Benny and Penny in Just Pretend, and: Otto's Orange Day, and: Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons (review)

The Little Lit mavens come courting the emerging reader set with a trio of "step-up" style graphic novels. Benny and Penny, a pair of mouse siblings, squabble over whether younger Penny is big enough to play pirate with her older brother. Benny tries to ditch her with the old hide-and-seek ruse, but Penny gets the upper hand in the game, proves to be the braver of the pair when confronted by a huge dragonfly, and finally earns her brother's respect and a big "huggy." Hayes makes the most of the comic-book format by varying panel sizes, occasionally omitting borders, spilling the action across frames, tossing in narration boxes, speed lines, sound effects, and emanata. It's a little predictable and old fashioned, but the energy and the authenticity of most of the sibling interaction makes it the liveliest of this freshman trio of beginning readers. Cammuso's cat in Otto's Orange Day is rendered in a style that cartoon viewers are most likely to consider the norm-highly stylized, with a huge head, small, anthropomorphized body, elastic facial features, and a dose of attitude. He doesn't have much opportunity to show his chops, though, in a tame, Midas-inspired tale of a youngster who loves all things orange, uses his one wish from an unbottled genie to recolor his world, and then rues his choice. Lilly, aimed at the youngest audience, presents five teensy seven-panel stories that are more successful at showing children how a comic strip is sequenced than delivering a solid plot. Each series of identically sized panels features a single speech bubble in which Lilly (evidently repackaged from Rosenstiehl's Mimi Cracra) comments on a seasonal activity: e.g., eating apples in fall, finding an occupied sea shell in summer. Pictures of sturdy little Lilly boast strong colors and streamlined compositions, but come up woefully short in the promised silliness department. With the bounty of comics now on offer, this trio is unlikely to lure many readers when the classic Donald Duck Adventures or the trendier Owly shares the shelf, but diehard early graphic fans who can't get enough may still want to dive into these well-pedigreed offerings.