THE MIGHTY ONION

The road to superhero success is paved with collaboration challenges for a pair of middle schoolers in this series opener.

Aspiring comic book writer Eliot Quigly is not an artist—or at least not one who can draw the kind of art he needs. His eye fixed firmly on fame and fortune, he’s thrilled when he comes up with a hero whose super-strength comes from eating radioactive onion rings. So convinced is Eliot of the great potential of this idea that he persuades talented classmate Pamela Jones to draw the first episode. Though Eliot’s unselfconscious enthusiasm and unchecked confidence in his own genius are annoying and get him in trouble, the first installment of The Mighty Onion is championed by Pam and Eliot’s teacher and wins them followers and fan mail. Eliot soon runs afoul of his illustrator, however, since he fails to yield any artistic ground to Pam in storylines, dialogue, or anything else. His bumpy journeys to understanding his calling as a writer as well as grasping the elements of a sincere apology are convincing and very funny. Collage elements—crumpled drawings, torn pieces of paper, inspirational stickers, and a couple of fortune cookies—add energetic visual interest to this hybrid graphic novel/notebook narrative. Main characters read white; Dr. Hubris, the green-skinned, goblinlike supervillain of Eliot and Pam’s comics, inexplicably sports a Nehru jacket and topi.

Highly entertaining.