Lola's Super Club: My Dad is a Super Secret Agent

November 16, 2020
Evildoers of Friendly Falls beware: Lola’s Super Club lies ready to defend her home with the power of imagination. Super-Lola uses ballet to evade capture, and a pencil and eraser to alter space; her companion Super-James, a thong-clad toy dinosaur, can alter his size. Together, along with Hot Dog the cat and others, they stand against the villain Max Imum and his hench-dogs, who believe that Lola’s father is secret agent James Blond (never confirmed). Both stories collected in this volume—“My Dad Is a Super Secret Agent” and “My Mom Is Lost in Time”—follow a similar premise: Max Imum kidnaps Lola’s parents, spurring her to pursue and resulting in myriad developments that move the emphasis away from the protagonist’s character and toward absurd occurrences in time and space. Fouillet’s thin line work packs each panel with characters and details, which frequently compete for attention, but the art demonstrates skillful stylistic consistency amid varying subjects, including humans, animals, skeletons, and scribble monsters. Throughout Beigel’s plot-driven story, Lola remains a charming and earnest protagonist, one whom readers can root for. Ages 7–12. Agent: Travis Pennington, the Knight Agency.

November 1, 2020
When her parents aren't looking, a girl and her toys go on secret-agent adventures in this duo of French graphic stories bound together for publication in the U.S. Lola is convinced her perfectly ordinary stay-at-home dad, Robert Darkhair, is secret agent James Blond. Whether he is or not is almost irrelevant; what's important is that mustachioed archvillain Max Imum believes it, too. Thus Lola dons a cape and mask (the former cut from her bedroom curtains) and hares off on a series of joyfully chaotic adventures to thwart the villain and rescue whichever parent has most recently been kidnapped. In both of the short tales collected here ("My Dad Is a Super Secret Agent" and "My Mom Is Lost in Time"), Lola is assisted by her cat and a collection of toys and drawings, most of which become person-sized and animate whenever her parents aren't looking. The excitement proceeds at breakneck pace, as Lola and her friends are propelled from frying pan to fire and back to frying pan every few pages. The adventures, translated from the French, don't make the trans-Atlantic hop altogether smoothly. One sequence is an extended homage to the Asterix comics that relies on familiarity with same. Nonstop silliness and lively use of the form will propel most readers through jokes lost in translation. Harder to overlook are the hackneyed representations of race, especially when mute "Mayans, Incas, or Aztecs" serve Max Imum, who threatens human sacrifice to Quetzalcoatl. Main human characters all seem to be White. There's pleasurably messy, madcap humor, but the casually dismissive cultural representations are tr�s d�sagr�ables. (Graphic fantasy/adventure. 7-10)

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December 11, 2020

Gr 2-4-Lola's active imagination lands her in one madcap adventure after another. In both stories, Lola rescues her parents from the mustache-twirling villain Max Imum and his minions across many settings. Aiding her are a number of toys brought to life, including a size-changing dinosaur in underpants, a skeleton couple, and a shape-shifting sentient scribble, plus a cat, a shark, and an alligator, all of whom provide running commentary and silly reactions. Lola either invents solutions to obstacles or fights her way out with ballerina moves. The narrative is propelled by child logic that has Lola's troupe floating through treacherous waters on an inflatable ducky one moment, then free-falling through the sky the next, only to land on a cloud. Three-tiered layouts and skinny linework fill the page with plenty of details to be absorbed if readers aren't matching Lola's breakneck pace. There are a few gags involving underwear and a time travel story that zips through eras and locations with little explanation. Lola admires Christopher Columbus, but spear-wielding, arrow-firing Indigenous characters aren't given any dialogue. The protagonist and her parents all appear to be white. VERDICT Children who recruit anyone and anything nearby to set the stage for their imaginative play will have no trouble keeping up with Lola.-Thomas Maluck, Richland Lib., SC

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