Tor Freeman’s Boss of the Underworld series so far (Shirley vs. The Green Menace and Shirley vs. The Huge Beast) gives us two funny books for kids, but the humour is sharp enough for adults to enjoy them as well. In Book 1, our heroine Shirley falls into a manhole in an effort to retrieve a dropped pound coin, and finds herself landing in the Underworld, where she is promptly hailed as the Chosen One by a motley selection of mutant creatures who live there, and sent on a mission to defeat the Green Menace who is making their lives a misery. She is accompanied on this mission by a kid-sized cockroach called George, who rapidly becomes her best friend.
In Book 2, George is dragged down into the Under-Underworld by a giant mole. Shirley follows to try and rescue him, and soon finds herself on a new mission, to defeat the Huge Beast who is terrorising the realm. This time she is accompanied by an animated banana skin called Peels. It’s flagged up in a couple of places that beneath the Under-Underworld there lies yet another realm called (wait for it) the Under-Under-Underworld, and that in Book Three, the concluding part of the trilogy, Shirley will be going there.
The humour makes a lot of use of misdirection. It sets you up to expect one thing, then delivers something else. For example, Shirley and Peels are hiding inside a barrel, and Peels is peeping through a cork-hole in the side to see what’s going on. “What do you see? What do you see?” says Shirley. “Uh-oh,” says Peels. “What?” says Shirley. “Uh-oh,” repeats Peels. “What???” says Shirley, looking thoroughly panicked. Peels turns round with one eyeball looking red and inflamed. “Nothing,” he says, “I thought my eyeball had got stuck, but it’s okay.”
This little sequence works particularly well because of the way Freeman draws her characters. In the space of three panels Shirley goes from being anxious to know what’s going on outside, to being worried, to being really panicked. Then in the fourth panel Peels turns round to reveal that one eyeball is now swollen much bigger than the other, and marked all round the outside with little red blood-vessels. The art helps deliver the jokes; and the facial expressions of the characters, in particular, are always augmenting or adding an extra dimension to the dialogue in the speech balloons.
The books don’t set out to deliver a moral or a message, but it’s worth observing that Shirley is a strong female character, who always manages to come up with solutions when she finds herself in tough situations; and that the driving force behind both stories is friendship – the friendship she makes with George the Cockroach, and then the one with Peels the banana-skin. Shirley relies on her friends, and she’s prepared to put herself at risk to help them. But Tor Freeman’s silliness, lightness of touch and sense of irony prevents her treatment of this theme from ever becoming sentimental or preachy.
Tor Freeman (W/A) • Hodder/Hachette, £7.99
Buy Book 1 online from Gosh! Comics here
Buy Book 2 online from Gosh! Comics here
Review by Edward Picot
