How I Made it to Eighteen, by Tracy White

“I didn’t come here to change my style.  I came here because I want to be happy again.”

The mostly true visual diary of the author (under the pseudonym ‘Stacy Black’) who finds herself in a psychiatric hospital following a self-destructive incident.  At seventeen, living with her boyfriend, separated from her family, graduated from high school, she loses touch with herself.  After punching out panes of glass, she asks her mother to commit her to a psychiatric hospital.

Once there she tries to maintain her sense of self while coming to grips with a numbing depression, her unhealthy relationship with her boyfriend, her difficult family dynamics.  

More action packed YA books for Girls (Celadore, Gunnerkrigg Court)

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.

Reader questions and follow-up to the MCPS media specialists in-service learning day: Some YA books, challenges and ‘What’s the difference between Shonen or Shojo manga?’

Clearing old business off my desk.

Thanks to all who attended our discussion on Comics in Libraries at the Montgomery County Public Schools  in-service learning day this summer.    As usual it feels like we never have enough time to talk through all possible topics, so I’ll try to circle back to touch on issues that were raised in each session, or questions that came to us from participants afterwards.

What are some Age-appropriate books for middle schoolers and young adults, not too ‘childish’?

There are many.  The great thing about middle schoolers is that they are willing to read a wide swath of books, all-ages to teen issues.   All ages books check out well to– well — all ages.  With middle school kids you can also risk ventures into some manga, and put some books in front of them with deeper themes or content.  I will begin to preview some of these books of the next couple months.  But I’ll detail a few general interest books for YA’s after the jump.

Zita the Space Girl, by Ben Hatke

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.  

Amulet, by Kazu Kibuishi

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.

City of Spies

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…