The Day I Swapped My Dad for 2 Goldfish
October 19th, 2003by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean
ISBN: 1565041992
Sawney and Beaney are the two fish that get traded for a newspaper-reading Dad.
The Dad isn’t very exciting — all he does is read the paper — so he gets traded again, for an electric guitar, a gorilla mask, and a large rabbit named Galveston. Yeah, this book takes place in the kind of world where the usual bargaining that goes on between children can extend to parents. Big brothers also tie up their little sisters, and mothers just order that Dad gets brought back and not swapped again.
It is McKean’s art that really makes this story work. He uses a layered mix of drawn, painted, and photo-realistic images. Splashes of color and bits of newsprint sometimes bleed off the page, other times add emphasis to the main character on the page. McKean’s work is all angular oddness with suprising bits of cuteness — like the white rabbit with one black ear.
This story would be appropriate for kids or graphic novel fans. It is less menacing and creepy than Gaiman’s Coraline, but the full-color images are much richer. I’m looking forward to Gaiman and McKean’s latest collaboration, The Wolves in the Walls, because I think that will be the right mix of scary story and visuals.
