Mighty Mega Pets: Freaky Food Fiasco

Mighty Mega Pets is a funny, energetic graphic story that will have readers giggling, whether they like pets or not.

Daisy the dog and her animal chums (one cat, one tortoise, one goldfish) live in Rumford and are rather surprised one morning to find that they have all miraculously developed superpowers (apart from Arthur the tortoise – who is very grumpy about missing out)! The group are extremely excited to suddenly have dozens of legs, telekinesis, or the ability to shoot electricity. They are called upon to use their powers almost immediately, due to the presence in the garden of a giant, spaghetti-armed rabbit and a cat shooting lasers at them from her eyes!

It is clear to the pets that something has gone wrong with their food (apart from Arthur’s). To solve the mystery of who has been tampering with the town’s pet food, they grab themselves new superhero costumes from the dressing-up box and give themselves the name ‘Mighty Mega Pets.’

The team’s enthusiasm is somewhat dampened when, upon tracking down the super-sized bunny, they learn that they are not the only group of super-heroes in town! The ‘Ruffians’ have even fiercer powers and are in no mood to team up with the Mighty Mega Pets. Cue a number of action-filled fight scenes, with countless explosions blasting out from the pages, and rather a lot of animals being squashed by the bottoms of bigger animals.

As the mega pets uncover more and more secrets about the pet food, menacing new villains emerge and their motivation (total domination over the town, naturally) is revealed. Can Daisy and her team defeat the Ruffians in time to stop the super-modified pet food spreading throughout the town and causing utter chaos… and are they willing to give up their own exciting new powers to do so?

Generously published in bright, vibrant colours, the comic-style book is stunning to look at and, on closer inspection of each page, readers will spot oodles of hilarious visual gags. The script is funny, too. Characters have a chemistry that delivers lots of laughs as they encourage one another and argue about their plans. Even funnier are the animals’ occasional asides to the reader, which offer an insight into what pets really think about things and how much they are just like humans, really.

The marketplace is currently rather crowded by illustrated series about animals going on adventures and doing silly things, and readers might be somewhat less than excited by the funny but unsurprising first few pages. The Mighty Mega Pets is worth sticking with, though. Gary Northfield is an expert at bringing chaos together on the page to create humour, and the visual set pieces he draws are genuinely dramatic. The extent to which the characters have sufficient personality to justify future episodes is debatable, but there is certainly enough humour and excitement in this series-opener to grab the attention of young readers.