During said battle and along the way Pilkey tucks in multiple Flip-O-Rama inserts as well as general gags. The Steinbeck novel’s Cain/Abel motif gets some play here, as Petey, “world’s evilest cat” and cloned Li’l Petey’s original, tries assiduously to tempt his angelic counterpart over to the dark side only to be met, ultimately at least, by Li’l Petey’s “Thou mayest.” (There are also occasional direct quotes from the novel.) But inner struggles between good and evil assume distinctly subordinate roles to riotous outer ones, as Petey repurposes robots built for a movie about the exploits of Dog Man-“the thinking man’s Rin Tin Tin”-while leading a general rush to the studio’s costume department for appropriate good guy/bad guy outfits in preparation for the climactic battle.
Recasting Dog Man and his feline ward, Li’l Petey, as costumed superheroes, Pilkey looks East of Eden in this follow-up to Tale of Two Kitties (2017). Although this concept of role reversal may be well-trod, Renner handles it deftly, making the predictable feel satisfying. This clever offering plays with identity in an appealing and humorous way: the fox isn’t ferocious, while the chickens are positively-and hilariously-bloodthirsty. His economic scenes offer little in the way of background, relying instead on the characters and their antics to propel the action. When the wolf comes to collect on their bargain, will the fox let his adorable and adoring brood be eaten? In a departure from the traditional sequential-storytelling form, Renner’s earth-toned line-and-wash illustrations have no panel boundaries. In an amusing turn of events, when the chicks discover the fox is not a chicken, they then believe themselves to also be foxes and change from docile to fierce. Desperate, he joins forces with a wily gray wolf and steals three eggs that eventually hatch the chicks believe that the fox is their mother. His attempt to accost a chicken from the nearby farm is foiled-humiliatingly-and consequently, most of the barnyard denizens see him as an annoyance, not an actual threat. With his small stature and unimpressive growl, the Big Bad Fox doesn’t quite live up to his moniker. A not-too-tough fox in a henhouse comes away with more than he bargained for.
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