This cool, colourful, highly visual guide to media covers the territory from TV, music, magazines, and comic books to video games and the Internet. Deconstructing media while it informs, the book is built around six big, serious questions, beginning with “Who created this message and why?” and ending with “What’s missing?”

Despite the strong sense of personality the book conveys, it offers no details about its creators, not even mug shots. However, some quick Net-surfing tells us that the Jamaican-born Ali lives in Vancouver and Cho lives in Toronto. Half a continent apart, they meet seamlessly in the persona of Media Madness’s charismatic narrator, Max McLoon. This zany, multicultural, multispecies cartoon character, though initially irritating, grows on the reader. Versatile and savvy, Max guides us through a huge amount of material in the book’s short span. We learn, for example, that kids currently spend more than four hours a day with media – roughly the same as 30 years ago. Clever formats like cutaway views of media jobs explain production elements in an efficient and appealing way. (Work in a TV studio and get lots of pizza and great cubicle toys!) Even the names of fictional media workers – often excruciating puns such as Mayka Z. Bucks and Emmanuel O’Style – carry information. There’s also a useful index.

Max and the team offer plenty of “Try This!” suggestions: design your own comic strip, perform your own survey. Alas, these will probably need a teacher or a parent to jump-start them, since it’s easier simply to turn the page or change the channel.