Ben Towle’s artwork is, as always, detailed and captivating. There is much to learn about and enjoy in this graphic novel.

A superb combination of whimsy, artistry, and educational content from an imprint of the Naval Institute Press. While most readers are familiar with horses and dogs in combat, we probably know less about bears, dolphins, and slugs in the military.

Ben Towle’s style is vintage, almost a throwback to comics of the 1960s and 70s. The detail that he achieves without overwhelming the page is skillful indeed. The lettering also conveys a healthy amount of information in a clear and engaging way. The combination produces a work that is unique and memorable. I can see it finding a home in libraries, schools, and individual homes.

Thank you to Ben Towle, Dead Reckoning, and NetGalley for an Advance Reader Copy in exchange for an honest review.

This was so lovely! It was a super simple, enjoyable read with some really cool and interesting animal facts that I'm definitely going to bring up at any parties I go to in the future. I think this book will be especially impactful to younger audiences; while I was reading it I could see a younger me getting obsessed with the animals in this book and just wanting to learn more and more about them. The artwork also definitely helps in this sense as well as it is beautiful and understandable for all ages! I would definitely recommend this to everyone as I think every person would love this little book and its contents!

Starting with a vignette about US soldiers in WWI France using jars of glow worms as a light source, this is purely designed to show us the range of animals used in the field of war. The first standard-length chapter concerns a US Civil War soldier convinced he's being involved in a prisoner swap that shows him in great light – only to find it's actually a dog with a miraculous spirit for survival that's going the other way in exchange for him. Next is a light-hearted survey of naval ship's cats, followed by a look at dolphins, and it's only the semi-fictionalised halfway house of pieces like this that will put readers off this book. This wanted to be both a listicle of dolphin use by the US Navy, and something that has something to dramatise, and is therefore stuck in the middle in an ungainly fashion.

But we have stirring dramas elsewhere to make this really well worth a look, such as Satan, a dog who sent messages and more across a field of war where seven men had failed previously, and therefore got a small troop of trapped men out of danger. Yet for me the best thing here was the surprising element – the use of Pavlovian seagulls to indicate submarines, and so on. I guess some people would add the monochrome nature of these pages to the turn-offs, but I didn't mind, and found it fully suiting; the other aspects to the visual representation are all fine. What this boils down to, then, is a big success – despite the clumsiness it has at times in knowing how much to fictionalise, and some less-than-clear wordless sections, it's a book full of the unusual and unexpected, and probably sits on a very small shelf of similar books. The fact it fills such a niche so well only helps me hold it in high regard. Four and a half Dickin Medals.