Review by Ian Keogh
Arnie has the misfortune to love sports, but at the same time not be talented enough to perform well either as an individual or as a team player. Give him a board game or a console and he’s near enough unbeatable, but that counts for nothing in his sports obsessed town. The curse of his life is the Brohemians, an alliance of five older kids elite in their chosen sports who patrol the first class sports facilities and decide who gets to use them.
Having spent the opening two chapters dumping on Arnie, Mat Heagarty supplies a possible path to redemption via the revelation of his neighbour being a former town hero whose NFL career bombed. Mort Cohen now tries to live a quiet life away from the spotlight, but he has a story to tell, and its one that might benefit Arnie.
Considerable sympathy for Arnie comes just from the way he’s drawn by Lisa DuBois-Thompson as enthusiastic, but short and dumpy. She supplies his embarrassments harshly, one of them an autobiographical experience for Heagarty, in a broad cartoon style suggesting previous work on The Simpsons. It’s brightly coloured and action-packed, which is necessary as Arnie eventually participates in a number of different sports, all energetically depicted by DuBois-Thompson.
Heagarty’s path for Arnie’s redemption is a clever idea, an artefact used by Cohen for selfless purposes, eventually passed to Arnie. Will he follow the same path? Getting what one wishes for is a fine plot for an all-ages story, but as kids have to learn along with Arnie, with great power comes great responsibility, and it’s not long before Arnie’s succumbing to temptation. There’s little subtlety about the change to Arnie once he gets to hang out with the cool kids, and it extends beyond a conveniently placed warning about how judgement can be impaired.
At one point it seems only novice readers won’t to be able to predict Arnie’s rise and fall arc, but Heagarty swerves away from that by having Arnie’s guilt kick in sooner than expected. There are still moments straining credulity, but Indoor Kid is intended as a charming gentle comedy with a lesson to teach, and on that score it succeeds.
