Review by Woodrow Phoenix

Collaborations is the fourth book in the Cat Kid Comic Club series, and the focus here is on teamwork. “We’re better when we work together”, the back cover states. Making comics often means more than one person coming up with ideas, putting those ideas down on the page in some form and getting the final result across the finish line. This means everyone has to listen to each other’s point of view, agree about what will happen next, and not be selfish about claiming credit. But that’s not easy to do.

As usual, Naomi and her brother Melvin are the driving force of the narrative here, interacting with their dad Flippy – and at this point we can clearly see that Cat Kid himself, Lil Petey, is no longer relevant to the success of these books. He appears on 14 pages of the 220 that fill Cat Kid Comic Club: On Purpose, and only speaks on four of them. In this volume Lil Petey gets seven pages to introduce the comic club in his role as president and that’s it. He’s in the background of three more pages and we never see him again. He is not even on the cover!

The emphasis has also shifted from lessons being the core of the book to looking at the results of those lessons in the children’s lives as they make stories, try to do something with them, or respond to what the others have made. This is highly entertaining because of Dav Pilkey’s skill at funny interplay between his characters and simple, silly drawings, but it’s a different kind of series now from the concept he started with. It takes a little more attention for readers to get the most out of the information which is weaved in among all the funny incidents. Sample stories from the class this time include photo haikus, the scribbly crayon-coloured menace of Frogzilla; and Mallo Cop, a fumetti (photo-style) action adventure starring a marshmallow, a bar of chocolate and some crackers. Whether or not the Cat Kid Comic Club is renamed, readers can look forward to more exploration of the impulse to create and how to do it from Naomi and Melvin and their 19 brothers and sisters in Influencers.