Muddle School

In this graphic novel, middle-schooler Dave starts school in a new town and almost immediately everything in his life goes wrong: he is beaten up by bullies, he embarrasses himself by literally falling onto the school tough guy, and his teacher confiscates a comic he makes for the girl he has a crush on. When he and his friend Chad make a time machine for their science fair project, Dave is the first to try it, and he finds himself back at the first day of school with a chance to do it all over again before the machine takes him back to the present. When he resumes his life, everything seems different, and his classmates are amazed by his drawing ability, but slowly he realizes that he hadn’t really erased his earlier mistakes and that he’d instead just hit his head inside the machine and hallucinated. But his new attitude changes everything, and he slowly overcomes his awkwardness.

Based on the author’s own life, Muddle School is a fun, goofy, and ultimately touching story that belongs on the bookshelf of every young artist or dreamer. Full of sardonic humour and sight gags, the book gets off to an occasionally awkward start. Dave’s father’s leisure suit from the 1970s is a little inexplicable to today’s kids, and there are occasions where the dialogue bubbles make it unclear who is speaking, and even one case in which it is hard to tell who is being scolded by a teacher, Dave or the bullies. But it quickly moves into more meaningful territory with the introduction of the sympathetic and wise Chad and the bully-turned-friend Bad Brad, and the slow realization that Dave can change his whole world by forgetting about his past embarrassments and enjoying the ride.

The illustrations are in a comic-strip style, with exaggerated faces and action-packed scenes interspersed with sidebars on lined-paper backdrops in a more childish style meant to evoke Dave’s work as a youngster. His crush, Lisa Jordana, is drawn in a way that might seem to evoke a fashion model more than the kind-hearted middle-schooler she is, but the exaggeration is consistent across characters, mixing Dave’s childhood memories with the superhero and action comic style he is a fan of. In the end, Muddle School is a book with a message, but one that is so well weaved into the zany comic story that most kids won’t let that bother them.