
Cut to five years previous, in a prequel to the whole series. The villain sets off after George and Harold, who are in juvie (“not much different from our old school…except that they have library books here.”). There, he witnesses fellow inmate Tippy Tinkletrousers (aka Professor Poopypants) escape in a giant Robo-Suit (later reduced to time-traveling trousers). To start, in an alternate ending to the previous episode, Principal Krupp ends up in prison (“…a lot like being a student at Jerome Horwitz Elementary School, except that the prison had better funding”). Not that there aren’t pranks and envelope-pushing quips aplenty. Sure signs that the creative wells are running dry at last, the Captain’s ninth, overstuffed outing both recycles a villain (see Book 4) and offers trendy anti-bullying wish fulfillment. or as the cooks chorus "MILK IN THE BATTER! MILK IN THE BATTER! WE BAKE CAKE! AND NOTHING'S THE MATTER!" (Can it go without saying that the pictures are superb.) God Bless Milk and God Bless Me!'" God bless naked and naturally exposed, Mickey is pure joy. Sometimes Mickey's toss and turn from bed into the night kitchen and back keeps in time to internal rhyme, or sets up a rhythmic chant or a remembrance of things heard, or makes sport with words while what's doing in the kitchen is the concoction of a cake by three Oliver Hardy cooks who take Mickey for milk until "right in the middle of the steaming and the making and the smelling and the baking Mickey poked through and said I'M NOT THE MILK AND THE MILK'S NOT ME! I'M MICKEY!" But wait: in his bread dough plane with his milk-pitcher helmet, Mickey flies up and up and up "and over the top of the Milky Way," then dives down into the bottle "singing 'I'm in the milk and the milk's in me. This is Maurice Sendak's comic strip apotheosis of the Thirties/ dusky dream of sensual bliss/ bim bam boom bombshell of a child-echoing picture book.
