cover image Green Pieces: Green from the Pond Up

Green Pieces: Green from the Pond Up

Drew Aquilina, Five Star, $19.99 paper (197p) ISBN 978-1-58985-191-7

The premise of Aquilina's comic strip, collected here, is the nature-minded hijinks of a turtle, a dragonfly, a raccoon, and a frog who live in a wetlands environment—a more explicitly eco-friendly version of Pogo.. Regrettably, it's nowhere near Pogo's class. Aquilina's not a strong enough artist to give his animal characters a convincing range of expression or establish much of a setting, and his sense of humor, as with the way he lays out his images, is a bone-pale imitation of early Bloom County. (Even the better jokes are clumsily paced, and a gag involving Iggy the turtle shining his shell with Turtle Wax is repeated until it's no longer even vaguely funny.) There are a few extended sequences, like one in which Iggy gets a crush on a squirrel, and another in which Cabby the frog retrieves a dinosaur egg from the Cretaceous period and hatches it—although baby Rex vanishes after its first few appearances. Strangest of all, 15 pages before the end, a story line ends on a cliffhanger, and the major Green Pieces characters are never seen again; the rest of the book is one-off gags about various plants and animals, unrelated to anything earlier. (Sept.)