3 out of 5

I’m a huge supporter of kid lit, kid movies, kid comics, whatever, that grant their audience a modicum of respect.  It doesn’t have to be layered for an adult audience; it can just be what it is.  But if the creators take the time to actually create and not fall back on pandering, I’ll stand by it.  So I stand by Baltazar and Franco’s legion of ‘Itty Bitty’ or ‘Aw Yeah’ stuff, even if I don’t particularly like it.  Art’s been mining this quirky vision of kid culture since Cray Baby, and though that got him attention, I don’t think anyone would’ve predicted a years worth of Itty Bitty variant covers or Hellboy done up in the style.  And as he and Franco have proven with Tiny Titans, this isn’t just a book told through someone else’s characters – the duo will dig up fun references from a series or book’s history and drop ’em in, and do so in a way that doesn’t confuse and could, theoretically, encourage a kid to read the source material to find out what that reference is all about.  The take on ‘Hellboy’ didn’t differ, with fun send-ups of Baba Yaga, and Roger, and etc.  And I do dig that they kept ‘Hell’ in the title (the title only – a visit to hell in the mini-series is called by Heck and other ‘safe’ terms).  But I can only get so far with this stuff because it’s just gag after gag.  I don’t think I’d mind that except for the odd moments when the pair decide to carry a story element over from one gag to another, or from one issue to another.  It hints like it’s going to develop a full-on story, and then they dump it a gag later.  Sometimes Art / Franco will poke fun at themselves for handling the material that way (characters randomly showing up in a scene asking “How did we get here?”), but overall it’s just the style.

Art-wise, things are as delightfully consistently buoyant and pleasant as always, no bumps in that road.  I don’t read enough Aw Yeah to know if the coloring is always handled similarly, but Art used a texture on the water vs. solid colors elsewhere which I thought was fun.

Totally harmless, and works as the gateway comic that it’s supposed to be.  But I have to say that if you’ve sampled one Art / Franco book, you’ve done them all.  So it’s really more a pick and choose of your favorite character or whatever experience you want to foist on your offspring.