits and Jacob Chabot doing the S.Bob bits – this is one of those conceptually funny books that isn’t so laugh-out-loud in execution.

We join the in-universe United Plankton cartooning crew, who are prepping for a comic book signing for their new Spongebob comic; Drymon and Ordway offer up a hilariously realized / visualized team of an artist with a pencil peg-leg; an inker with a knife permanently grit ‘tween teeth; a parrot colorist; and a glasses-wearing lettering rat.  Unfortunately their genius epic about dancing and water squirting out yer nose is cut short by a raiding party of standards and practices pirates, who demand literary quality.  And so we get – page by page – light-handed classic literary spoofs (Mark Twain; Treasure Island; etc.) starring the Spongebobbers, inevitably interrupted by United Plankton’s need to be silly and thus descending into dancing and water squirting each and every time.

Did you catch all that?

It’s very self-aware, very clever, but maybe that the story is about a story is part of what makes it feel like it never really starts, or perhaps it’s that each spoof is only a page long, that makes the book’s flow very herky-jerk; either way, nothing quite achieves the same joyous glee as the best SB books / moments, settling instead for something that feels funny, even if you’re only somewhat cracking a smile while reading.