With simple text and cartoon artwork, Balloon Toons are the the perfect way to engage and encourage new readers. Award-winning and up-and-coming cartoonists lend their inimitable and illustrative talents to entertaining stories kids will enjoy again and again.Looking like a cross between a slug and a sock puppet, alien Doctor Bugspit plies his trade. He blithely dispenses jars of “Fix-It-Up Syrup” (made from sock juice, dead flies, moldy meat, pickle juice and ear wax) and other nostrums to extraterrestrial patients complaining of maladies ranging from split brains (“You have two smaller brains,” the doctor diagnoses, “like a cow”) to an all-body outbreak of toes. Despite nap and lunch breaks (“my favorite sandwich: slug slime and glow-in-the-dark jelly”) it’s an exhausting routine but the good doctor is up to it—until, that is, the gooey results of a sneeze (“some yellow stuff is coming out of my nose!”) send him into panic-stricken calls for “a REAL doctor!” Presented in a loose assortment of graphic panels, page-sized or smaller, this Balloon Toons entry will exert a strong draw on budding graphic-novel fans as well as children fascinated by yucky stuff. Read Less