Trubble Town: Squirrel Do Bad, graphic novel be excellent

Making something a long-form of entertainment when its traditional packaging is delivered in short doses is daunting. Peanuts has managed to do that successfully. Trubble Town is not a direct Pearl Before Swine story. It has all of the fingerprints and indelible characteristics of Stephan Pastis’ genius creations and wit. It even has some of the same characters that fans love from the comic strip, even if they’re only in a panel or two in the entire book. Trubble Town: Squirrel Do Bad is its own creation. It’s an original graphic novel that’s made up of just over a dozen chapters that has one of the highest laugh-to-page ratios of anything we’ve read in years.

The Investigators series also has a really high laugh-to-page ratio where readers are going to laugh at least once on most pages. Trubble Town is an absurd story about a young girl named Wendy, her overprotective father, the Butterfly Effect, and lots of interesting characters in the aptly named town of Trubble.

The managed chaos that you’ll see on the cover of Trubble Town is reminiscent of what you’d see if an episode of Phineas and Ferb were encapsulated in a single animation frame. Is Squirrel Do Bad we see a squirrel with a stick of dynamite, a surly looking mole, a doughnut house that amongst regular looking houses, a purple-haired girl dangling from one of the letters, and a man in a peanut costume that has a cape on the back of it. The amazing part is that readers will know exactly where all of these seemingly disparate and bizarre things logically fit into a coherent story.

This is a graphic novel that’s presented in chapter form. The result of these sometimes very short chapters is that it allows the book to quickly pivot between subplots. Yes, subplots. Trubble Town is laden with numerous story threads that would otherwise result in people skipping eyelets on their shoes. Instead, Pastis melds those cold chapter endings into two solid aglets that create a beautiful bow on this all-age graphic novel.

Wendy is a young girl who wants to be curious. She lives with her widowed father in a mushroom house and is sometimes too overprotective about her. There is also a mooshy store that sells delicious hot chocolate that might have too much sugar. Wendy stops by Mooshy Mike’s to get one for herself. At the park, Squirrely McSquirrel approaches her for a nut. Normally squirrels in Trubble knit ugly Christmas sweaters so it was very strange that this one wanted a nut. However, there were no nuts around Wendy, so she broke all social norms and gave Squirrely a sip of her hot chocolate.

Unfortunately, this now super caffeinated squirrel has started a chain of calamitous events.  These seemingly unrelated things will go on to throw the entire town of Trubble into one of the best, most entertaining, funniest, and most creative graphic novels of the year. It’s also an all-age graphic novel that ages eight and up should be able to read all the way through. And because it’s a graphic novel, just in case they don’t know the rare word or two, there’s an illustration that’ll help them infer what’s happening.

Most of all, readers will enjoy Trubble Town: Squirrel Do Bad. It’s irrepressibly fun to read, creative, and has a narrative that makes sense, which is amazing given how quickly each chapter changes tangents. It’s a graphic novel that you’ll read once and love. You’ll read it again and find jokes that you missed the first time. This is graphic novel comfort food that’s incredibly smart, quickly paced, and an excellent chance to build the confidence of younger readers who might be intimidated by thicker books. It’s also clearly labeled as “Volume 1” on the front cover. Here’s hoping that another trip to Trubble Town is happening soon.

Trubble Town: Squirrel Do Bad is by Stephan Pastis and available on Aladdin Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster.

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