Leo Geo and the Cosmic Crisis by Jon Chad is the second of the science / science fiction graphic novels featuring Leo Geo. The first one took Leo Geo through the center of the Earth and on some Jules Verne inspired adventures. This one takes Leo and his brother on adventures through space.

As with the first book which required reading the book in an up and down fashion and then a down to up fashion as Leo Geo passed through the center, this one also has an unusual schema. Cosmic Crisis is like those old dime store two-in-one novels where one printed upside down and the two books met and ended in the middle. Here though, it's two related adventures: one being Leo's, and one being his brothers.

As my public libraries tends to hide all the relevant cover stuff under their copious stickers (library sticker, barcode, genre sticker, spine label), I mistook the brother's cover as the actual start of the book. So I ended up reading about the brother's rescue of Leo Geo before I read about Leo Geo leaving to rescue his brother. As you can guess — the brothers are working on only partial information due to a communications outage.

As the brothers are traveling through space, the pages are filled with background information about different aspects of space: facts about stars, planets, light speed, and so forth. The artwork in these books is very busy but its worth taking time to read and look at everything, either by going slowly through the book or by doing a second read later.

I don't know if more Leo Geo books are planned but if there were a third one, I'd definitely read it. ( )

It's not something I particularly care for but I can see a lot of kids loving this comical adventure story that starts at opposite ends filled with weird minutiae. ( )