THE MUSHROOM OF DOOM!

A series of kitchen mishaps radicalize a grudge-holding shroom.

The story opens in media res, with an expressive button mushroom plummeting into a whirring blender toward certain death. Cue the record scratch—you’re probably wondering how this fungus fell from grace—and we flash back to rosier times. It’s pizza night, and the fridge teems with animated veggies grinning nervously as they await selection. But when pineapple makes the final cut and strips the mushroom of his pizza-star status, the culinary slight ignites a descent into madness that endures all the way to the compost heap. Dubbing himself the Mushroom of Doom, he assembles an army of fungi amenable to exacting revenge. Readers won’t be shocked when Doom’s tyranny extends to the treatment of his goon squad, but they may be surprised when even the selflessness of a brave former fridgemate isn’t enough to inspire a return to the straight and narrow. Delightful visual details—particularly Doom’s transformation into not-so-fun-guy—complement a narrative structured like a graphic novel and a text jam-packed with groan-worthy puns. While the inciting incidents feel a little scattered, on the whole, the pleasing narrative invokes familiar themes, sitting somewhere at the intersection of Aaron Blabey’s Bad Guys series and Jory John and Pete Oswald’s Food Group collection. Its subversive conclusion, too, offers a fun twist on the redemption arc some readers have come to expect.

A witty acknowledgment that sometimes it feels good to be bad.