Y’know when the ice cream truck drives down the block in summer, and you chase it down because you can’t wait for a tasty treat, and then you catch up to it and fork over your cash for a delicious King Cone? You unwrap it and there’s the vanilla ice cream and the chocolate and the caramel, and it looks heavenly and then you take your first bite, and yes it’s sweet, but it’s grainy, grainy ice cream and it ruins the whole experience because it almost feels like sand in your mouth? Well, when you’re 4 or 5 years old, maybe you wouldn’t care, or maybe you wouldn’t even notice that the ice cream is grainy because your tastes haven’t become that refined yet.

Well, that’s the Tiny Titans in a nutshell. It looks sweet, and it is, but there’s something really, really disappointing about the meat of it once you get past the cute, bright art style. Honestly, I think the words on the page actually detract from this comic, and if you ignore them and just look at some of the bits as visual gags, they actually work as well if not better. That said, my 8, 8, and 10-year old girls like it a lot, which I have to say is a little disappointing to me, but hey they’re kids.

One last nitpick. The books are broken into little vignettes or sketches or whatever. Now each of these has a beginning, with a title and so on, but there’s never anything at the end of the story/piece. I think there ought to be some kind of visual or written cue to mark the end of each of these pieces to give it some sense of completeness, because it’s not coming from the material itself.