Synopsis: In this wordless book, a dog spends all day following a flea around his neighbourhood and has amusing and surreal encounters with its inhabitants.

Review: Hurrah for another book which successfully ignores boundaries between picture books and comics! Creator of the both beloved and infamous 'Garbage Pail Kids' cards Mark Newgarden and partner Megan Montague Cash have come up with a delightfully surprising and quirky tale.

Readers will smile as Bow-Wow stubbornly follows a single flea along the street, then walks up to a white dog with black spots; when all its spots jump off the white dog, we realise they are fleas, not spots. As Bow-Wow walks off, the fleas jump back onto the dog, who seems not to notice. In another funny episode, Bow-Wow meets a nearly identical dog, and the two of them go through a huge range of greeting antics and attempts to impress each other while their two little fleas mirror their actions. But the story gets more bizarre as the creators start playing with our sense of scale between dogs and insects, and we see a legion of dogs marching down the road in pursuit of their own personal fleas.

The design team have used remarkably simple black line drawings with flat computer colours, almost like information graphics (although not quite as simple as Dick Bruna's 'Miffy' images). This simplicity often contributes to the story's humour. The flea is actually only a dot on the page, but we read characteristics into it. As Bow-Wow watches the flea climb up the simple purple shape of a woman waiting by the side of the road, it's highly amusing to see her taking flight over the fence as she realises she has a bug on her and Bow-Wow watches with deadpan interest. The front cover is so simple it doesn't even have a title written on it, strikingly showing just the dog's eyes and the flea on its head.

Lane Smith and Mo Willems praise the book on the back cover. For style and content, 'Bow-Wow' easily nestles in between Smith's 'Happy Hocky Family' and Willems' 'Pigeon' books. All three rely on intentionally simple formats. 'Happy Hocky Family' has episodic gags much like 'Bow-Wow' and Willems also uses some comic book techniques in his picture books. But 'Bow-Wow' goes further into comics territory by using several black-lined frames on many of the pages. And since comics work more cinematically than standard picture books, we get more of a sense of comic timing, with its pauses and step-by-step progressions. On a double-page spread, we get four separate images of the dog walking up its driveway at sunset, then four images of it having its supper, and five images of it going to bed. Readers not only get a sense that an action is completed, but take part in watching how the action is carried out.

 As a well-designed wordless comic, this book will appeal to a wide range of readers, everyone from pre-readers to students at art college.

2008-05-15