Friends Pablo and Jane are so bored! It's raining and they've read all of their comic books, played all their board games, and are having cabin fever. So when the duo decides to explore an abandoned building in the center of town, they get mixed up in an epic fight between an evil cat and an 18th-century professor named Dr Jules, whose been turned into a rat. It seems that the villainous cat wants to use the professor's hot air balloon time machine to take over the universe. But something goes haywire and the machine explodes.
As a result, the children and Dr Jules are thrust into the Monster Dimension, where ghastly ghouls roam the earth terrorising the human populace and maybe tenderising a few as a late night snack. In order to get back home, the kids must find an assortment of parts in order to repair time machine contraption. Travelling the far corners of monster earth, Pablo and Jane must venture to a creepy bayou, a deadly outback, and parts unknown before their feline foe does; else they'll be stranded in this alternate reality and become dinner for the creatures of the night.
Pablo & Jane and the Hot-Air Contraption is one part graphic novel and one part Where's Waldo. Up until when Dr Jules' machine goes wonky, the book is formatted like a comic book. But, when the children arrive in the Monster Dimension, creator Jose Domingo goes into an insane seek-and-find mode.
The first four or five scenes are pretty easy. You have to find about 4-7 itsy-bitsy parts like light bulbs, screws, and control switches. However, as the book progresses, the level of difficulty gets harder. It also doesn't help that the parts you must find are so blasted tiny nor that the things you must find look nothing like they do on the search inventory key.
Towards the end, I was having to find about 15-18 very small items. Maybe it's that I am getting older and I just can't find little things like a blue screw that are the size of a booger. But I really started getting both flustered trying to discover everything and a headache! By the last couple of scenes, I gave up. (I didn't even attempt to go back and find the extra stuff listed in the back of the book.)
This 2015 book is full of ghosts, vampires, tiki gods, and other monsters. But the source material isn't that scary. The graphic novel sections also don't have anything for parents to object to except some cartoon violence similar to Tom & Jerry. Amazon lists this as a book for kids aged 5-7. But since it is really hard to find a lot of the hidden objects in this book, I might up the appropriateness of this book to age 10.
Pablo and Jane started off really well. It just gets harder and harder to enjoy with each flip of the page. Domingo's art is quite fanciful and I enjoyed eevery scene from a cartoon standpoint. But I think if the illustrator wants to continue with the adventures of Pablo & Jane, he's going to make the things you search for just a little bit bigger. Beleive me, your eyes will thank you!
Worth Consuming
Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.
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