Review by Ian Keogh

It’s not mattered why Toby’s King of the Pixies since the opening volume. All any reader needs to know is that despite the volume title he is definitively not cool, and the pixies following him around and acting on his requests are more likely than not going to make a bad situation worse. That’s the case when Toby has a spot, that’s the case when Toby needs a haircut and that’s the case when he wishes he didn’t have self-doubts. It turns out they’re due to a critter that can be lured out by a magic brain cap. Whether by magical spell, potion or device, the pixies always take the literal option rather than understanding what Toby really wants. On the other hand there are occasions where he doesn’t really help himself.

James Turner has a magnificent facility for the absurd that serves the strip well again and again. In the hair episode Toby not only has to tackle excessive growth, but his dandruff personalised as cowboys keen for a shootout. Toadflax, that most whimsical of pixies, imagines a bicycle made of bees to ride and fly at the same time, and when asked what the motif on Toby’s jumper might be Toadflax considers it a weasel eating a sausage. Turner has so many funny ridiculous ideas that he can afford to squander them willy-nilly in the self-doubt story.

As before the formula is that of silly short stories, usually causing Toby further embarrassment, with Stef on hand here with an appropriate sarcastic comment far more frequently than in Pixie Pandemonium! The one extra length offering concerns the school environmental project. Toby teams up with best mate Mo to construct a papier mache penguin, but it’s sabotaged by Princess Sugarsnap who thinks she ought to be ruling the pixies and treating them as badly as her father did.

Once again Andreas Schuster keeps the art simple, creating a world where the small abstract shapes of the pixies fit around the preposterous situations Toby finds himself in. If there’s a design change it seems he’s exaggerating Toby’s quiff a little more than previously.

Toby and the Pixies has been a slow burner, always good, yet never top of the class, but with How to be Cool! Turner seems to be injecting extra surrealism to the mishaps that befall Toby and it raises the series a notch.