Graphic Novels

When it rains, it pours! The last few weeks of all ages comics have been a little sparse, but this week is filled to the brim! IDW has another one-off story for their crossover event Super Secret Crisis War, featuring The Grim Adventures of Billy and Mandy. Papercutz brings wrestling to the world of comics [...]

Sixth and seventh grade students are always asking me for another book by Raina Telgemeier. They want the “next one,” not realizing that with the exception of her Babysitter Club adaptations, her books are stand-alones. They also don’t realize that it takes an awfully long time to write and draw a full length-graphic novel! But [...]

El Deafo By Cece Bell Amulet (an imprint of Abrams) $21.95 ISBN: 978-1-4197-1020-9 Ages 9-12 On shelves September 2nd We appear to exist in a golden age of children’s graphic novel memoirs. Which is to say, there are three of them out this year (El Deafo, Sisters, and The Dumbest Idea Ever). How to account [...]

Kekla Magoon’s How It Went Down about a black teen who is shot by a white man, is especially timely with recent events in Ferguson, Missouri, and just the right title for young adults grappling with streaming headlines. And, a new book from the queen of verse novels, Ellen Hopkins, will entice fans of the format. The following fiction and nonfiction titles for teens will be perfect for late-summer reading and back-to-school shelf-browsing.

High school is behind you, but you’re not quite an independent adult. Today’s reviews cover one book of essays and stories written during–and one graphic novel memoir written about–the college years. Marina Keegan was a talented writer who died days after graduating from Yale. She had lined up a position as an editorial assistant at The [...]

Enjoy the last days of summer with some cool comics from this week’s new releases. Action Lab Entertainment releases the second volume of Vamplets: The Nightmare Nursery. Capstone Press releases more DC superhero books, this time for young learners, and Papercutz has the third volume of their very funny title, Dinosaurs. The List: ACTION LAB [...]

On Wednesday, we reviewed Above the Dreamless Dead, edited by Chris Duffy, a graphic novel comprised of poems by the Trench Poets of World War I, and illustrated by contemporary graphic novelist. As promised in that post, today we have an interview with one of the illustrators of that collection, George Pratt. Pratt is a [...]

There are various dates given as the first day of World War I, from the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand on June 28, 1914, to the first shots fired by Austro-Hungarian soldiers on July 28 to the August 4th declaration of war by the British Empire, signalling the truly world-wide stretch of the conflict. Whatever [...]

Have you ever looked at a cat and wondered what it was thinking? What would it say if it could talk? Would you really want to know? There are a lot of cartoon and pictures of cats captioned with their “thoughts” of taking over the world. The movie Cats and Dogs had cats as the [...]