Yeah, much of this series is silly and meant to be: at times, the writers display an enjoyably Python-esque willingness to follow illogic as far as it can go. In Operation Squish, for instance, our gang of Sidekicks takes on the chore of picking up the rubble after their clubhouse has been trampled by a giant robot. Under Exact Change Kid's direction, the group is told to sort the rubble out by size: bit-sized rubble; hand- to medium-gourd-sized rubble; medium-gourd-sized rubble to Australian-North-Coastal-Jellyfish-sized rubble. When Boom Boy finds a piece of rubble that's exactly medium-gourd-sized, the group debates which category it belongs to. (Throughout this debate, it should be noted, that monster robot is continuing to rampage in the city.) Occasionally, Danko & Mason slip out of silly into childish - always a risk with this kind of material - as when they introduce a evilly odoriferous super-villain named Le Poop (naturally, he's French). But both short books (100 pages apiece) read so quickly and are so overstuffed with punchlines that it almost doesn't matter.

The big question I have about Sidekicks is more fundamental: how many kid readers are there familiar with the kind of comic book conventions being kidded in this series? Looking at sales estimates for American comics in the month of October, for example, we see the two top sellers, JLA/Avengers #2 and Amazing Spider-Man #500, reaching estimated sales of 176,734 and 162,176, respectively. Now I'm just guessing here, but I'm betting that the majority readership in these numbers is not pre-teen-aged. Perhaps this doesn't matter - with movies and cartoon series like Teen Titans out there, the niceties of superherodom are probably familiar to most media-savvy kids. But whether that passing knowledge will be sufficient to pull 'em into this amusing kid's book series is a whole different matter. It'll definitely say something about the superhero industry if this book series is able to garner a larger readership than that JLA/Avengers team-up. . .