Cat on the run

Fluffy, white anthropomorphic cat Princess Beautiful, an online influencer, gets a reality check when she's forced on the run in this harebrained graphic novel by Blabey (the Bad Guys series). Feline social media megastar Beautiful has it all: 2.2 billion adoring fans, even more billions of views on her oh-so-cute cat videos, and several assistants who are ready to fulfill her every whim, even during inconvenient moments. Today, the "World's Favorite Kitty" is preparing for a date with handsome feline and billionaire heir Catrick Cash. Distracted by swoony daydreams while filming a new video of her using the computer, Beautiful doesn't notice that her device has been hacked and that she has accidentally armed nuclear missiles. Suddenly, Beautiful goes from a beloved media figure to a wanted global villain. Now a fugitive, Beautiful seeks the real culprit--the evil Red Scorpion--while being relentlessly hunted by mouse deputy Marshall Cheeseman. Rough-hewn b&w illustrations with red accents portray Beautiful as a prim and proper feline who's used to the finer things in life in an antics-filled series launch that effectively captures the absurdity of social media fame while building to a cat-tastic cliffhanger. Ages 7--10. (Sept.)

A celebrity cat--turned--unwitting outlaw fumbles hilariously through a series of calamities. Princess Beautiful needs her vanilla latte! Right now! No, make that a green tea! She's preparing for a date with suave billionaire Catrick Cash, and she's all out of sorts. This sort of outburst is par for the course in the life of a superfamous cat. Princess Beautiful is wildly popular, racking up over 3 billion likes on goofy videos in which she chases laser pointer beams, smashes her paws haphazardly on a computer keyboard while wearing googly-eye glasses, and activates top-secret nuclear missile codes for the whole world to see. Wait, that last one seems a bit off. Princess Beautiful, set up by shadowy enemies, swiftly finds public opinion turned against her. She's arrested, spectacularly destroys a prison bus and a Supermax prison, and attempts to flee in disguise in a series of snowballing catastrophes that make her appear much more evil than she is. Princess Beautiful, a delightful new addition to the Bad Guys universe, is a true diva, glamorous and self-obsessed yet perpetually uneasy, not unlike the iconic Miss Piggy. Each character she encounters is equally dramatic and broad, and every turn of the page brings fresh disaster. Punctuated with red, Blabey's dynamic grayscale art brings to life Princess Beautiful's pratfalls with the same enjoyably chaotic energy as in his Bad Guys books. The perils of online celebrity take the form of frantic feline antics in this capable, caper-filled series starter. (Graphic fiction. 7-12) Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.