Parenting with the Soylent Greens: A Nerds Guide

Firstly I have to apologize for the format. I am working towards a video format that will include the kids giving their reviews but editing is confusing to me at the moment. I will eventually get there though.

What is parenting with the soylent greens? As a parent I spend a lot o my time sharing my interests with my family and friends but as I have 2 small girls I cant always show the full extent of nerd culture for reasons ranging from explicit images to the use of bad language. I also find that as I've grown up so has a lot of the material making it quite inaccessible for younger viewers. Parenting with the Soylent Greens aims to level the playing field for us adults a bit by finding the best FAMILY FRIENDLY material. This means material that you as parents can enjoy WITH your family.

For this first feature we took the time to read Itty Bity Hellboy (Artist: Art Baltazar Story: Art Baltazar, Franco). This was a great find for me as a huge Hellboy fan and so it gave me a chance to introduce the character to my kids without any of the darker elements or quite frankly older themes of the original comic books.

Mat: I'm a huge Hellboy fan especially when Mignola himself is on art so this book was really exciting to me. The first thing that took me was the cover art showing some of Hellboys more exciting friends including Lobster Johnson and Abe Sapien. The interior artwork is bright and colourful and hits you right in the eye, nothing like the original source material but not in a bad way. The child like element of the art adds to the flavour of the book but I did really miss hellboy's classic brooding look, there's just something missing without the heavy shading. The story is broken up into a couple of shorter stories that could act as a comic strip in its own right but then adds up to a bigger overall story. This wasn't a bad thing because i noticed that Megan couldn't possibly read the whole thing in one go. This style let her read what she could manage to concentrate, without needing to sacrifice the story.

Megan: I like this comic because it was easy to read and I liked the story and colours. I like it because daddy likes Hellboy and its like the film but without the monsters and its funny.

Overall the comic has earned a very respectable 7/10 as an average score from the Soylent Greens. Whilst it appealed to the Megan, it did suffer from missing the quirks that make Hellboy who he is and I found that the characters came across as bratty. I will be buying the rest of the mini series however because it is accessible to younger readers and you just cant say no to the artwork.