Pilot & Huxley #1
Television and comics have long shared visual styles, tones, and character types that permeate fluidly from one to the other, as befits two media that were, once upon a time, so central to a child’s entertainment life. As the two cling to each other for dear life, terrorized by video games and the Internet, the stylistic line blurs even further. Witness the titular best friends of Pilot & Huxley, whose giant round eyes sitting in giant round heads are nearly indistinguishable from those in South Park, and who find themselves on an absurdist adventure filled with a breakneck array of metatextual gags and gooey gross-out humor you will swear you just saw on SpongeBob SquarePants. This is merely to suggest that, while it doesn’t ring with originality, the heroes’ cross-dimensional escape from a video-game rental store’s bounty hunter (who’s also the grim reaper) is comfortably familiar enough and, it must be said, clever enough that kids will enjoy a diverting half hour and inquire about the upcoming second installment before taking off to play some Xbox. Grades 2-4. --Jesse Karp