Jesse Leon McCann is an American comic book and children's book author. He wrote most of the stories for the Pinky and the Brain comic series, edited two out of the four Simpsons episode guides, and wrote all of the Smiley the Psychotic Button comics for Chaos! Comics. McCann's Shrek II movie adaptation novel made the New York Times Best Selling Children's Book list in 2005. While McCann mostly scribes comic books and children's books, he has written for a variety of genres in different forms (such as the Austin Powers trivia game).
Scooby-Do and the Alien Invaders is a children’s book about a gang of teenagers who drive a bus and go out solving mysteries. While Shaggy was driving the van span out of control after a UFO drove by so fast it shook the whole van. They ended up crashing into a cactus and the van wouldn’t start again. They ended up staying at a town nearby where they encounter aliens. The aliens were actually humans who were keeping people away from the town by scaring people away with their alien suits. They ended up catching them and discovery two real, friendly aliens. The police arrested the fake aliens and the real aliens went back into their UFO and left. All of the pictures in the book were very colorful and vivid. The illustrator did a good job putting specific moods by using shades of colors. They would place the characters in dark places when they were being chased by aliens to set a “scary”, thrilling mood for children. They would either make these chases at night by making the sky a dark purple, or have them being chased in a dark cave. When everything was going well they used brighter and lighter shades of colors, such as light blue or light brown. One thing that I though could have been done a better was the choice of pictures for the text. I found myself reading a page and being a little lost at what was going on in the picture. Often times I saw that the picture didn’t convey what the page was text was saying. I think they could have had a couple pictures per page to compliment the text more effectively and/or put drawings that would better express the text of that page.