By Max Brallier
A thirteen-year-old runs his own monster-and-zombie apocalypse out of a tricked-out treehouse, and it reads like a video game you can hold.
Jack Sullivan is living every child's dream: school's out forever, because the apocalypse arrived and turned the town into a playground of zombies and giant monsters. From his fortified treehouse he sets out on a Feats of Apocalyptic Success to-do list, rescue his crush June, find his best friend Quint, and take down a towering monster called Blarg. He picks up the toughest child in school as an unlikely teammate along the way. It's part survival story, part goofy action movie, told by a narrator who thinks all of this is the best thing that ever happened to him.
This is the natural rung after The Bad Guys for a child who still wants a picture on the page but is ready for a real story to run underneath it. Douglas Holgate's drawings land every couple of pages, full comic-panel spreads in places, so the eye always has somewhere to rest, but between them there's genuine plot, more sentences and more story than a comic carries. The zombies and monsters are played for laughs and grossness, not fear, and the whole thing has the reward-loop feel of a game, which is catnip for a child who says books are boring.