SPX Review: Mr. Big

Mr. Big by Carol and Matt Dembicki (Little Foot Publishing)

In this ecological suspense-mystery tale, a group of fish, amphibians, and invertebrates decide that the local snapping turtle (the enigmatic and violently unpredictable Mr. Big) is just too dangerous for their pond. They recruit a "murder" of crows to take him out, but of course things start to go awry.

A new creature -- some kind of land-crawling exotic -- suddenly appears at the pond. In the face of the newcomer's indiscriminate voracity, Mr. Big starts to look like an acceptable neighbor. As the various animals try to work out their own places in the pond's surprisingly sensitive food web, Mr. Big silently vies with the exotic predator for dominance of the ecosystem.

This is work in the style of Jay Hosler, with more of a focus on narrative and suspence instead of biological exposition. The panels weave together and fill the pages imaginatively and organically. The realistic faces of the animals invite us to read our human emotions into them, and the swooping, swishing motions carry us from page to page, through reeds, branches, mud, and drainage pipes, to a better understanding of balance and morality in the life of the pond.