"Muddy Max: The Mystery of Marsh Creek"

I didn't expect much from the graphic novel Muddy Max: The Mystery of Marsh Creek.  Judging from the cover,  a boy/best friend gay subtext disrupted by The Girl.  But it turned out to be quite a bit more queer.

Middle schooler Max has overprotective parents who can't abide the slightest bit of mud.  So why do they live in Marsh Creek, the muddiest place on Earth?

Mom is a soil scientist.  She works with mud all the time.  It doesn't make sense that she would disapprove of Max getting muddy.

And why do Mom and Dad go jogging every day wearing heavy backpacks containing food, water...and scientific textbooks?

And what about the mysterious photo of a baby that Max found in the attic?

Max sleuths out the answers with the help of his buddy Patrick, a stereotypic black nerd with a bit more androgyny in his dress and mannerisms than one would expect.  The two have an unselfconscious physicality; after all, a lot of their experimentation involves applying mud to Max's body and then washing it off again.

Turns out that, due to some mishaps in  his mother's soil science experiments before he was born, Max acquires superheroic speed and strength from applying mud.  But it is also becoming more and more difficult to get the mud off, and he's being drawn to the Marsh, as if he belongs there.

The first two chapters involve Max finding the answers and saving the schoolbus from a mudslide.  In the third, we discover that he has an older brother, Milo, who was also drawn to the Marsh, and finally got stuck there.  His parents tried everything to get him out, but it was no use.  They built him a small mud house (inspired by a real-life Anton Gaudi house), and bring him books and food every day (in the backpacks).  Thus their refusal to leave town.

They were desperate to save Max from suffering a similar fate.  Thus their paranoia about mud.

Discovering that he has a brother, Max wants to reconnect, "hang out."  But his parents forbid it, for fear that the mud will take him.  They even try to separate the two by sending Max away to Death Valley (no mud).  A nice "forbidden love" gay subtext.

The girl (I don't remember her name) is a minor character, mostly an onlooker.   But she adds to the gay subtext by asking Max out twice.  He refuses. Not into girls, Max?

Beefcake:  Max is in middle school, and Milo about five years older, but they both develop chests and biceps when they're covered in mud.

Color Pallette:  All browns and blacks, which isn't as boring as it sounds.  The backgrounds are cleverly applied.

Activities:  This is a book for middle-schoolers, so it contains several pages of factoids and activities that are actually quite interesting. Did you know that 1 acre of mud typically contains 1,000 pounds of earthworms, 15,000 pounds of bacteria, and 2,000 pounds of fungus?  Or that nematodes (ringworms) are the most common form of animal life on the planet?  2 out of every 5 animals is a nematode.

My grade: A.