Braddy Reads Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong

Surprisingly, I haven't been reading too many comics recently. I spend most of the time I've set aside for picture entertainment watching cartoons, I guess. Recently, though, I came across the name Faith Erin Hicks as a cartoonist to watch out for. She's got this book called Friends With Boys that's supposed to be excellent... but I didn't start with that one (I'll read it later). Instead, I went to the book she created with Prudence Shen called Nothing Can Possibly Go Wrong.

I should spend more time with this kind of book - you know, a comic book that's about something other than superheroes. NCPGW is a pretty straightforward story about a group of teenagers trying to come up with money for different goals. Amitious and arrogant Nate is trying to raise the funds to help his robotics club enter the National Robotics Fair, while the cheerleading squad is trying to capture those same funds in order to supply the team with new uniforms before their big competition. Poor Charlie, the captain of the basketball team, is caught in the middle, and he's not sure he can handle all the stress while still trying to deal with his parents' divorce (and his mother's new boyfriend).

Those are the stakes in NCPGW, and they're great stakes to have in a story with these characters. Faith Erin Hicks imbues each character with a great deal of charm - they all look good. Even their "acting" is a thing of beauty.

I don't know that you could call this a world-changing book - it's the sort of thing teenagers will read to convince themselves that the world doesn't end just because you're in high school. It's got a lot of the usual cliche's - the jocks vs. the nerds, the prissy squad of cheerleaders, dirty student election politics - but with enough clever twists to keep any of them from wearing on the reader. Plus - and I don't know if I've mentioned this yet - it's really, really funny.

You can knock out NCPGW in about an hour or two, and it's the type of book most public libraries will probably keep a copy of, so I'd strongly recommend it. You could probably even borrow my copy, if you wanted - after I finish reading it the second time, of course.