n interesting graphic novel by Dan Santat. It starts in a storm-tossed sea, where a ship is well into danger of sinking. It is a ship engaged in oceanographic research (specifically, animals) and its master goes down with it. In his dying moment, a hermit crab with a soda can for a shell comes to him and touches him in the fashion of Michelangelo’s Creation of Adam. Somehow the creatures (the hermit plus his other little friends) gain sentience.

Meanwhile, we cut to the master’s daughter Sophia, a young girl hanging around the expedition’s base, a failing park named Aqualand. She remains listless until someone in an diving bell suit walks ashore in San Diego, outside the park. Whoever is in the suit seems alien and confused at the Southern Californians (no surprise there) and we quickly realize that the creatures have fitted out the suit with an internal mechanism to walk it about in crude fashion. How this is done and why is not really explained, since we are now finding out about the dark secret behind the investor’s plans for the park and the things it holds deep in its research tanks.

Okay, so it was cute and all. I liked that, but a funny suit with adorable sea creatures can only go so far. We had all the tropes, the bumbling cops, the evil-as-sin investor, chases, pratfalls, everything. Really, the artwork was interesting but otherwise the plot and pacing were like a second-rate Pixar movie. It could have been better.

I know a girl from the local eatery who saw me reading it a few weeks ago and would like to borrow it. I’ll go her one better. Tomorrow I’ll swing by and give it to her. Perhaps she will enjoy it.

I’m not saying it’s bad. I’m just saying that maybe I was reading below my usual level here.

>>>AND, OF COURSE, HERE ARE MY BOOKS<<<