Graphic Novels and your Library
Letter from a Grad Student at the University of Maryland, college of Information Sciences
Hi Dave,
I am looking for suggestions for graphic novels or comic that are either 1) science fiction or 2) contain science content in some other way (ie a prose example would be half brother by kenneth oppel) for an afterschool program I will be designing for 6th graders in DC. Any thoughts? I welcome all suggestions. Thanks!
Many of the best comics produced today begin as webcomics. The reason is simple, it costs little to nothing to post your content online seeking an audience, where back-in-the-day creators would self-publish only after maxing out credit cards for the initial print run, or going the ‘zine route and taking a job at a copy shop for the free print-outs.
Now the world is wide open, we’re in a renaissance for comics art as the technology provides both new tools for production and an instant outlet for an audience to find the work.
Granted the traditional publishing houses often overlook these series as they don’t fit the industry standards, however since the entire web-scape can track them down and lay eyeballs on the content, occasionally these books attract enough readers to encourage a real-world publisher to risk a print run.
(Better still, librarians who are searching for new books but want to get a preview may take a peek to see if the book fits their own standards).
Here are two in that category that I’d recommend you enjoy.
Here is another letter from a school media person:
Hello,
I’m planning on introducing a reluctant reader group to graphic novels and I am thusly wondering what would be your first 15-20 buys?
I am planning on introducing the titles and then letting the boys select one title then maybe next session having them report on their book.
Do you have any experience with reading groups, and if so does this seem like a format that would work, or should I run it differently?
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Doug TenNapel (sorta rhymes with ‘ten-APE-hell’) produces quirky and interesting books that challenge the brain.
I enjoy every panel of ‘em though they require some cataloging gymnastics because while they have an all-ages sensibility (an appreciation for the gross, an appealingly goofy sense of violence, enough action to keep the story moving, and kid heroes who have wit and cunning) still there’s usually one panel per book that causes me to promote ‘em to our Young Adult side.
Reading through the panels you’ll occasionally hit a speed bump in an errant curse word, a realistically rendered birth scene (Earthboy Jacobus), a splotch of realistic gore (Frink), or a full size Tyrannosaur dropping steaming heaps of dung on a neighbor’s car (Tommysaurus Rex)…
His relatively recent (2010) Ghostopolis tip-toes this line well. There are just enough lines of low-brow slapstick humor to engage the Captain Underpants set, and sufficient interesting plotlines (and even romance!) to appeal to older readers. This is a book I can read to the masses at our monthly Comics Jam (comics read-aloud programs) to hold them in rapt attention — without worrying too much that I’ll hit a squeamish bit.
At the New York Comics Convention some years back I sat in on a panel where the Marvel rep discussed the difficulty they had in training their in-house staff to write for an-all ages audience. He said that for many years they were simply pulling writers and artists from their mainstream books and instructing them what not to say or draw. No guns, no blood, no ‘language’ or suggestive situations, and so on. The results were awkward, uninteresting, clunky.
No surprise since studies show the average age of most comics collectors is over 30, and most comics writers and illustrators nowadays grew up reading comics, and have moved on to adult themes: cynicism, decay of common values, despair, etc…
Generally though the genesis of superhero comics can be understood to be adolescent hormonal fantasies. Bulgy men and women (with correspondingly exaggerated characteristics of male/female bulgy-ness) swoop across the sky in skintight costumes, solving problems by pounding them to pulp. These are testosterone surges running rampant.
And if there exists a sort of magical thinking in the idea that you can simply smash your complex problems as they arise, well, what’s wrong with a little magic? It’s enough to realize that there is supposed to be a moral code that allows you to smash your problems, so long as you are doing so in defense of the helpless and not merely for personal benefit.
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It’s tricky to find good all-ages superhero comics that stand alone. Many purporting to be kid-friendly still don’t quite get it– filling their pages with those excessively bulgy men and women who tend to solve problems by slamming each other through walls (or else, bereft of their ability to commit mayhem in the name of justice, they race around battling non-sentient menaces: natural disasters or general misunderstanding, waving a stern finger in rebuke).
Another subgenere of all ages super-types parodies the titles of mainstream comics via cartoony caricatures of the heroes, usually morphed into kid bodies. The pint-sized wisenheimers prank each other and behave as naughty brats, while sporting the powers of their grown counterparts. These satirical stories work best if you already know the characters and the Universe of their storylines. The japes and wisecracks tend to fall flat otherwise.
Chris Giarusso has penned a couple of this sort of book (Mini-Marvels, in the Marvel comics universe), and manages to wring a snicker out of a well-read comics fan. But the books don’t stand alone on their own merit.
By contrast Giarusso’s superkid comic G-Man: Learning to Fly (Image Comics 2010, and the 2nd volume G-man: Cape Crisis ) not only stands alone, but flies around in giddy loop de loops divebombing the neighbors and chasing pigeons out of the sky. Or something like that.
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Zita receives dubious consolation
Honorable, fiercely determined and a good friend, the titular protagonist of Zita the Space Girl has many admirable qualities as a hero for youngsters. She’s also the sort of person who pushes a big red button just to see what happens.
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We have many new graphic novels just added to the collection, but I want to clear out a backlog of excellent kids books I was holding aside to add to the ‘canon’ of really top-notch timeless all-ages books that should not be missed.
One more in the category of ‘instant classics’ is Eleanor Davis’ action-science nerd-’venture: The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook (2009, Bloomsbury USA).
Ultra-nerd Julian Calendar fears persecution in his new school, and tries to hide that proverbial light under a bushel basket. His clever plan is to play dumb in order to fit in at the new school. And ‘plan’ is the right word, he approaches the problem like a science experiment, an anthropological study of other tweens: what is the science of ‘fitting in’ ?
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After reading Bone by Jeff Smith I am often asked ‘what’s next?’ These next few posts are reviews of a few All-ages comics that join the canon of stellar works I’d recommend to anybody. Some are not new, but maybe new to you:
Amulet, by Kazu Kibuishi
In his ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’ Joseph Campbell postulated that the Hero of classical mythology must lose his parents early in life. Perhaps the reason tall heroes have dead parents is that it opens up the boundaries of possibilities and exposes the youth to danger. Perhaps the hero myth is simply the coming of age we all undergo.
In any case Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet hits every note of the classic hero’s journey. Within the first ten pages he has offed one primary caregiver, as the father drives off a cliff in a car accident. Attempting to leave their old life behind, Mom moves the two kids to an eerie home in the woods, left to her by dead grandpa Silas. Daughter Emily finds a luminous necklace (the eponymous Amulet) in the library then shortly thereafter the two kids lose their second parent as Mom is snatched by a fleshy squid-spider.
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By Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan; art by Pascal Dizin
Think: ‘Nancy Drew times Tintin’ to get a sense of this book. Set in World War Two-era New York City, spunky and imaginative tweenager Evelyn is sent by her father to spend the summer with an artistic and distractable maiden aunt in her Upper East Side apartment. The father has a new fiancee to squire around the country club set, and Evelyn just may be in the way.
As Aunt Lia has little experience or expertise in parenting, Evelyn has a great deal of free time to become bored, to mope, then to explore and get herself into trouble. Some trouble manifests in a new friendship with the working class son of the building superintendent.
As kids do, they fall into a natural conspiracy– or, it being World War Two: counter-conspiracy. Aunt Evelyn’s apartment building stands in the heart of the Germantown neighborhood of 1940′s Manhattan, thus to a ten year old girl it’s entirely plausible there are Nazi collaborators wherever they look. Perhaps this is a ‘girl who cried wolf’ situation, but perhaps not…
