Graphic novels have started to harness the power of the comedy duo and use it to great effect in recent years. You can walk into classrooms across the country and children will be familiar with Mango & Brash, Bumble and Snug, Narwhal and Jelly, Bird and Squirrel and now they’ll be desperate to add Peng and Spanners to the list. A sarcastic penguin and a cat who struggles with his vocabulary are not necessarily the first options you may have expected but let me assure you they work perfectly together. Despite seeming almost too opposite to each other, Peng and Spanners work in perfect harmony and their partnership provides maximum opportunity for comedy but also success in saving the day. Throughout the book, they argue and bicker over the names of superheroes, what they are meant to be doing and also how to try and do anything but it works wonderfully.

Readers will love the seemingly daft comments of Spanners and the hostile reaction they provoke in Peng. You know it’s going to happen, but it’s still hilarious each time and I found myself almost upset when Peng didn’t have anything to get irate about. He manages to do angry penguin even better than Pingu and I never thought anyone could take that crown! The story is a simple yet slightly mad concept that sets the tone wonderfully for the whole book. Peng has gone to boarding school (or bored in school as he calls it) and his new head is desperate to be given the accolade of having the best school dinners by local judges. To do this he builds a pizza restaurant, which is a big reason that Peng wanted to leave his home, but as it is about to be unveiled the restaurant goes missing. Peng and Spanners are newly acquainted and Peng is still far from sure that he wants to spend time with Spanners, but it is up to them to find the pizza palace and save the day before they get put in jail for being suspicious.

What follows is a mad adventure that has fighting robots, non stop puns and inept police. All of which blend together to create a hilarious story that moves at a wonderful pace. Readers will be rolling around with laughter one moment and then cheering for fighting robots on the next page. With books like the Investigators and Bunny vs Monkey being massive hits in primary schools, Peng and Spanners is going to find itself a lot of fans ready for its style of humour and adventure. It’s easy to look and think that it’s a book following the footsteps of others but Peng and Spanners oozes with its own charm and is written in a way that only those characters could be written. I think people need to get used to the names because Peng and Spanners are here to stay for a long while and your bookshelves will be better off for that.

Pick up your copy here: https://uk.bookshop.org/lists/great-graphic-novels-for-kids?