Capture Creatures #1 is promising, but needs more creatures

On the surface Capture Creatures has lots going for it.  The cover is dreamy, surreal art with an orange fox like creature stampeding through a field of mushrooms and antlered animals.  Capture Creatures is from Kaboom, who has a very steady track record with great all age comic books.  The inside of the book leaves older readers a little flat, but solidly hits the all age comic book audience.

Our 5 year old loves this book.  While I kept it in the office to write the review he kept asking if he could read Capture Creatures.  Initially he wasn’t too keen on it.  At the comic book store he wanted to get something that he already had.  After that five minute melt down he has been all about this comic.  He read it on the way home and the only way I could get it into the office was to bribe him with chocolate.

Tamzen is a young girl on an island who is going back to the city with her family in one day.  On her last bike ride to see the coast she has a cycling adventure in the woods.  She meets Teddy, a forest rehabilitation expert who chases her away from some reclaimed land.  We also meet Jory, a shy friend of Tamzens’s who is in the same class as her.

Jory and Tamzen go exploring in the forest together and meet a strange orange creature.  Tamzen starts to pet it and realizes that it’s friendly, but then an earthquake rattles and bring them down to the ground.

Once they recover another adult sees the creature and starts to taze it.  Teddy stops the officer from doing so, but the creature makes a run for it towards an island in the horizon.  The kids give chase, capture the creature and convince Teddy to take everyone to the island so that they get the creature home.

As they get towards the island they realize that it may not be an island after all.  Things get even weirder when the creature has a flame or something that starts to levitate over its head.

In re-reading Capture Creatures I can understand why our 5 year old loves it.  Even though, I, as an adult, would like more creatures in the comic, our son is perfectly happy to read the simple dialogue and tell stories inside his mind with the pictures.

The arts is great for children too.  It’s packed with colors and features a variety of environments from the lab, forest, ocean, beach and mountains.  The dialogue is in big black letters and has a good mix of 4-5 letter words, with the occasional bigger challenging words like “hydroponically” and others.  The story also has a nice friendship angle with the two children, exploring uncertain futures (like going back to the city) and a pending adventure.