Hatcher, Gill – Go Wildlife!

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Go Wildlife!

I’m a big fans of comics as entertainment, obviously, but I’m an even bigger fan of entertaining comics that also teach me something.  This comic taught me plenty and was funny throughout, so I’d call that an unqualified success.  Some of the best stories were done as two page spreads, otherwise picking the sample page out would have been a lot tougher.  This is, as you probably guessed from that exuberant cover, a series of stories about animals.  There are pieces about the junglefowl (a skinnier ancestor to chickens), pet robber crab (the largest land-living anthropod, and it turns out they’re strong enough to de-husk and open coconuts), puffin (and how they can carry so much fish in the corners of their beaks), kakapo (and how it was brought to Codfish Island), great auk (and the stupid, stupid manner in which they were driven extinct), red kite (and their propensity to steal clothes hanging outside), and moray firth bottlenose dolphin (and the theory that they may be able to actually transmit images to each other).  Other, less fact-based pieces include an ongoing story of see otter revenge against humans (primarily for the Exxon Valdez mess), a series of rhymes for a series of animals, and a rather stupid lion.  Gill also listed a series of sources for her facts, as this is clearly a subject she loves.  I thought it was a fantastic comic and here’s hoping she makes a bunch more of these things, as there sure are a lot more animals out there that don’t get nearly enough attention… $4ish