Yes, I realize that this is not a comic book but is instead a children's picture book. I think it's close enough to warrant coverage on a comics blog, though, and not just because of the overlap between comics and picture books as media which tell stories through a combination of words and sequential pictures.
No, this particular children's book, as the title of this post and the cover above say, is the work of the great Kate Beaton, responsible for everyone's favorite online comic strip Hark! A Vagrant (collected by Drawn and Quarterly into 2011's Hark! A Vagrant and 2015's Step Aside, Pops) and the excellent 2022 graphic memoir, Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands.
In other words, while her Shark Girl may be a picture book—Beaton's third, following 2015's The Princess and the Pony and 2016's King Baby—it's a picture book by a cartoonist.
Beaton seems to take some inspiration from Hans Christian Andersen's The Little Mermaid, at least broadly, her book featuring as it does a half-human, half-fish girl who makes a deal with a Sea Witch to get herself some legs to take care of some business on the surface world.
This particular half-human, half-fish isn't the traditional mermaid, of course. Her fish part is shark, and she has the pointy teeth of a shark.
When Beaton introduces us to her, she says "she had no troubles in her life at all."
"Until the day... she got caught."
She gets caught, as the illustrations show, in a huge, weighted fishing net dragging along the ocean floor This is known as bottom trawling or dragging, and it's a particularly insidious way of catching fish, as it obviously picks up not just the target species, but any other fish or marine life that happens to be in the path of the net (Like, here, Shark Girl). Additionally, this method also tears up the bottom of the ocean floor, causing environmental damage to the ecosystem.
As Beaton explains in her narration:
As the net is being hauled aboard The Jellyfish, the boat under the command of Captain Barrett, the feeling of "REVENGE" swells up in Shark Girl's heart, giving her the strength to break free of the net. She immediately swims to visit the Sea Witch and tell her of how she hopes to achieve her revenge, and the Sea Witch gives her legs (And Shark Girl doesn't even have to trade her voice or anything in exchange for them; "Sea witches are half human themselves," Beaton writes, "they live for drama."
Shark Girl's plan is to, first, get a job aboard The Jellyfish, which she does easily enough (despite the fact that she is so tiny, about waist-high to Captain Barrett, is all gray blue, and has big, triangle-shaped teeth). And then lead a mutiny.
That second part isn't as easy, though. Shark Girl first broaches the subject with the crew in a panel—parts of the book read just like comics, with the art broken into panels, while others use the full page or the full two-page spread as a particular beat (or implied panel)—where she holds a hand to the side of her face and looks around suspiciously, a dialogue balloon featuring a crudely drawn image of the captain with X's over his eyes, and the world "mutiny" below it. The three-person crew looks on with big, round eyes and slightly quizzical expressions.
Over the course of a montage, Shark Girl manages to befriend the crew, despite various aspects of her sharky nature marking her as quite different from them, and she proves herself an amazing fisher, able to pull up fish after fish with her little fishing rod, thanks to her apparently unerring ability to tell where the little fish that the crew is after are.
Barret sees great value in her skills, and is therefore afraid to let her leave the ship, so one day he captures her and handcuffs her to a radiator, after which point her new friends the crew rescue her, she returns to the sea and they end up carrying out that mutiny she had set out to provoke at the beginning:
The crew has taken command of the Jellyfish and restored order.
They still fish, but they never overfish, and they only catch what humans will eat.
And they remember that the other fish are living creatures, too.
Though far bigger and brighter than the Beaton art you're probably most familiar with, that in the book is quite clearly Beaton's. Rendered in Procreate, according to the fine print on the cover page, it looks painted, and though there are several rather dynamic images (particularly the full-page illustration of Shark Girl bursting free of the fishing net and seemingly swooping through the reader in the direction of the reader), much of the staging looks, well, comic strip-y.
And certainly all the characters look like Beaton's characters. You can certainly recognize Shark Girl as hers on the cover, for example, and the human characters on the boat look more Beaton-y still, particularly the captain. They all have the funny, exaggerated expressions one might expect from characters in a comic strip or animated cartoon, and while there are certainly messages to the book—about caring for the environment, about greed being bad, about accepting others who are different—it's really quite funny too.
The mutiny, for example, occurs over the course of three panels, where the characters do things like take the captain's portrait off the wall and dump out the coffee out of his mug reading "#1 Boss" while he reacts melodramatically.
And the page which first shows Shark Girl in the net has some 50-75 or so of the "little fish that humans like to eat," each with wide-eyed expressions registering differing degrees of emotion, from confusion to disappointment, to concern to the sort of dumb obliviousness that Beaton sometimes gives to the animals she draws (like her fat little ponies, for example).
In addition to giving fans another opportunity to enjoy her artwork, Beaton's Shark Girl is also the very best kind of children's picture book, that which can be equally enjoyed by kids and grown-ups.
If you have a little person you read to in your life, I'd definitely recommend the book for them. And if you're simply someone who enjoys fun artwork and excellent cartooning, I'd recommend you borrow a copy for your local library to check out.
English (US) · 