The Bad Guys 5 – Intergalactic Gas

Aaron Blabey's The Bad Guys in Intergalactic Gas is a very silly space mission for 7 year olds, with more burritos on board than any rocket should carry.

What happens

This is the fifth Bad Guys book and it picks up right where the last one stopped. The world is being overrun by zombie animals (zombie bunnies, zombie ponies, even zombie dolphins). The gang know the ray causing it all is on the moon. Nobody will believe them.

The only way up there is a rocket, and they'll have to "borrow" one. Mr Wolf is horrified. How will anyone ever believe they're heroes if they steal a spaceship? So Shark dresses up as a booster rocket with Snake, Legs and Piranha hidden inside him. Legs (the tarantula) does the flying.

Piranha has packed a bag of burritos to keep his spirits up. He'd eaten six before they even took off. That turns out to matter a LOT.

Things go wrong fast once they're in space. Snake is in a jealous, grumpy mood about how much Wolf likes their secret agent friend. When the ship is hit, Snake slams a hatch shut and Wolf is left outside. He ends up stranded on the moon with his air running out, and he isn't alone in his spacesuit.

I won't say who's in there or why (the title is a pretty big clue). What follows is a whole chapter of fart jokes. Wolf comes up with a plan involving his jet pack and all that gas, and it's every bit as ridiculous as it sounds.

Reading it is much more like reading a comic than a chapter book. Nearly every page is panels and speech bubbles, and the sound effects are HUGE. One BOOM fills a whole page by itself. The words are short, lots of them are in capitals, and the faces do a lot of the joking. A child reading alone can get through the whole thing in one sitting.

There's some heart in it too. Snake has a proper sulk about feeling left out, and the way Wolf handles it is really sweet. Fair warning, the story ends on a very big surprise and a TO BE CONTINUED.

What to read next

If your reader hasn't met the gang yet, don't start here. This one leans on what happened in the earlier books, so go back to the very first Bad Guys book and meet everyone from the start.