FLIP & FIN

Sand shark twins Flip and Fin return as supersharks.

Watching their favorite TV cartoon heroes, Sammy Saw Shark and Harry Hammerhead, saucer-eyed shark siblings Flip and Fin decide they want to be superheroes too and set out to find someone to help. As they zip along through the sea, they find their friends Swimmy the jellyfish and Molly the anglerfish (unlikely eyelashes reinforce her femininity). They all decide to be super together. Fin zips through the waves at the surface. Flip flips out of the water and lands on something strange and bouncy. They don’t know what it is, but they know it belongs to the human people and decide they will be heroes if they return it to the beach. However, when they arrive at the beach, all the humans run screaming. They are afraid of the sharks, of course, but Flip and Fin think they are afraid of the ball, so they bite it and end up heroes (in their minds at least). Gill’s second Flip & Fin tale (mostly free of the bad jokes that peppered the first) is not as clever as it intends to be. The fishy foursome doesn’t know what they’ve found at first but then spontaneously start calling it a “ball.” Numberman’s cartoon watercolor illustrations out-goof the tale they help tell.

A passable tale for the shark-obsessed, but there are funnier fish in the sea