By Zach Weinersmith
A proudly lazy boy who wants nothing more than to lie on his friend's couch gets dragged into his town's cutthroat gourd-growing festival.
Sawyer Lee comes from a long line of astronauts, athletes, and spies, and he wants absolutely no part of it. His life's ambition is to lie on his best friend Gary's couch doing as close to nothing as a person can. Unfortunately, he lives in a town gone completely gourd-crazy, where everyone, including his aunt Celia and his other best friend Angela, is scheming to win the grand prize at the annual gourd festival. As the schemes get wilder, Sawyer gets yanked, groaning the whole way, into both an adventure and a mystery he never wanted.
Weinersmith put over a hundred cartoons in here on purpose, to cut the word count down and keep a reluctant reader moving. The joke at the center, a boy who just wants to be left alone stuck in the most over-the-top town imaginable, is genuinely funny, and the gourd-festival mystery gives it a real plot to pull them through. It's for the child who liked that kind of no-thanks energy, or who'll read anything with cartoons on every page.