After last week’s dive into Edgar Cantero’s Meddling Kids and revisiting the comic Scooby Apocalypse, I decided to investigate what other Scooby-Doo media existed. Of course, I’ve known about the movies and TV series which are available in a variety of formats, and I’ve known many books exist for younger children, but I was curious if more had been done. I was pleased to discover a young adult novel series published by Scholastic under the series header Daphne and Velma. The first novel in the series is The Vanishing Girl, by Josephine Ruby.
The novel introduces us to high school students Daphne Blake and Velma Dinkley, who had been close friends as children when they spent many afternoons with Fred Jones, Shaggy Rogers, and Scooby-Doo playing at being detectives. However, as time passed, the friends went their separate way. Daphne fell into the “cool crowd” while Velma became a loner who is working for Crystal Cove’s theme park, celebrating the town’s haunted past. One morning, Velma comes into work and is doing her rounds only to discover her distant cousin and Daphne’s current best friend, Marcy Heller, locked in the old west Sheriff office’s jail cell. Marcy claims a ghost locked her in. Whether that’s true or not, the park’s owner blames Velma’s mom, who was the night manager, for not making sure everything was locked up at night. With her mom’s job on the line, Velma wants to find out what really happened. As she begins her investigations, Marcy starts evading Daphne and ultimately disappears completely! Now Daphne wants to find out what happened to her friend, which causes her path to cross with Velma’s. If the two want to find out what really happened, they’ll have to reconcile their differences and heal their friendship in order to work together.
The Vanishing Girl turned out to be a pretty dandy young adult mystery. We get enough clues that we’re able to solve the mystery alongside Daphne and Velma. Yes, I did figure it out before they did, but as a reader, I got to see all their clues as they found them, plus part of the plot is them dealing with preconceptions both about who they felt must be the culprit and who they had already eliminated. On top of that, part of the story is learning how the rift developed in their relationship and how they heal that rift. As someone who had been a teen and as someone who recently watched his kids go through their teen years, the emotions felt genuine.
Telling the story in prose allowed the author to explore the world of Scooby-Doo more deeply than even the movies have to date. Of course, Scooby’s world has been explored by many creative teams over the decades and there has been little consistency about the gang’s backstory, their parents, and even their hometown. Still, the author found a nice balance between their world as portrayed in A Pup called Scooby-Doo, What’s New Scooby-Doo?, and Scooby-Doo: Mystery Incorporated. As I read, I thought I might not make the same choices for what to use and and what not to use as the author did, but I did feel the author made valid choices.
Over the course of the novel, we also meet series regulars Fred Jones, Shaggy Rogers, and Scooby-Doo along with supporting characters like the Hex Girls. In fact, Shaggy and Scooby prove to be major supporting characters. The author made an interesting choice to not allow Scooby to use human words. He only barks and whines as a real dog would. I rather liked this since it helped me suspend my disbelief for this more in-depth mystery novel. What’s more, there have been multiple points in the series and movies where it’s implied that only the Mystery Inc. gang actually understand Scooby. Those of us who’ve lived with dogs and cats do begin to understand their language after awhile.
Fortunately, there are two more novels in the Daphne and Velma series and I plan to dive in as soon as I can. I really enjoyed spending time in this version of Crystal Cove and felt like I got to know these old friends a little better. Reading these made me wish that Warner Brothers would actually develop a Scooby novel series for adult fans like me and my kids who all grew up with these characters. In fact, great movies like Scooby-Doo on Zombie Island and comics like Scooby Apocalypse showed us that stories with the gang as adults do work.
In the meantime, I’m busy creating stories about my own characters exploring spooky mysteries. One good choice is my novel The Astronomer’s Crypt. You can learn more and see a video trailer at: http://davidleesummers.com/Astronomers-Crypt.html
David Lee Summers' Web Journal 
That’s interesting. I did not know these kind of Scooby Doo related books existed and I did not even know their last names.
The characters’ last names never really appeared in the early seasons of the shows. They first really started being used in shows made after 2000. I suspect a lot has to do with how long these characters have been around and how deeply fans care about them. Meddling Kids made me think it would be great to see an actual Scooby-Doo novel, and that led me on a quest to find out if such a thing existed. That’s how I learned about The Vanishing Girl!
Oh I see. That makes sense.