Arni's Adventures

Written and illustrated by 10-year-old Arnav Ashok, Arni’s Adventures is a collection of comics that follows the titular Arni through a series of everyday and fantastical events.

Ashok’s book contains eight stories, each charmingly illustrated and featuring red-headed Arni. Whether Ashok is depicting a towering dinosaur or a group of popcorn-obsessed aliens, he displays a sly sense of humor.

For example, in the opening story, titled “The Housefly Menace,” Arni seeks to catch a particularly wily housefly. After several failed attempts, Arni manages to capture the fly, enticing it with a plate of food and then slamming a cover over the plate. He triumphantly releases the fly outside, only to have the fly recruit others for a new assault: “Let’s show him our real power! See the window? That’s the way!” As Arni sees them coming, his eye looks like it might explode.

Also entertaining, “Alien Invasion,” has the clever conceit of aliens attracted to Earth after one of them tastes Arni’s popcorn and shares his discovery with other aliens.

However, some of the stories can be puzzling. In “My Pet Dinosaur,” Arni discovers a strange egg in his front lawn that contains a baby dinosaur. He calls for his mother, but she’s busy and shouts that it’s OK for him to keep whatever he found. Then the egg hatches, and the pet dinosaur grows to unmanageable proportions, ruining Arni’s home. Dialogue bubbles seem to indicate his mother knows what’s happening, but one wonders why Arni’s mother would have let the dinosaur remain in the home all this time. It’s also unclear what’s happening during a large portion of some other offerings, such as “The Ghost Hunt” and “The Beast Behind the Door.”

Arni’s Adventures is sometimes amusing, sometimes baffling; regardless of the latter, the young author shows promise, both with his drawings and stories. While this collection could use polishing, Ashok is a person to watch as he refines his craft in the future.

- BlueInk Review

Ashok, a child himself, offers a collection of eight short stories for children in this anthology of graphic fiction. 

The protagonist of these stories is a little boy named Arni with orange hair, fair skin, blue pants, and an orange t-shirt that features a cheeky-looking yellow smiley face. Each of the eight stories are between one and five pages in length, with six comic panels per page, making for an easy and consistent format to read. In the first story, “The Housefly Menace,” a battle of wills between a boy and a fly, ends in victory for Arni when he tricks the fly into landing on a plate of food, captures it, then releases it out the window. Arni takes a job in “At the Zoo” as the resident bear by wearing bear-suit and moving into a caged enclosure, where he encounters a tiger. Luckily, the tiger is also a kid (in a tiger suit). In “The Ghost Hunt,” Arni tries to catch a ghost but catches a fly instead, then discovers his mom is playing a little trick on him with a sheet and some string. Arni’s vivid imagination is the highlight of these stories, whether he’s fighting dinosaurs or snapping back to reality after doodling an alien invasion during a boring class at school. The text is limited to short dialogue and thought bubbles and the occasional title frame; occasionally, the illustrations depicting a fight or fumble are a little too chaotic to follow in the absence of descriptive prose. The strength of the writing is in its use of punchy short sentences with simple vocabulary that effortlessly evoke the voice of the book’s young hero. The dialogue is quippy, and the thought bubbles are sneaky: “If only she had known...” Arni thinks to himself after his mom agrees to let him keep what turns out to be a dinosaur egg. The action is often accompanied by classic comic-book onomatopoeia that will be exciting to the blooming comics enthusiast. 

A mischievous hero with a big imagination animates this charming collection of comic stories.

- Kirkus Reviews

A boy goes on flights of fancy in Arni’s Adventures, a comic book collection that is silly, mischief filled, and full of twists. 

In Arnav Ashok’s graphic novel Arni’s Adventures, a boy turns mundane days into extraordinary adventures as he encounters ghosts, aliens, tigers, and an annoying housefly. 

This collected series of comics can be read independently of one another; some leave off with clever twists and others with what-ifs. They switch between plausible scenarios (as when Arni gets a job that isn’t what he anticipates, and it makes him sweat; elsewhere, a parent is too busy to pay attention to him) and wild adventures in Arni’s imagination, as when he tries to take care of a dinosaur. In some instances, Arni is scared or vulnerable; his mother arrives to support him and share her humor. And alien language is translated in some stories—a fun and engaging feature. Still, there are some predictable endings to these stories that diminish the book’s overall entertainment value. 

Though its graphics are simple, they are also bright and colorful. The gradient and white backgrounds center the characters and the action within the panels. Transitional covers between the stories function as overt segues, and each story itself is preceded by a vibrant cover page that introduces its characters well. But within individual scenes, the movement lines are muddling; the sweeping, roundabout lines that show objects flying, moving fast, or that indicate who is talking take up too much room in each panel. 

The book’s conversations are also scrambled because of the inconsistent placement of dialogue bubbles, as with “The Beast behind the Door,” in which Arni’s thoughts and the words he says out loud are mixed up in the panel boxes narrating the timeline. Elsewhere, the voices of Arni, his mother, and his cat are not differentiated enough from one another. Further, images are included that are out of place, as with a sketch depicting children kicking a ball, with a shaded sphere, and with an open, shaded pomegranate. Doodles, personal photographs, and background information on the author round the book out somewhat, as does the book’s sweet dedication: “Thanks for being kind and letting me doodle on the walls of our home when I started drawing.” 

A boy goes on flights of fancy in Arni’s Adventures, a comic book collection that is silly, mischief filled, and full of twists.

- Foreword Reviews