Tagged: First Comics

Review: Three Kids’ Books

Review: Three Kids’ Books

To make up for Manga Friday being so “adult” and off-limits to kids lately, how about some reviews of books that are made for kids? Here are three very different ones – two of ‘em are even “educational!”

Robot Dreams
By Sara Varon
First Second, September 2007, $16.95

But let’s start off with a book with no particular pretensions of teaching anyone anything – it’s just the story of the friendship between a dog and his robot. [[[Robot Dreams]]] is a wordless graphic novel by Sara Varon, whose Chicken and Cat was similarly wordless, similarly about a friendship between two anthropomorphic creatures, but which was laid out and published as a picture book. Robot Dreams, though, is a trade paperback, and doesn’t immediately announce itself as a book for kids. (Not as blatantly as a picture book does, at least – that cover would garner some glances on the subway.)

Robot Dreams is set in the kind of world where there are some real people, and some anthropomorphic people – dogs, cats, raccoons, elephants – and nobody ever notices. Dog lives in a city, and sends away for a robot kit. It arrives, and he builds himself a new friend.

They are briefly the best of friends, until a trip to the beach for Labor Day. Robot goes in the water, and then rusts solid on his towel on the beach. Dog can’t move him, and has to leave. And, when Dog comes back a few days later – with a repair manual and some tools – the beach is closed for the winter, with barbed wire on top of a tall fence.

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Review: Four Books for Pre-Adults

Review: Four Books for Pre-Adults

I had a pile of books more-or-less for kids, and thought: why not review them all together? And so I will:

[[[Flight Explorer, Vol. 1]]]
Edited by Kazu Kibuishi
Villard, 2008, $10.00

The popular [[[Flight]]] series, officially for adults but containing a lot of all-ages stories, has spun off a younger sibling. The cast of cartoonists is pretty much the same, and the editor is still Kibuishi, but this book is shorter, cheaper, smaller, and contains many more characters seemingly designed to headline a series of stories.

The stories are all fairly short – there are ten of them in a book just over a hundred pages – long enough to introduce what mostly seem to be series characters and given them a situation to deal with. The cover-featured “[[[Missile Mouse]]],” by Jake Parker gets the most adventurous, and will probably be the most appealing to the boy audience. (There’s nothing obviously aimed at the girl comics-reading audience – or maybe I mean nothing trying to poach some of the manga audience – though there are several strips with female protagonists, like Ben Hatke’s “[[[Zita the Spacegirl]]].”

The art is still mostly clean-lines enclosing solid colors – an animator’s palette – though the book gets more painterly towards the end, in the pieces by Ben Hatke, Rad Sechrist, Bannister, and Matthew Armstrong. It’s all quite professional and fun – all in all, a great book to hand to an 8-12 year old interested in comics.

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