While Top Shelf's Owly: Splashin' Around was the best "all-ages" offering for Free Comic Book Day, fulfilling most expectations, Jimmy Gownley's delightful Amelia Rules makes my Top 5 on the strength of its catching me completely off-guard despite this being her second FCBD appearance. Sort of Calvin & Hobbes meets Nickelodeon, cleverly scripted and energetically illustrated, Amelia and her friends are an engaging bunch and Gownley's hooked me into wanting to read more about them.

Amelia is a plucky nine-year old transplanted New Yorker with a flair for the dramatic, and she narrates what is ostensibly her origin story with aplomb. Gownley plays it smart, realizing many readers will be meeting Amelia for the first time, presenting an original story depicting her and her friends' first meeting after she and her divorcée mother relocate to "a dump town" in Central Pennsylvania, moving in with her youthful Aunt Tanner. Invisible at first, as most newcomers feel, she is eventually able to connect with a trio of neighborhood kids, an imaginative group of wannabe superheroes called G.A.S.P. (Gathering of Awesome Super Pals) who fight "crime" under the guises of Captain Amazing, Pajamaman and Miss Magnificent. Crime, of course, meaning eggings and wedgies delivered by the neighborhood bullies.

This is no dumbed-down capes and spandex slugfest, though. Rather, it's a sweet, but not saccharine, spin on what its like being a kid and trying to fit in that proudly wears its superheroes-as-power-fantasy underpinnings on its sleeve. Gownley's art evokes a combination of Bill Watterson's Calvin & Hobbes and Charles Schultz's Peanuts - both for his simple but distinctive faces, and his energetic layouts - with the manic pacing of such Nickelodeon favorites as Jimmy Neutron and Rugrats. His kids look and act like kids, their superhero costumes are appropriately ridiculous, and his coloring choices are bright, vibrant and easy on the eyes.

The back-up story by Jane Smith Fisher, Kirsten Petersen and Ravil Lopez, WJHC: Between the Stacks, is something of a poor man's riff on Archie, a well-intentioned educational piece featuring a cast of teenage stereotypes that, while not nearly as compelling as the main offering, does what it's supposed to do in a workman-like manner, promoting the various pleasures the library holds. At 11 pages longs, I would have much rathered Gownley devoted at least half of those to character sketches and commentary about Amelia and her friends instead.

Of the comics jockeying for position this weekend as part of Free Comic Book Day, Amelia Rules! is as deserving of a place on your pull list as anything else you might pick up. A genuine pleasure to read and I'm looking forward to more of it.