by Moe Zilla

Created on: May 05, 2010

I love the illustrations in this book. Many have black night backgrounds filled with white dots for stars, but the foregrounds are still busy with bright colors. The first drawing shows a Candyland-like city under a glass dome with gold ornaments on a green, crater-filled planet. It's Moonbeam City, "where rockets fly among the twinkling stars," and it's also the home of the book's hero - a little boy named Mickey Moonbeam.

"Today was a special moon-day. Mickey's pen pal Quiggle was coming to visit for the first time."

The story is set in outer space, and author Mike Brownlow enjoys imaging all the details.. During breakfast Mickey gets a distress call on his interstellar videophone - Quibble's space scooter has crash-landed on Asteroid B 2672. Mickey twiddles the dials on his spaceship to "super-zippy-hyper-fast," and then rockets up to the stars with a roar. And then there's another brilliant drawing of the night-time sky - filled with an orange sun and silvery panels of a passing satellite.

"Zoom! He flew faster than a meteor, past moons and planets…"

Brownlow also drew the book's illustrations, and it lets him complement his fast-paced story with some equally exciting visuals. When he writes that Mickey can't see Quibble on the "large lump of rock," there's a drawing of the spaceship with its thrusters blasting- tilted off at an aggressive angle - while a worried Mickey in the cockpit looks down with bewilderment. And the story leads to complicated twists which only an illustrator could pull off. Mickey falls down the smooth side of a yellow hill until he bumps onto a small ledge - and it turns out he's landed on the helmet of an enormous astronaut's space suit!

"I didn't know when we spoke on the videophone that you were so small," says Quiggle, who's a giant green alien with a short elephant-like trunk!

Quiggle is shipwrecked on the planet, since one of his engines is broken. And Brownlow dreams up an ingenious solution, which must've been fun to draw. Since Quiggle is an enormous alien, his scooter's engine is enormous, too. Mickey Moonbeam climbs directly into its wiring, and emerges with a giant tangle of brightly-colored wires!

A worried Quiggle looks down in the background of the drawing, his face shadowed in his spacesuit, with the night sky behind him. And into the shadows climbs Mickey Moonbeam, with the light on his red spacesuit shining on the ominously detached wires. There's lots of colors in the drawing - Quiggle's space suit is yellow, while Mickey's is red. But in the end, Brownlow's imagination saves the day once again. The two work together to fix the broken spaceship engine, and then blast off to enjoy Moonbeam City together!

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