Editor's Note: Franklin Richards: Summer Smackdown! arrives in stores tomorrow, August 6.

Editor's Note #2: Kara Young is the six-year-old daughter of regular Comics Bulletin reviewer Thom Young. Her reading level has been tested as being at the third-grade level or higher, and she is about the same age that Franklin Richards is shown to be in the story. The plot synopses were provided by Thom and the comments are by Kara. This is her first review.


Story One: "Thunderous Throwdown!"

Plot: Franklin accompanies his "Uncle Ben" to a professional wrestling match in which The Thing is to wrestle a costumed wrestler called "Thunder." When Thunder begins to pummel Ben Grimm, Franklin steps into the ring wearing a belt that provides a force field and that augments his strength.

This first story was funny, but some of the words were spelled wrong. Was was spelled wuz and Thunder's brother was called lighting instead of lightning. I think they did that because sometimes kids spell words wrong and make mistakes.


Story Two: “De-Aged Dad!”

Plot: Franklin wants his father to play with him, but Mr. Fantastic is too busy. Frustrated, Franklin zaps his father with a "de-ager" that his father invented--causing Reed Richards to become a six-year-old boy for three hours. With no memory of having been an adult, Reed plays with Franklin and they get into the types of mischief that six-year-old kids love to get into.

The second story was also funny. It was like my dad and me. He always wants to write stuff when I want him to play with me. It was funny how the dad had hearts over his head when he saw the mom even though he was a little kid and Franklin thought it was disgusting.


Story Three: "Night of the Living Pet!"

Plot: After neglecting to feed his pet for several days, Franklin discovers that his hamster has died. He hooks the decomposing rodent up to a "re-animator"--creating a zombie hamster bent on killing the young boy.

The third story was disgusting because the hamster was dead, but it was funny that he became a monster who wanted to chase Franklin. I thought the hamster died again at the end when it bit the robot and had electricity and fire in him, but then Franklin talks about feeding brains to the hamster.


Story Four: "Un-Mistaken Identity!"

Plot: In order to avoid having his parents meet with his elementary school teacher, Franklin neglects to tell his mother about the parent-teacher conference. Instead, he sends his father to the wrong classroom. He then uses an "image inducer" that his father invented to run back and forth between classrooms--disguising himself as his teacher to meet with his father and as his father to meet with his teacher.

The fourth story was hard to understand. It had some words in it that I didn't know--like compute, responsibility, inducer, and deduce.

I thought they spelled computer wrong, but my dad said that "does not compute" means "doesn’t make sense", which means it's hard to understand.


Story Five: "H.E.R.B.I.E.’s Love Bug!"

Plot: Franklin's robot, H.E.R.B.I.E., has a date with the Fantastic Four's robot receptionist (who looks a little like Franklin's mother, Sue Richards. All of H.E.R.B.I.E.'s advances are met with polite rejection in accordance with the robotic receptionist's programming for addressing visitors in the lobby of the Baxter Building. Feeling sorry for his robot, Franklin has his father upgrade the receptionist's programming to give her artificial intelligence so that H.E.R.B.I.E. can have a second chance at love.

I don't know why Franklin was covered in dirt on the first page and then clean on the rest of the pages. It was funny to see the robots having problems. I really liked it when the girl robot got her face and hair covered in chocolate milk.

I don't know why Franklin thought that it was gross that the girl robot wanted to talk with H.E.R.B.I.E. again after Franklin's dad fixed her.


Thom Young: As Kara alluded to in her comments on the first story, Marc Sumerak attempts to create a sense of dialect for Ben Grimm. However, since the phonetic pronunciation for was is wŭz, it doesn't work to spell the word as wuz since it's going to have the same phonetic pronunciation.

Also, as Kara mentioned, in the advanced PDF of the story that she read, the name of the brother of the wrestler called "Thunder" is spelled Lighting (without an "n" in the middle). Since none of the other characters in the story mention to Thunder that his brother's name should be Lightning, it would seem to be an error that the writer, the letterer, and/or the editor made. However, this mistake may have been caught in blueline before the issue actually printed, so it might not appear in copies bought at the store tomorrow.

I gave this book to Kara to review because it looked like a book marketed to young children--primarily because Chris Eliopoulos uses an illustration style similar to that used by Bill Watterson on his "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strip that ran in newspapers from 1985 to 1995. In fact, Eliopoulos's version of Franklin Richards looks almost identical to Calvin--with H.E.R.B.I.E. assuming the role of Hobbes.

As Kara mentioned in her comments on the fourth story, "Un-Mistaken Identity!" these stories of Franklin Richards are not actually written at a level that cann be easily understood by pre-teen kids--and I would suspect that most teenage kids would not be very interested in reading about the misadventures of Reed and Sue's six-year-old boy. Despite its appearance and it's "All Ages" claim, the stories are obviously directed at adults.

The vocabulary and the situations are more appropriate for adults--as were Watterson's "Calvin and Hobbes" comic strips that seem to have served as an inspiration for these stories of Franklin Richards. Unfortunately, the visual appearance is about all that these stories share with Watterson's work.

Of course, "Calvin and Hobbes" was not intended for children. It was a comic strip that looked at the world through the eyes of a child filtered through the intellect of an adult interested in satire, nostalgia, and (at times) academic concerns.

In that same vein, I recently tried watching an episode of Pinky and the Brain with Kara because I loved that show when it first came out in the mid 1990s. The episode we watched had me laughing uncontrollably, but Kara just sat there with a rather perplexed expression.

She kept asking me, "What's so funny?" and I had a difficult time explaining it to her because nearly all the humor was aimed at an adult audience--perhaps specifically at adults with a college degree. I suddenly saw Pinky and the Brain through her eyes and realized that there really isn't anything in those episodes that is meant to appeal to children other than the appearance of the animated mice--which Kara did enjoy, by the way.

The vocabulary and situations in Pinky and the Brain are really intended for an adult audience. Similarly, some of the vocabulary and some of the situations in these Franklin Richards stories also seem to be targeted for adults (or at least not to be understood by kids). Unfortunately, some of the vocabulary and some of the situations are about all that these stories share with Pinky and the Brain.

When I was six years old, I enjoyed watching Bugs Bunny and the rest of the Looney Tunes and Merrie Melodies series of animated short films that were shown on television. When I watch those old cartoons now, I realize that there are things in them that went over my head when I was a kid, but I also loved them when I was the age Kara is now.

Tex Avery, Chuck Jones, and the rest of the animators working for Warner Brothers in the 1940s and 1950s aimed their cartoons at children, but they were sure to also put in bits that adults could enjoy, too. After all, those animated shorts were shown to actual "All Ages" audiences in movie theaters each week. Thus, the Warner Brothers animators of 50 to 60 years ago knew they needed to include things that would appeal to children and adults alike.

As brilliant as Pinky and the Brain is (and I do think it's brilliant), it's clear that even though the series was on the "Kid's WB" network in the mid 1990s (and in the afterschool slot), it was never actually intended for children. The humor is too much in the manner of cultural and political satire.

When I asked Kara last week if she wanted to watch Pinky and the Brain by herself while I worked, she said, "No, not unless you want to watch it with me." On the other hand, she loves watching the Tom and Jerry animated shorts from the 1940s by herself. In fact, there are times when she doesn't want either of her parents in the room when she watches them.

Unfortunately, while the Franklin Richards stories in this latest issue from Marvel are not really meant for kids, they also won't be as interesting as "Calvin and Hobbes", Pinky and the Brain, or Hanna and Barbera's Oscar Award-winning Tom and Jerry cartoons are for most adults.

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