NEXT STOP, SUPERSTARDOM!

A third gathering of stories and stills from the animated TV series.

Awkwardly forced into graphic novel format, the episodes contained here consist of stills from the animated show inspired by Peirce’s Big Nate series (Peirce contributes black-and-white comic strips between each story). In “The Ghostly Coven of Man Witches,” Nate breaks into school at night to teach the faculty how to cook. After being forced to sign up for figure skating, he disregards his friend Chad’s warnings in “The Curse of the Applewhites.” And in “ ’Til Death Do We Rock,” Nate reluctantly surrenders the role of lead singer in his band, Fear the Mollusk, to Artur, an immigrant classmate whose fictional, quasi–Central European home country’s culture is played for laughs. (All three stories include subplots that allow Nate’s single dad to stand in for inept, unemployable fathers everywhere.) The musical tracks that play significant parts in the animated versions in two of the stories appear as lyrics associated with random floating notes. The selected stills that are used for illustrations fail to capture the action’s continuity even with the help of added directional lines—leaving out most of the comic timing and reducing sequences like the middle episode’s icy whirls and twirls to disconnected tableaux. Some of the rubbery, 3-D figures in the art present as people of color.

A poorly executed attempt at a crossover.