Review by Frank Plowright

Blue and Jason are expecting a quiet day reading and making models respectively when Pancake announces she’s built a spacecraft to take them to the planet Balloonia. Balloonia is entirely Pancake’s construction, even populated with talking balloons, and the visitors discover that perhaps getting home won’t be as easy as they anticipated.

Blue, Barry & Pancakes first introduced the completely mismatched trio of Blue (blue worm), Barry (green frog) and Pancakes (bulky yellow bunny). Easy to assimilate shapes are fine for the greater imagination of very young children, which stretches further, and it also makes them easier for children to adapt to their own adventures.

Having produced a very readable series of Barb the Brave books, creators Dan Abdo and Jason Patterson, here just credited as Dan and Jason, turn their attention to even younger readers, with both creators involved in the writing and the art. Children just learning to read is a surprisingly neglected area of the graphic novel market, and all the right buttons are pushed here. Blue, Barry & Pancakes provides bright and colourful characters set in simply understood environments while the plot sets easily understood problems to be dealt with like the massive ape Balloon Kong.

Along the way there is the message that sometimes friends want to do different things, and that’s completely okay. This is hardly subtle, but nuance wouldn’t be suitable for the intended audience.

That audience will find a good-natured adventure where there’s comfortingly no harm to anyone, and all ends well with everyone safely back home again.