Axe Cop (2010), Volume 1

March 21, 2011
Have you ever played with a little kid and noticed the anything-goes quality of "kid logic" that allows for amazingly unbridled leaps of imagination? This loony collection of the popular webcomic (www.axecop.com) unleashes the rampaging imaginings of five-year-old Malachai Nicolle as crisply illustrated by his twenty-nine-year-old brother, Ethan, and the results are a glorious and utterly hilarious cornucopia of action, aliens, superheroes, heavily-armed fully-deputized dinosaurs and more. Perfectly capturing the wild concepts that only a pre-adolescent mind could come up with, this book is populated with the likes of the titular axe-wielding law enforcement officer, his partner (whose permutations are numerous and ludicrous), vampire/werewolf ninjas from the moon, assorted oddball superheroes (the armless Sock-A-Rang being particularly notable), and the hilarious Best Fairy Ever (imagine Tinker Bell if she were a skilled and deadly operative along the lines of Elektra, only really itty-bitty), so what's not to love? A delight for all ages, this stuff is laugh-out-loud funny and a welcome blast of unique, unapologetic absurdity. Illus.

Starred review from March 15, 2011
Grades 9-12 *Starred Review* An experiment born of utter lunacy bears fruit in the hands of Eisner-nominee Ethan Nicolle (Chumble Spuzz), who collated and illustrated stories dictated by his five-year-old brother, Malachai. To say that Axe Cop is an axe-wielding policeman who sometimes chops off bad guys heads and sometimes sneaks into their houses at night (dressed in a black cat suit) and punches them in their faces while they sleep; who can tell if youre evil by how you kick; who creates poison copies of any fruit he eats; who rides a dinosaur with machine-gun arms; and who encounters the likes of Abraham Lincoln: Explosion God is merely to say that Ethan successfully channels the phantasmagoric surrealism and psychotic violence of a little boys imagination into readable form. Concurrently, his classically exaggerated style lends a sense of satirical gravity to the impossibly absurd proceedings that is absolutely vital to its humor. Although it works best in short, stupefying blasts (as in the Ask Axe Cop sections), there are moments of sublime hilarity unapproachable by the work of mature brains producing formally understandable narratives. This explains why its become a full-fledged webcomic phenomenon and now, in its collected form, belongs in every graphic-novel collection.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)