A Goofy Guide to Penguins

Don’t mistake A Goofy Guide to Penguins for an educational comic. This is a book of silly pictures aimed at kindergartners and first graders. Philippe Coudray also does the Benjamin Bear series, and this has a similar irrational logic applied to wildlife, co-created with his twin brother Jean-Luc.

Each page has two pictures, setup and visual punchline, narrated by a baby penguin outside the frame. You can see samples at the publisher’s website. The images are excuses to draw penguins, beloved by so many, huddling together or getting covered in snow or dealing with ice or eating fish.

I suspect most readers will figure out what’s unrealistically going on with the first page, where the penguins have mittens and scarves. Later, they get umbrellas.

The images are neat, and the goofy ideas will spur imagination about what the reader might do in such an extreme environment, full of glaciers and snowfields. Two text pages at the end provide “genuine, real facts about penguins”.

A Goofy Guide to Penguins can be preordered from your local comic shop with Diamond code MAR16 1766. It’s due out May 10. (The publisher provided a review copy.)