Owly, Vol. 1: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer by Andy Runton

My rating: 3 of 5 stars

I can’t say this with any certainty but Owly has the feeling of being written for school-aged children. The pictures are sweet and the text is minimal but the stories themselves seem to have a moral impetus driving them….like you just know there’s a lesson at the end. Andy Runton even includes this teacher resource page on his blog: http://www.andyrunton.com/teaching/in… …as if Andy Runton sat down one day and said “I have the perfect thing for those elementary teachers…” The pictures are sweet and the text is minimal which is certainly an achievement but the stories themselves seem to have a moral impetus driving them….like you just know there’s a lesson at the end. This makes the stories seem disingenuous and I have to question the validity of the purpose. However, there is a very nice storytelling moment when during their quest Owly and Wormy meet a pair of fireflies to light their nighttime path. The reader realizes that Owly released these two fireflies from a jar earlier in the story so they are repaying a favour to Owly.

And another thing….While I mostly like this cute character Owly, I’m a little miffed when in “The Way Home” that he can have worms as friends, because I think any owl with any self-worth would munch on that worm quick as can be. Owly just isn’t very ….owly. My son was given a book called “Ducklings love…” once when he was about 3 and it was super cute that the ducklings love something different on each page like: water, swimming, their Mommy and Daddy, and then the ducklings were said to love cats and dogs and I thought “Ducklings do not love cats and dogs or rabid-duckling-eating-wolves” and I threw it away. There’s something about Owly’s quirky relationships with much smaller animals that I find unnerving. Maybe the leap from personifying an animal to taking all of his animal characteristics away is just too great for me to take.

I appreciated “The Bittersweet Summer” a little more because of the natural cycles of migration that Owly discovers. I particularly enjoyed the pages where Runton conveys time passing through the calendar and the plants are starting to bloom again. Runton’s use of black and white does not diminish the emotions he’s trying to convey through Owly’s expressions. Only occasionally does Runton break his style to provide a whack of information regarding a plant or the hummingbird’s migration patterns in writing. The structure of the frames on a page is generally reliable and this would be comforting to a new reader of the comic genre.

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