THE SILVER SIX

On a heavily polluted future Earth, a group of orphans battles to bring down the evil industrialist who killed their scientist parents. P.S., they also save the planet.

The tale displays a fine disregard for internal logic but provides action and banter aplenty. It takes young Phoebe and five chance-met friends whose parents all died in the same “accident” from durance vile in an orphanage/workhouse to a somehow-hidden moonlet for adventures and then back to Boston for an explosive assault on the headquarters of archvillain Hayden Craven. Both the figures and the violence in Rawlings’ easy-to-read panels are of the cartoon sort, and generous helpings of comedy—much of it provided by Phoebe’s histrionic (“WE’RE GOING TO STARVE OUT HERE, PEOPLE!!”) robot sidekick, Max—lighten the tone. The it’s-all-good resolution leaves Craven behind bars, humanity liberated from crowded habitat domes by the discovery of a new, unspecified source of renewable power and the orphans rewarded with a spacious home on the aforementioned planetoid.

Lots of excitement and comfy predictability for readers willing to go with the unlikely flow.