Investigators: All Tide Up, the seventh in the series shows no signs of age

As an adult, I know better than to laugh at repeated uses of puns. It’s the low end of the bad-dad joke pool.  I know that some would say that’s an impossibility, but there’s a distinct difference between puns and dad jokes, plus billiards is a highly underappreciated sport.  Investigators is a go-to series of all-age graphic novels and the seventh entry in it is All Tide Up. This series of graphic novels breaks the fourth wall, is loaded to the brim with puns, has colors that immediately give it a ‘classic’ vibe, and still maintains one of the highest laugh-to-page ratios that readers will encounter.

The laugh-to-page ratio is something that we noticed in the first Investigators book. We found ourselves laughing multiple times on each page and then realized that while reading other humor-oriented graphic novels that didn’t happen. There certainly would be some grinning and the occasional guffaw, but it never produced an audible “ha”, or whatever sound escapes your mouth when you find something funny.

Investigators: All Tide Up has at least one laugh per page. For us, it was two to three genuine laughs per page, but even surly readers who’ve had a bad day will find numerous instances to smile, grin or giggle as they read along. Younger readers will be able to look at the graphic novel and enjoy it. They’ll follow the visual prompts and know that there’s some funny stuff happening, but to really laugh at All Tide Up, they’ll need to read it.

Let’s look at pages 62 and 63 for a great example of the humor. Mango and Brash, our two Investigators are on a cruise ship and go into an entertainment complex and then a restaurant. The name of the restaurant is Ocean’s Ate. The two detectives then realize that it’s a buffet-style place, but that the choice of food is only a cheese or double-cheese sandwich. Brash then goes to comment that their all-too-cheap ticket price must’ve gone to their quarters and not the food, which leads Tango to say that “for two dollars they should’ve gotten eight quarters.”

Granted the “Ocean’s Ate” name might fly over the heads of some elementary school readers. They also might not know that quarters is used to refer to a room where you sleep whilst on a ship. Those young ages will understand the humor of a cat, who is also the ship’s captain, being frustrated when it’s unable to find a laser pointer beam dot. They’ll laugh at the fact that the Investigators are able to get from place to place by going down the toilet. If some of the puns are too high brow then the illustrations will get them. Those readers who can dig into the text will receive the best of both worlds because they’ll understand the jokes that aren’t obvious and have the illustrations to make them grin along the way.

The plot in All Tide Up revolves around a cruise ship that’s gone missing. The captain is found adrift in a lifeboat and is only able to say “Willy Nilly”. The owners of the cruise ship line are about to launch the missing sister ship, bus some are concerned that hundreds of passengers are missing at sea. Mango and Brash are called in to investigate the cruise line, it’s potentially corrupt owner and determine if those people really perished after all.

All Tide Up continues to prove that the Investigators graphic novel series still has plenty of gas in the tank. It spun off a sequel series of graphic novels, Investigators Presents:  Agents of S.U.I.T, with the same degree of joke-per-page success as the main branch. Moreover, it earns its all-age graphic novel merit badge by operating on two levels of funny for different demographics. Our 13-year-old is a great case study for this because he borrowed All Tide Up from my office and quickly read it one afternoon. “It’s good” he curtly said as he returned it to the library. Looking at the glass half full, he said something, and that he found it enjoyable. He doesn’t say that about every book that he reads and the fact that he still found Invstestigators entertaining speaks volumes about the size of the book series base of support.

It’s a graphic novel that can speak to elementary-age children but has the intelligence to be able to aim for older audiences too. The illustrations and humor are all but screaming to be made into an animated show or movie. However, this leads fans of the graphic novels to think about the fact that the books are always better than the films. Scratch that, those ages don’t know that adage yet, however, if it does happen, and they’re not, then this will be the first instance that they have to utter such classics. Regardless of whether that happens or not, Investigators: All Tide Up is a funny, go-to all-ages graphic novel that will make middle elementary school ages want to read because it’s fun, something that every kid can get behind.

Investigators: All Tide Up is by New York Times-bestselling Author John Patrick Green and is available on :01 First Second, an imprint of Roaring Brook Press.

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