Summary
October means it's Halloween time. Greg's dad has a Halloween tradition of trying to scare trick-or-treaters, but he has some funny ideas of how to do it. When the trick-or-treaters are passing by, Greg's dad jumps out from behind the bushes and drenches them with a bucket of water. On the subject of scares, this is the first year that Greg gets to go to the haunted house at Crossland High School. His mom is going to take him and Rowley, and Greg is annoyed when Rowley shows up in last year's Halloween costume, a Superman outfit. The Crossland haunted house is really scary—so scary that Greg's mom stops someone who's chasing them with a chainsaw and makes him apologize.
Crossland inspires Greg and Rowley to make their own haunted house in Rowley's basement. They come up with flyers advertising it and post them around the neighborhood. A bunch of kids show up and Greg sees a money-making opportunity, so he increases the entrance fee from 50 cents to $2 on the spot, and the first person to pay is Shane Snella. Shane ends up getting so spooked by the Hall of Screams that he curls up in a ball and won't get out.
Rowley's dad comes down and wants to know why Shane Snella is curled up under a bed, and doesn't believe that they had set up a haunted house. He grounds Rowley with no TV for a week, and bars Greg from coming over during that time. Greg thinks it's unfair, since it's like Rowley's dad is also punishing him—where will Greg go to play video games now?—but tries to make it up to Rowley by narrating Rowley's favorite TV show to him over the phone while it's on.
Rowley has a really impressive Halloween costume this year, since his mom bought him a full knight costume, and Greg thinks it's really cool. Greg doesn't have a lot of time to plan a costume since he has to plan the best trick-or-treating route, but at the last minute, Greg's mom shows up with a pirate costume that Greg loves. Right when they're about to leave, Greg's mom makes his dad take them trick or treating with Manny and a neighbor.
Eventually, Greg's dad and Manny leave so Greg and Rowley can get down to business. But after they get sprayed with a fire extinguisher by a bunch of teens in a car, Greg shouts that he's going to call the cops and the teens start chasing them. Greg and Rowley hide out in Greg's grandmother's house until Greg's mom makes him come home. Walking home at night was scary, and just when they were getting close, Greg's dad jumps out and drenches them with water.
The next day, Greg sees that his grandma's house got toilet-papered. He says he feels bad, but not too bad since his grandma is retired and won't have anything better to do than clean it up anyway.
In Phys Ed, Mr. Underwood is starting a unit on wrestling, which gets all the boys excited because they want to do the moves that they see on TV. Greg buys a video game to learn some wrestling moves so he can get good at it, but he doesn't want to get so good that he becomes athlete of the month and they put his picture up in the gym. The kids find out one day that the wrestling Mr. Underwood is going to teach them is totally different than what they see on TV, and since Greg is one of the lightest kids in the class, Mr. Preston demonstrates a bunch of moves on him.
Greg is afraid he'll have to wrestle someone like Benny Wells, who can bench press 250 pounds, but finds out that the only other person in his weight class is Fregley, who pins Greg every time. The simple solution, Greg thinks, is to get out of that weight class by putting on a lot of muscle. So he talks to his parents about getting weight training equipment, and his dad really likes the idea of Greg working out. But Greg's mom says that he can't have a weight training set unless he shows he can stick to a regimen by doing sit-ups and jumping jacks every day for two weeks.
Greg knows he won't get ripped that way, so he makes a barbell out of a broomstick and some milk jugs filled with sand. He invites Rowley over to try the weight lifting rig, but makes Rowley do set after set after set without ever switching off. Eventually, in the middle of one of Rowley's sets, Greg gets a pair of glasses with a fake nose and puts them on, making Rowley freak out and drop the barbell. Rowley is trapped under the barbell for a while, and when Greg finally frees him, he leaves.
In Geography class, Greg has a quiz that he doesn't plan on studying for since he sits right next to a big map of all the states with their capitals. But when Patty Farrell points out to the teacher that the map is up, the teacher covers it up, and Greg flunks the quiz. He wants to get payback on Patty Farrell.
When the school play comes around, Greg's mom makes him try out. It's The Wizard of Oz, which Greg has never seen, so he thinks everyone is dressed up pretty weird. He tries to remain inconspicuous during his audition, but Mrs. Norton singles him out for his lovely soprano and he feels like he's going to get a part. Well, he learns later that everyone gets a part, so he wants one where he can try to sabotage Patty Farrell, who's going to be Dorothy.
Greg considers trying out for a part as a witch, but is dissuaded when he realizes that there's a good witch and a bad witch, and he sure doesn't want the part of the good witch. He decides to try for a part as a tree since the tree gets to throw apples at Patty Farrell. But it ends up that the tree costumes don't have arm-holes, and that he only has one speaking line. At least Rodney James gets to play video games inside of his shrub costume. Unfortunately for Greg, there's no way out of the play.
Analysis
In his graphic novel Understanding Comics (The Invisible Art), comics artist and theorist Scott McCloud talks about how comics largely depend on the interaction between pictures and words. He goes pretty deep into that relationship, illustrating the specific ways that a comic writer can build either little moments or a big narrative arc using pictures. One of McCloud's key points is that the more work the text does in a comic, the more the reader is free to explore the pictures. Jeff Kinney gets a lot of mileage out of this principle in Diary of a Wimpy Kid.
This book, after all, has a lot more text than your normal graphic novel, and it's not just constrained to little speech or thought bubbles within the frame of a drawing. Instead, Kinney lets the diary format work in his favor as a storytelling device. Then, the illustrations can work on a different level to bring Greg's world to life. These pictures are often used, as previously mentioned, to establish Greg as an unreliable narrator, but a lot of other times they give us some insight into his brain.
The part where Greg and Rowley plan and then run a haunted house in Rowley's basement is a great example of this. We know from Greg's writing that he and Rowley are dreaming big, and see their elaborate plans in the map they make. Of course, through the drawings we, also see how little Rowley's basement looks like a haunted house, and there are no illusions for a second that Shane Snella is curled up, terrified, underneath a bed.
The play between words and pictures also makes the wrestling scenes in the November chapter all the more hilarious. We get a glimpse into Greg's fantasies of being incredibly muscular and dominating his classmates in the ring like a pro wrestler, and then a few pages later, we get a glimpse of Fregley absolutely destroying Greg during actual wrestling in gym class. These little bursts of images into our narrator's storytelling really help sell the jokes.
On that note, Kinney has said that he always comes up with jokes before he comes up with his stories. His process involves trying to figure out the best way to assemble a giant stockpile of jokes he has for his book and then writing a story around it. So the illustrations in Diary of a Wimpy Kid aren't just little punchlines or ornamentations on what we're reading, but actually the core of the story, which the text just helps support.
