
Boys Vs. Shark | Review
Boy Vs. Shark
Writer/artist: Paul Gilligan
Tundra Books; $20.99
How old should a boy be before he starts worrying about his manliness? For cartoonist Paul Gilligan, perhaps best known for his comic strip Pooch Cafe and the Pluto Rocket series, his concerns reached a crisis point when he was just 10 years old, way back in the summer of 1975, as he chronicles in his hilarious new graphic novel, Boy Vs. Shark.
We first meet young Paul playing baseball with his friends David and Bernie, using a tennis ball instead of an actual baseball because Paul is afraid of getting hit with a baseball, which, he tells readers, could crack your head open…although he doesn’t want his friends to know he’s so worried about getting hurt, so he simply tells them he has lost his baseball.
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Paul is nowhere near as brave or as adventurous as his lifelong best friend David, and he increasingly seems to share more in common with Bernie, who they both play with, even though he’s a few years younger than them.
Then older kid Swain arrives on the scene, further driving a wedge between Paul and David. Swain, an inveterate jerk and budding juvenile delinquent, appeals to David’s dangerous side, but he thinks Paul is a sissy and a wimp, regularly making fun of him…jokes that David all too often laughs along with.
It is Swain, who first appears in the book wearing a Jaws t-shirt under his jacket, that first brings up that summer’s hit movie to the younger boys. “It’s a killer movie about a giant shark! It swims around ripping people to pieces!” he excitedly tells them as he mounts his bike, “Everyone’s seeing it.” He then pointedly looks at Paul and adds: “Everyone who isn’t too much of a sissy.”
To prove he’s as brave as his friends, Paul asks his father to take him to see Jaws…which, despite his initial excitement about the prospect, proves to be a huge mistake. Paul clearly isn’t ready for such a scary movie, the sights of which “are far too scary for me to show what actually happened,” he says in narration. Instead, Gilligan treats readers to ten examples of scary scenes from Jaws, only starring balloon animals instead of humans “to make it more bearable.”
That night, Paul lies awake in bed, terrified of getting eaten by a shark, despite being in his house on dry land, hundreds of miles from the nearest ocean. It quickly gets to the point that he’s afraid of the shark all the time. Not just of it getting him whenever he’s near water—jumping over the nearby creek, swimming in Bernie’s pool, even in his own bathtub—but he imagines it lurking in the garage or hiding in his bedroom closet.
In fact, one night a talking shark walks out of his slightly open closet, belittling him for biting off more than he could chew: “You were trying to be a big man…but now you’re scared of everything. Like a little girl.”
Though originally presented as something of a nightmare, the talking shark soon becomes something akin to a voice in Paul’s head, appearing to him when he’s all alone to talk about his growing split with David, and always urging him to try to be more “macho” and engage in more dangerous, even illegal activities.
The shark comes to represent the sort of toxic masculinity that Paul is wrestling with, as he feels society’s expectations (and his own embarrassment at not being able to meet them) weighing down on him.
And so, when everything finally comes to a head, Paul must confront the shark, reject it and learn what true maturity looks like…as well as learning the important lesson that 10-year-olds don’t necessarily have to be all that mature yet.
That may all sound pretty serious, and it is, but Boy Vs. Shark hardly reads like a drama…in fact, few panels seem to go by without a joke of some kind, and even when there aren’t jokes written into the dialogue or the particular situations, the panels still look funny.
This is in large part thanks to Gilligan’s super-simplified art and sharp character design, complete with characters whose heads broadcast their inner emotions as loudly and clearly as if they were emoticons.
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While Swain’s face looks like a mask of maliciousness and spite—narrow eyes, diagonal eyebrows, a long pointy nose, a mouth full of prominent teeth—Gilligan draws the younger boys with huge eyes in their big, round heads.
The Paul character has perpetually round, blank-looking eyes, his frown giving him an always-worried look in almost every situation. The Bernie character similarly wears a happily blank expression, evoking innocence and lack of guile…even if he and Paul do spend certain scenes trying to deceive others.
Perfectly relatable for kids (and/or anyone who has ever been a kid), Gilligan’s Boy Vs. Shark is a fun exploration of childhood fears, anxieties about growing up and how we often start worrying far earlier than we need to.
And if you find yourself wondering whatever happened to Paul, Gilligan’s bio in the back of the book assures us that he now “quite comfortably swims in lakes and pools, as long as nobody makes any ‘du-nuh’ sounds.”
Filed under: Reviews

About J. Caleb Mozzocco
J. Caleb Mozzocco has written about comics for online and print venues for a rather long time now. He lives in northeast Ohio, where he works as a circulation clerk at a public library by day.
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