Sir Ladybug | Review

Sir Ladybug
Writer/artist: Corey R. Tabor
HarperCollins; $12.99
Gr 1-5

Sir Ladybug is just what he sounds like—a ladybug who is also a knight. He wears a suit of armor under his red, polka-dotted wings, he wears a helmet with a dandelion seed atop it, and he carries a sword. He travels with his herald Pell, a little pillbug who sings Sir Ladybug’s praises in often embarrassingly long and detailed ways, and his squire Sterling, a snail whose spacious shell the three of them can all retreat into to hide from danger or play video games or bake cakes, as the occasion demands.

Pell is in the middle of introducing Sir Ladybug to a bunch of ants—and readers—when he receives his latest quest: A monster is trying to eat a caterpillar. Well, a chickadee is trying to eat a caterpillar, or, as the chickadee—”Chick-a-dee. Does that sound like the name of a monster to you?”—explains it, it’s just trying to eat this food, but the food refuses to stand still.

It’s up to Sir Ladybug to referee and ultimately solve this conflict. This he accomplishes not with violence, despite a two-page demonstration of his fencing skills, but with another of his skills: The baking of a lemon cake. Once the chickadee reluctantly tries the cake, a cake so good it lays the bird flat on its back with its deliciousness, he is no longer interested in eating the caterpillar and, in fact, befriends the caterpillar.

The moral of the story? Um, well, there’s a couple of them, like the fact that monsters are defined by what one does not who one is, or that there are all different kinds of bravery, or the sage and pithy “There’s always cake when you know how to bake.” There are also a couple of high-quality knock-knock jokes.

Sir Ladybug is the work of children’s book author and illustrator Corey R. Tabor, whose past work includes Mel Fell, Snail Crossing and Fox the Tiger. He uses a thin, even delicate line to draw a world of cute, cartoonishly abstracted bugs in a world of somewhat silly mechanics. The drama is gentle, but fun and funny, with bold characters and simple wisdom embedded within the jokes.

It’s a great comic, and it’s not the only adventure of Sir Ladybug and his friends. Sir Ladybug and the Queen Bee is already scheduled for a June release, followed by Sir Ladybug and the Bookworms in October.

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