Children's book reviews, all age comic books, Kidlit, mglit, movies, entertainment and parenting
This is a look at the new all age comics that are OK for young readers. Some of these comics are also great for any reader :) We’ll review some of them and provide as thorough a list of all the new titles coming out that Wednesday.
When I was a teenager I saw The Last Temptation of Christ. I was no budding theologian; it was the fact that the movie was being picketed that piqued my attention. Enlightened is not the graphic novel, Buddhist version of that experience. This is the lightly fictionalized story about the early years of Siddhartha, the human who would later be known as Gautama Buddha.
As an adult, I know better than to laugh at repeated uses of puns. It’s the low end of the bad-dad joke pool. I know that some would say that’s an impossibility, but there’s a distinct difference between puns and dad jokes, plus billiards is a highly underappreciated sport. Investigators is a go-to series of all-age graphic novels and the seventh entry in it is All Tide Up. This series of graphic novels breaks the fourth wall, is loaded to the brim with puns, has colors that immediately give it a ‘classic’ vibe, and still maintains one of the highest laugh-to-page ratios that readers will encounter.
It’s obvious to pop-culture or comic book fans from the book’s title, Along Came A Radioactive Spider, that Spider-Man is central to the plot of the story. The book’s subtitle, Strange Steve Ditko and the Creation of Spider-Man, fills in some of the blanks and might introduce some elementary school-age readers to the other man behind the spider. He was the peanut butter to Stan Lee’s chocolate and the man who helmed the illustrated manifestation of Spider-Man, Steve Ditko. This illustrated book moves with the same kinetic energy as a great comic book in presenting the strange aspect of how Ditko was perceived and his impact on the publishing world.
School-age children want to be scared. Nay, school-age children need to experience scary, spooky, well-told stories that shake their skin. They don’t need to be able to quote dialogue from some Korean horror film or break down their favorite Saw entry, but they need to see some darkness, even if it’s splattered with music, humor or thought. Eerie Tales from the School of Screams is a graphic novel that oozes with things that go bump in the night. Its thick presence, patient pacing, and varied short stories elicit a variety and genuine dread, with just a grimace of awareness that makes this graphic novel resonate with those aged eight and up.
The laugh-per-page ratio to a Stephan Pastis book is incredibly high. His collections of Pearls Before Swine and the Trubble Town graphic novel series are hilarious, observational, intelligent and some of the best bang for the buck in a book that you can invest in. I say “invest in” because every Pastis book that we’ve received or purchased has never left our house and sticks like glue in our forever library. We had heard about the Timmy Failure book series but hadn’t read any of them. They are less cartoon-illustrated books and more in line with a chapter book for upper elementary through middle school. Looking Up is a book that falls into that category. It also produces multiple laughs per page, gets you thinking, grinning, trying to figure out some jokes, and in the end, tugs at the heartstrings more than you expect.
The audience, it’s all about the audience and finding to whom it’s speaking. I’m teaching an AP Language class now and that’s a key trait that we’re discussing about certain texts. In Barb and the Battle for Bailiwick the audience for this graphic novel entry is crystal clear. If you’re eight-years-old and like to read, this is your jam. If you’re eight years old or older and a reluctant reader, because reading isn’t cool and you’re parents are content to let your brain turn to Minecraft mush, then this is your jam. If you’re looking for an action-packed all-age graphic novel that screams with enthusiasm, runs with energy, and has humor for days, then this is your jam.
Sublime. If you wanted to make lots of money, and if such an index fund actually existed, I would invest in the patent that manufactures Sublime t-shirts. To a lesser extent, it would also include Nirvana and the Rolling Stones, but by the grace of the ska gods, they seem to be the most prevalent. You can walk into any middle or high school across America on any given day and see at least a dozen Sublime t-shirts. For a band whose posthumous career has exceeded their actual record-producing years by about 10:1, their ability to stay in the teen mainstream eye is stunning. I tried teaching sublime as an adjective to describe humor the other day to a class and the lesson took off like a lead balloon. Are You Gonna Eat That? is sublime, minimalist comic art at its best. It’s a compendium from The Essential Collection of They Can Talk Comics by Jimmy Craig and is just on this side of voodoo from capturing the soul of animals.
The graphic novel genre is huge. It’s a massive cross section of books that can span any interest and are for any age. As proof of this, Batter Up, Charlie Brown!, it’s in the Peanuts Graphic Novels series on Simon Spotlight, and joins Snoopy Soars to Space and Adventures with Linus and Friends. There’s a timeless, classic aura that permeates every panel on every page of Batter Up, Charlie Brown! It’s comprised of six new, original stores that are punctuated with classic Sunday comics that Charles Schultz created.
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