Scooby in a familiar-looking red room, in an episode from "Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated."

Meddling Kids
by Edgar Cantero

The Regional Office Is Under Attack!
by Manuel Gonzales

When my oldest son was little, he would get very frightened if the subjects of ghosts or monsters came up. One day, we were flipping channels and came across "Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated," a revamped, 21st century version of the old mystery-solving-teenagers-and-their-talking-dog cartoons from my childhood. "Watch," I said, "the monster on 'Scooby-Doo' always turns out to be just some guy in a mask who is trying to scare people away so he can steal some buried treasure. At the end of the show, they will catch him, pull of his mask, and he'll say, 'I would have got away with it too, if it hadn't been for you meddling kids!'" We watched the episode, it followed that formula, more or less, and something clicked for my son. He saw that the monster wasn't real in the show, and that reminded him that the show wasn't real, and that opened his mind to a world of possibilities in storytelling.

And, it turned out, my wife and I got hooked on the show too. I would place "Mystery Incorporated" in any list of the best of our current moment of Peak TV.

"Mystery Incorporated" lasted only two seasons on Cartoon Network, but those seasons were master classes in how to revive a familiar franchise. Unlike the 2002-2005 "What's New, Scooby-Doo," which updated the gang's clothes and turned the Mystery Machine into a minivan, "Mystery Inc." had the kids in their familiar uniforms: Shaggy with his baggy shirt, Fred with his ascot, Daphne with her hairband, Velma and her knee socks.

Their characters, too, were boiled down to essentials and built up from there: Shaggy is interested only in hanging out with his beloved dog and eating -- to the point where he can't handle it when a girl expresses interest in him; Velma is so much brainier than everyone else that it leaves her lonely; Fred loves traps to the point of unhealthy obsession; Daphne loves Fred, a guy who doesn't appreciate her.

Similarly, the story started with essential tropes and then added new bits on top. Each episode followed that familiar pattern I pointed out to my son -- at least until toward the end of Season 2, when things got really weird -- and that gave it room to introduce new characters, conflicts and story arcs. It wasn't too complicated or obscure for the kids, but Gen X parents like me loved the episodes where original MTV VJ Martha Quinn shows up to help the kids understand an undead ska band, or where Scooby puts on a straight blond wig and sings for a Velvet Underground-like band at the Factory-like studio of a Warhol-like pop artist.

In one of my favorite episodes, Mystery Inc. competes in the Mystery Solvers State Finals, alongside Captain Caveman, Jabberjaw and Dune Buggy, reminding us that the Scooby gang isn't the only group of crime-fighting teenagers accompanied by a nonhuman sidekick. In one of the strange developments of Season 2, we get glimpses of similar groups that appeared throughout history -- a group of colonial California monks and their talking donkey, a group of victorians and their pet orangutan, etc. "This has all happened before," someone says, and it you kind of believe these tropes are just part of the landscape of our collective imagination.

"I Would Have Got Away With It, Too ..."

Edgar Cantero takes this idea very far in his delightful "Meddling Kids." The premise here is very much "Scooby-Doo vs. Cthulu." It's the the story of a mystery-solving crew of teenagers and their dog, known as the Blyton Summer Detective Club, but it catches up with them 13 years after their last big case.

The Blyton Summer Detective Club is not exactly Mystery Inc. The names are different and some of the character traits have been shuffled, and there's definitely a bit of Hardy Boys and Nancy Drew in there, but it's close enough. I could hardly read anything about redheaded Kerri without picturing Daphne, even if her brainy personality seemed a little more in tune with that of Velma. I didn't have to read any description of an ascot to picture Peter as Fred, and it was easy to picture Shaggy growing up to be a fantasy nerd with mental illness like Nate.

The dog, Tim, is a direct descendant of the gang's old Weimaraner. (The breed may be another reference: Photographer William Wegman cast his famous Weimaraners as myster-solving youths in a series of "Hardly Boys" films.) The surviving male human of the club is Nate, who has spent much of the past 13 years in mental institutions, largely the result of the lingering effects of the gang's last big adventure -- one such effect is that he thinks he is talking to the gang's other male human, Peter, who has actually been dead for several years.

In fact, all the gang has been struggling in the years since they went their separate ways. Andy, a butch Latina, has spent time in the military and behind bars. Kerri, who was once on her way to a promising career as a biologist, is a waitress in a sleazy bar, living in a disgusting apartment.

Andy gets the action started by tracking down the other two -- or three, counting the Weimaraner. Something about their long-ago solution to the Sleepy Lake Monster Mystery just doesn't feel right, and she wants to get back to it, solve the mystery and heal their broken lives.

It's much less touch-feely than that sounds, I promise. Soon enough, we get hints of the Lovecraftian, with weird languages and necromancers and a sleeping god under the water and so on. It's a great, page-turning adventure, that somehow doesn't stop being one when it gives you a little wink, or even a very big wink, like this one:

"Two blank lines later ..."

Superhero Office Politics

A couple months ago, I read, "The Regional Office is Under Attack," a novel that knowingly plays with adventure and fantasy in a different way. The premise -- a team of beautiful young superpowered assassin women attacks a mysterious underground office that is protected by high-tech robots and magic -- is so preposterous that it practically winks at you from every page. But almost before you notice it, the comic book premise and James Bond movie action sequences fade into the background of what's really a story about office politics, surviving trauma and finding your place in the world.

I had a lot of fun reading "Meddling Kids," but in some ways I liked "The Regional Office is Under Attack" even more. Its premise is based on familiar genre tropes, but not specific characters, so I didn't have the distraction of wondering who was supposed to be whom. Instead, I just surrendered to the story. At first I thought the story was a Marvel movie, but it turned out to be something much more human. It's strangely moving.

But I should also say: After "Meddling Kids," I opened Phillip Pullman's new "The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage" and I immediately felt the depth of a story that has roots like John Milton, instead of, you know, Scooby-Doo.