Thanks to Lea Hernandez, I found out about this promo piece for an upcoming humor book that uses the well-remembered children’s series to parody politics. She illustrated it, you see, and she does quite a good job, capturing both the simplicity of the Encyclopedia Brown books and the idiocy of George Bush.

Encyclopedia Brown
and the Mysterious
Presidency of
George W. Bush
(Book has apparently
been cancelled)

Author John Warner’s style is to craft simple paragraphs in the style of the original material and then end them with a zinger. For instance, from the introduction:

In his spare time, Encyclopedia ran a detective agency out of his garage with Sally Kimball, his junior partner. Sally was the prettiest girl in the fifth grade and the toughest, too. She was the only person who could stand up to Bugs Meany, Encyclopedia’s arch enemy and the leader of the local gang, the Tigers. Sally’s parents wondered if she might be a lesbian.

This booklet contains two stories. The first is “The Case of the Supreme Court Showdown”, in which Encyclopedia goes to Washington to try to prevent Bugs Meany from stealing a fair resolution to the 2000 election. The second, which doesn’t appear in the actual book, is “The Case of the Million Little Lies”, about plagarism and a fictional memoir.

The only Hernandez piece is the cover, sadly — I’d like to have seen more of her work. Read this sampler yourself as a PDF preview (link no longer available).