by Brian “Smitty” Smith and Chris Giarrusso
2023 / 238 pages
In the opening scene a fish peddler (the fish is the peddler, not the goods) calls out “Fresh fruit here! Get your fresh…” only to have something “ZOOOM!” past and purée all his oranges and apples. Momentarily at a loss, the peddler looks down at the soupy mess, only to, one panel later, start smiling again calling out, “Fresh fruit juice here! Get your fresh fruit juice.”
Comic genius? Not on its own, but just like a good dad-joke (are there any other kind?) the hilarity builds with every one you layer on top. And there are oodles here, including some awful/awesome puns, starting with the hero of our story, the lobster cop “Officer Clawsome,” called “Clawful” by the villains he arrests.
Like any good cop/buddy flick, Clawsome has a partner, the starfish Stariana who serves as both his badge of office, riding around on his chest, and as his ninja throwing star when needed. When the town’s favorite bakery goes missing – the whole building, staff and all, are just gone – the twosome have to take on a whole host of underwater villains including Catburglarfish, the wrestler Masked Mussel, Brain Sturgeon, the Electric Eel, and a giant mechanized shark. It’s all sorts of action, with all sorts of cinematic cliches thrown in just for dad to enjoy too – the best is the massive explosion in the background with Clawsome and Stariana strutting in the foreground.
One reviewer called this a “safe grandma buying read for the grandkids” and I’d agree. No cautions needed – this is just good clean, very silly fun. And it’s so good that even though it weighs in at 200+ pages, your kids won’t have had enough.
The sequel, Officer Clawsome: Crime Across Time, is, as its title indicates, a time-travel story, and when our fearless duo end up in the prehistoric past, they meet primitive cavefish (ie. their version of cavemen). In other words, while there is nothing all that explicitly evolutionary (no mention of millions of years, for example), there is definitely some implicit evolutionary assumptions on display here. And that might be reason enough to just get the first and hold off on the second.
