Editor's Note: Kara Young is the six-year-old daughter of regular Comics Bulletin reviewer Thom Young. This is her second review.

Kara Young:

I got this book at the Baltimore Comic Book Convention that my dad took me to on Saturday, and I like it a lot. The people who gave me this book also gave me a tattoo of Capt’n Eli’s fish logo. They put it on my arm for me and gave me some pins to wear on my shirt.

They also gave me a Capt’n Eli card game. It looks like it will be fun after my dad reads the instructions and teaches me how to play it, but what I really liked was the large dog made out of cardboard that they had standing up in front of their table.

The dog’s name is Barney. He is Capt’n Eli’s dog, and he’s really smart. He can tie knots with ropes all by himself. I really like Barney a lot, and the artist gave me a drawing of him at the convention. It was fun to see how fast he can draw Barney. He’s a very good artist, and he writes and illustrates the comic book just like I do with my books. I really like the art in this book.

I also like Capt’n Eli’s parrot. His name is Jolly Roger and he’s 200 years old. He can speak 70 languages but everything he says is in English--which is good because I only know a few Spanish words that my mom has taught me. My dad has tried to teach me a few German words, but my mom says that German just sounds like someone is clearing spit out of their throat.

I like Capt’n Eli because he’s a kid who is really smart and he can swim for a long time under water. He can build submarines so he can go on adventures with Barney and Jolly Roger. He drew a submarine with crayons that the navy couldn’t build, but Professor Wow built it because he didn’t have problems with crayon drawings. Capt’n Eli named the submarine The Dolphin and they go on adventures in it.

One of the adventures is going to take them back to the time of dinosaurs. There are Pteranodons flying over a volcano and a brontosaurus standing above a boat. I wanted to read more because I like dinosaurs, but that’s where the story ended--so I didn’t get to see what happened to them in the time of dinosaurs.

My dad said the dinosaur story is in a Capt’n Eli book that we don’t have. I hope I can get it so I can see what happens next.

Thom Young:

The Undersea Adventures of Capt’n Eli Special Edition is a sampler comic that the publisher sells for $1.50 on the Capt’n Eli Web site (or distributes free at conventions). This sample issue contains Capt’n Eli’s origin story, “The Mystery of Me.” It also contains the first three pages of “The Mystery of the Sargasso Sea”--the main story in The Undersea Adventures of Capt’n Eli Volume One.

Based on what I’ve seen, the stories appear to be straight-forward adventure tales that can be enjoyed by both kids and adults--particularly by adults who were kids in the 1950s and 1960s, and who enjoyed such series as Clutch Cargo (1959-60), Jonny Quest (1964-65), and Thunderbirds (1965-66). None of those three shows lasted more than one season, but all are considered “critical classics” (despite the low-budget animation of Clutch Cargo).

The illustrations in Capt’n Eli combine elements of all three of those TV shows from almost a half century ago. Eli’s adopted parents, Ma and Pops, would fit right in with the characters of Clutch Cargo while the various submarines and boats (which are computer-generated to look like photographs of toys and models against which the characters are drawn) are somewhat reminiscent of the crafts used in Thunderbirds.

Just as Ma and Pops could have been characters designed for Clutch Cargo, the rest of the characters--particularly Capt’n Eli and the members of the Seasearchers team that he joins near the end of his origin story--seem as if they might have been designed by Doug Wildey and Alex Toth for either a spinoff of Jonny Quest or a mid-1960s Hanna-Barbera show that was never produced.

This Wildey-Toth style is further reinforced by the inclusion of a Steve Rude pin-up of the characters in the back of the book. Of course, Rude's own approach to character design and tone is also very reminiscent of the work of Wildey and Toth.

In fact, Jay Piscopo mentions in his afterword that one of the initial concepts for Capt’n Eli’s adventures was as a Saturday morning cartoon. He also acknowledges that he drew inspiration from the various TV series and books that he enjoyed as a child. In addition to the TV shows I’ve mentioned, Capt’n Eli’s origin seems to be a blending of the origins of Superman and Aquaman.

Piscopo does a very good job of blending his influences from (or homages to) old-school kids’ adventure stories, and then creating characters and concepts that are engaging despite their familiarity. He also hints at the possibility of deeper connotative meanings to Capt’n Eli’s story.

For instance, the Superman homage of the infant Eli being placed in a small craft (in this case, a small submarine pod rather than a small rocket) and then washing ashore at the base of Ma and Pop’s lighthouse is also a variation on a Biblical tale. Chapter Two of The Book of Exodus tells the story of the mother of Moses setting her three-month-old son adrift on the Nile River in a small basket made of bulrushes to protect him from destruction.

It will be interesting to see if this religious connotation of Moses--as well as of Superman (who is both a Mosaic and Messianic figure)--continues as the Capt’n Eli series progresses.

In any event, The Undersea Adventures of Capt’n Eli harkens back to a simpler time in children’s entertainment as it combines a light mystery (where did Eli come from) with straightforward action stories from the 1960s.

Then, when you throw in a dog, a parrot, and dinosaurs, what kid or kid-at-heart can resist?

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