Cat Out of Water | Review

Cat Out of Water
Writer/artist: Art Baltazar
RH Graphic; $10.99
Publisher’s rating: Ages 5-8

What is most integral to the work of the monumental children’s book genius Dr. Seuss? Is it his artwork? His use of language? Or perhaps the characters he created?

RH Graphic, which is launching a new line of graphic novels based on the works of Dr. Seuss, is betting on the characters, as that is all that is really retained from the good doctor’s original work, at least in the case of the first book out the gate, Art Baltazar’s Cat Out of Water. It stars Seuss’ signature character, The Cat in the Hat, from the 1957 The Cat in the Hat and its 1958 sequel The Cat in the Hat Comes Back.

The plot will be familiar to any child who has already read those classics. The Cat in the Hat comes to visit little kids Sally and her unnamed brother—and this is the latest in a series of visits, it seems, apparently acknowledging the previous books—to entertain them while their parents are away. Their pet fish strongly objects to the Cat’s presence and the chaotic, mischievous forms of entertainment he gets up to. And while a huge mess is made, the Cat cleans it all up in the nick of time and restores the house to state he found it in.

Here, the specifics are that the Cat, noticing that the fish seems somewhat constricted by its little fishbowl, decides to turn the house into one big fishbowl and thus summons Thing 1 and Thing 2 to run around the house, turning all the water faucets on, until the house is filled with water, and the fish, the kids and the Cat can all swim around in it.

While fun at first, it soon dawns on the fish and kids that this might actually be a big problem, and the Cat responds by calling forth a series of Seussian machines that dry out the house and clean up the mess.

Character-wise and plot-wise, then, it’s much in keeping with the source material, although it is admittedly quite jarring to hear these characters speaking like normal people, rather than in simple, Seussian rhyme.

As to whether or not Baltazar’s dialogue and word usage—as is usual for the artist, he uses simple, descriptive words in place of more traditional comic book-like onomatopoeia sound effects for many actions—achieves the same goals of teaching kids to read that Seuss’ original Random House imprint Beginner Books was devoted to, well, I’m not well positioned to answer that, but I have to assume that the publishers know what they’re doing, and attempted to keep the educational value of Seuss’ work intact.

As for the art component, it is to RH Graphics’ enormous credit that they didn’t simply hire an artist to ape Seuss’ style, a tactic taken by several other projects, including Random House’s The Cat in the Hat’s Learning Library, which sees the character and his Things assistants educating children about a series of non-fiction subjects.

Rather, they hired a skilled cartoonist who has developed his own inimitable style over the years and allowed him to draw Seuss’ character designs in his own style. The result is a book that looks—and, in fact, reads—far more like a Baltazar book than a Seuss one. In fact, were it not for the Cat’s distinctive attire of a red and white striped hat and big red bowtie, one might be forgiven for not immediately recognizing the long, thin, hairy cat on the cover.

This welcome strategy of finding talented cartoonists and letting them do Seuss’ characters in their own style pays off, then, as Cat Out of Water is something of a translation of the creator’s work, not just from one medium to a new one, or from one art style to another, but from one storyteller to another.

It will be interesting to see how the line plays out—next up is The Grinch Takes a Vacation by Kaeti Vandorn in the fall, followed by a Green Eggs and Ham-inspired story by James Kochalka in the spring of next year—but it’s off to a compelling start.

Filed under: Reviews