Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad | Review

Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad
Writer: Dave Scheidt
Artist: Miranda Harmon
RH Graphic; $12.99
Publisher’s rating: Ages 7-10

Mayor Good Boy, the canine mayor of the small town of Greenwood, faces perhaps the biggest scandal of his political career. He’s been seen all over town being, for want of a better term, bad: Barking and growling at constituents, running with a bad crowd, biting someone in the pit at a punk show and starting a fight. Sure, during these events, the mayor appears to be wearing a leather jacket instead of his customary blue collar, but other than that, it looks exactly like him. Does it stand to reason then that, as the title of the third Mayor Good Boy adventure says, Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad?

No, no that’s not it all. As we learn in the opening scene, set “many dog years ago”, long before he was mayor, Good Boy was part of a litter of puppies that included one who looked exactly like him, his brother Bad Boy. And Bad Boy, as his name indicates, is a bad boy.

Things are a bit more complicated than they seem, however, as Good Boy hasn’t always been so purely good and, in fact, was, in one particular instance, bad, something that only Bad Boy knows the truth about. And now he’s in Greenwood, for a particularly unwelcome visit with his successful brother.

That explains why Mayor Good Boy, who is trying to keep the secret of his brother from everyone, is acting so weird. But why are the Ablemans, Mayor Good Boy’s junior assistants Abby and Aaron’s parents, acting weird, too? And Aaron is acting weird, but then, Aaron’s always acting weird. Just what exactly is going on?

These are the questions driving Scheidt and Harmon’s narrative, the biggest Mayor Good Boy story yet, in which Abby, the usually so smart and together kid, finds herself reacting to everyone else’s weirdness by acting out in unusual ways.

Eventually, the truth of everyone’s recent weirdness comes out–well, except for Aaron’s weirdness, which is perfectly natural for him—and the Ablemans, Mayor Good Boy, his long-suffering assistant Ms. Monica, and Mayor Good Boy’s whole family, must all come together to trap Bad Boy, expose his impersonation of Good Boy, and resolve the core conflict between Good Boy and Bad Boy.

Mayor Good Boy Turns Bad continues building Scheidt and Harmon’s world of Greenwood, a town full of fun, funny, sometimes completely random characters, often introduced just to be part of a gag, particularly when the Ableman kids throw The First Annual Greenwood Heavy Metal & Skateboarding & Destruction & Pizza & Leather Jacket Festival to draw Bad Boy out.

This concludes the trilogy of Mayor Good Boy books the creators told us about when we originally interviewed them in 2021. But hopefully we haven’t seen the last of Mayor Good Boy and The Ablemans; their Greenwood is just too much fun of a place to imagine not ever visiting again.

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