ReaditDaddy's Comic / Graphic Novel of the Week - Week Ending 19th June 2020: "Virtual Unicorn Experience" (Phoebe and her Unicorn Book 12) by Dana Simpson (Andrews McMeel Publishing)

You may have a bit of a wait on your hands for this one but we couldn't wait to talk about it anyway, so here it is!

We've admired the "Phoebe and her Unicorn" series from afar for a while, pulling a couple of titles out of our local library for a look. My daughter has got to that age where she casts a cynical side-eye over anything that's pink, looks vaguely cute, and features either unicorns or llamas but absolutely raved about PAHU - and was delighted to get the chance of an early look at the latest adventure for Phoebe and Marigold Heavenly Nostrils (because if you're going to name a Unicorn, you've gotta go all-in, right?)

Phoebe and her luxuriously maned pal are on a new adventure - this time in cyberspace! Imagine it, a virtual unicorn experience to match anything you can possibly imagine in the real or magical world. This is what Phoebe and Marigold find on a school visit to the Science Museum.

It sounds too good to be true, right?

There's also the small matter of a school talent show to navigate, and as usual Dana's humour is cute, funny but also whip-smart (with Marigold stealing practically every scene, of course!)

Dana's glorious skills in comic making hark back to the sort of strip-based stuff I fell in love with as a kid, and of course have shared with my daughter as her appreciation of comics has grown over the last few years.

Phoebe and Marigold's adventures also work in a good dose of very smart and very subtle character-building storytelling, ideal for younger readers looking for their first inroad into comics and solo reading, but also utterly brilliant for big pug-ugly grown ups like me who appreciate the finer points of Dana's humorous storytelling and illustrative strokes.

Sum this book up in a sentence: If you've ever loved stuff like Calvin and Hobbes, or Bone, then you're really in for a treat, this series shows absolutely no signs of becoming stale or irrelevant and this latest virtual adventure is one fine chunk of comic greatness.

"Virtual Unicorn Experience (Phoebe and her Unicorn Book 12) is out on 20th October 2020, published by Andrews McMeel Publishing (kindly supplied as a digital ARC for review)