Koyama: Chris Kuzma's Lunch Quest

Chris Kuzma's book Lunch Quest is sort of like Paper Rad decided to do a children's comic. The color scheme is toned down from "visual assault" to "vivid," but the big, black eyes and roundness of the character design are very similar to that aesthetic. The page layout is also quite simple, with a base 2 x 3 panel grid that is collapsed into fewer panels as well as splash pages. It feels like the book is a mash-up of several different ideas, cleverly linked by a framing device that sets up what is non-stop motion.

It's about a hungry rabbit character dressed in a business suit who comes home looking for his lettuce. Kuzma quickly establishes a premise and then exhausts it as he leads the reader around the page, then quickly adds an absurdist premise that turns the story upside down. In this case, it's finding a portal to another world inside of the lettuce bin, which shows him a couple of skateboarding kids getting into a series of escalating challenges with a rabbit master. Kuzma slips between standard panel-to-panel transitions and flattened, full-page open layouts that twist and turn through a variety of distinctive visual cues. The same pattern is repeated in the second half of the book, where the suited rabbit happens to witness an epic dance battle.

Kuzma does a version of Keren Katz's approach to comics here, which is strongly related to her own dance background. Kuzma thinks a lot about bodies in motion and the ways in which they flatten and become distorted. Kuzma seizes on that distortion and freezes it, creating a tension between the relentless motion and that momentary pose that's a slice of that motion. The use of color and the pleasing, friendly character design make that distortion friendly and cool for a young reader, as they lead up to fun resolutions for the frenetic action on the pages. The final part of the book is a recapitulation of the first two sections, as the rabbit frantically searches for lettuce and discovers a half-dozen new worlds that get just a panel each. The final reveal is funny and sweet, but Kuzma also adds a gag on top of it. This comic is a great way of introducing non-naturalistic storytelling to young readers, reconnecting them to basic concepts of shape and showing them how it can tell a story. It's also funny, good-natured and very slightly scatological, making it a perfect read for kids between seven and ten years old.