Comics Corner: Mermin

To celebrate Children’s Book Week, the Comics Corner takes a look at Joey Weiser’s Mermin series.

As the field of kids comics steadily grows and includes many good titles, one such book is Mermin, a literal fish-out-of-water story by writer/artist Joey Weiser. Over the last four years and five books Weiser told an epic story about the prince of an undersea kingdom and his surface-dwelling friends, and their various adventures.

The title character in the prince of the undersea kingdom of Mer, but when we meet him that’s the last thing he wants to be. Mermin wants to be like any other amphibious child, and runs away from home to avoid his responsibilities. Mermin runs into Pete and his friends, and quickly endears himself to them as they show him all the wonders of life as a 5th grader in the surface world.

Of course, a prince of Mer can’t just up and go on a stroll out of the ocean, so his father sends out some agents to retrieve his son so he can resume his royal training. The rest of the series is basically about Mermin, Pete and friends trying to escape an ever-growing array of pursuers, from royal agents to human conspiracy nuts, eventually culminating in quite the encounter with the lost people of Atlantis.

Mermin is a fun series, with art that’s easy to follow and exciting action. Each character is drawn distinctly, which is no small feat especially in crowd scenes, and the kids are all very relatable. No one falls into an easy stereotype, and the ones that do at first quickly come around when adventure calls. This is a great series for kids who love comics or are just getting into the medium.

April saw the release of Mermin Book Five: Making Waves, so it should be easy to find in print, and the whole series is available digitally, and Comixology even has a free preview of Book One available.