Pluto Rocket: New in Town

This new graphic novel delivers bags of giggles from the very first page and is bursting with visually striking cartoons that young readers will love. It introduces a zany, pink alien – Pluto Rocket – and an inimitable pigeon – Joe Pidge, and establishes them securely as a fresh new comedy duo for the children’s genre.

Pluto Rocket descends to Earth from his home planet of Pluto, on a secret mission to find out all he can about life on ‘The Neighbourhood’. He lands next to Joe Pidge who is, until that moment, quite happy strutting confidently down the street like normal, talking to himself about how excellent he is. The pair strike up a conversation about Pluto Rocket’s amazing good fortune to have landed next to such an authority on ‘The Neighbourhood’s’ social scene and the comedic chemistry between the pair is immediately obvious.

The book is short on characters, focusing almost exclusively upon Pluto Rocket and Joe Pidge. This narrow cast might lead some readers to want a little more from the story, but it doesn’t detract from the comedy in any way. Joe and Pluto Rocket are the archetypal odd couple of the comedy genre. They seemingly have nothing in common. On the surface, Joe is all-knowing and Pluto Rocket plays dumb, and his failure to grasp Joe’s meaning about everything from hats to tacos is a frequent source of hilarity. However, it is obvious to readers (but not to Joe) that this visitor from a distant galaxy has some crazy alien skills that utterly upstage Joe’s self-celebrated talents (which include an ability to wear hats well and to know where to find the tastiest taco).

The Earth that Pluto Rocket has landed on is inhabited by talking animals and humans living alongside one another. Pandas and crocodiles stride jauntily down the street alongside vikings and Abraham Lincoln(!), making clear to readers that, in this series, anything and everything could happen, motivating them to keep turning the pages to find the next totally random, very funny surprise. In this series opener, though, Gilligan resists the temptation to broaden the narrative too much, only revealing a few of Pluto Rocket’s powers and a very small number of details about ‘The Neighbourhood’ and its residents. Instead, Pluto Rocket and Joe Pidge’s characters are developed fully through seriously funny dialogues about trivial matters that rarely stretch beyond the search for, eating of and (reluctantly) sharing of tacos.

It is heartening to imagine an alien arriving from Pluto and being as generous, positive and curious as Pluto Rocket is. His mission is to learn new things and he innocently seeks out  joy from the world around him and people in it. The result is an optimistic and celebratory atmosphere that young readers and their parents will find equally enjoyable.

Gilligan’s audacious illustrations have a colour scheme that is wild and flamboyant, and a clever use of line delivers great expression and characterisation, with the effect that characters are funny even before they have said or done anything! This is accompanied by great comic timing and plenty of visual gags. The marketplace for silly, witty graphic novels like this is somewhat overcrowded but the simple, double-act approach (which will hopefully be sustained in  future episodes) gives this an original feel. With luck, the front cover festooned with tasty tacos will be enough to tempt readers into trying it out!