Somewhere between learning to read and reading to learn is when elementary-aged children discover graphic novels. Their manic energy, full-color attitude, and age-appropriate puns, make the great graphic novels ones that are shared and the stuff of kid water cooler magic. The eXpets is the first book in a new graphic novel series that takes aim at a younger-than-usual demographic and will please that audience to no end.
It has been a long time since I’ve been so engrossed in a graphic novel. Ghost Book by Remy Lai is a graphic novel that is utterly putdownable. That is not a real word. However, there needs to be a word that book reviewers use every once in a rare while to describe a book that upends their senses and makes them stop what they’re doing. For me it was my planning period when I should’ve been getting papers ready for a group of high school students. I needed a break so I started reading Ghost Book and then 30 minutes later I stopped.
If the potential fun of Space Jam, the kinetic energy of anime and aspects of the absurd from Ren & Stimpy, mixed in with a bit of magic, all had a graphic novel baby it would look something like Fantasy Sports 1: The Court of Souls by Sam Bosma. There’s so much to love about The Court of Souls that audiences might not be sure as to why they are attracted to the graphic novel. It’s an oversized graphic novel that reads like a classic comic book with anime roots in a story that’s set in a magical time where magic, zombies and monsters rule. This is the sort of book that, like a mother cat corralling her kittens by the nape of their necks to move them from location to another, will relocate reluctant readers from one area to another.
Having taught a couple of classes to middle school grades about World War I, I know that the subject can be confusing. The time spent on WWI for most middle school classes is very brief, with more time allowed for the Treaty of Versailles, especially for those lower grades. Those ages know about the mythos of the flying ace, even if they get hazy on who were the Allied Forces and what were the causes that led to it. Above the Trenches is a graphic novel in the Nathan Tale’s Hazardous Tales series. This entry is specifically about the flying aces that took to the skies in WWI and how they came to shape this new form of combat. Ironically, the most famous WWI pilot, the Red Baron doesn’t factor into Above the Trenches that much. Instead, the graphic novel is about the Allied Powers and their build-up of the foreign legion and the men who jumped into this relatively new mode of transportation.
An entertaining first book does not automatically ensure a series. Quest Kids and the Dragon Pants of Gold was a great book that sure looked like it had legs. Quest Kids and the Dark Prophecy of Doug is mglit that runs with fun. It’s a book that lives somewhere between the graphic novel and chapter book world that incorporates the illustrated manic fun of the former while building upon the text-based latter that kids need to know.
Spy Vs. Spy was my jam growing up. Even when I was well past an emerging reader status, the simplicity of their wordless adventures, combined with the humor that I wanted Mad Magazine was the stuff of legend. Bunny Vs. Monkey offers up some of those same feelings but is collected in an elementary school package that’s shorter, more colorful and a graphic novel. Many people will compare Bunny Vs. Monkey to Dog Man, which is accurate to a point, but the latter has one has more of a staccato presentation which is well-suited to its young audience.
Vern, custodian of the Universe is the strangest, most creative and surreal graphic novel since Neurocomic. It also echoes the sentiment from the classic Peggy Lee song, “Is that All There Is?”, and parallels to Janet Jackson’s “What Have You Done For Me Lately”, which was certainly more about relationships, but could be extrapolated to a greater sense. Vern deals with the multiverse, and before you dismiss this smart graphic novel as merely jumping on the bandwagon that movies have mercilessly pounded into the ground, hear me out. This graphic novel accomplishes readers getting interested in it by successfully and entertainingly melding so many areas of a science-fiction venn diagram some readers might not know what to focus on. They’ll come for the trope of the multiverse, but get sucked into the art, check it out for the art, but then dig deeper into the STEM or one of any other possible paths.
Remember the “new math” joke from a couple of years ago? Parents of elementary school-age students realized that division and multiplication had a slightly different way of being taught. It’s not “new” per se, it’s just described using the commutative property, which is also a very quick way to learn craps. The Solvers is an interactive graphic novel series that entertains and educates. The DivMulti Ray Dilemma is the first in the series that manages to explain division and multiplication in a way that new and old math people can understand and does so with a strong superhero story that will guide those reluctant math readers.
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