Guest review by Lorraine Chun All too frequently we hear or read in the news about another shooting at a school, but rarely do we hear about its impact on students. The Golden Hour by Niki Smith addresses how an adolescent copes with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) after witnessing his teacher gunned down. This is a story about healing and resiliency, new friendships, and even young love. Manuel Soto is a latchkey middle schooler whose mother puts in long hours as a nurse at a health facility. He takes solace in his photography art work and is a loner at school with no friends and is by himself when he gets home. The story begins with… Read More
Go with the Flow
Book Review by Kevin Wolf In its own quiet way this graphic novel, Go with the Flow by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann, provides an excellent teaching tool. Though it’s mainly for middle and high school students, I highly recommend it for all ages, genders and orientations. This graphic novel’s actions are in real time with all dates lining up with the 2019-2020 school year. It’s about friendship, menstruation, bullying, frustration with school administration, fighting back, and taking responsibility. Go with the Flow revolves around four diverse characters Christine, Brit, and Abby, three friends from childhood, and the new… Read More
Wait, What? A Comic Book Guide to Relationships, Bodies, and Growing Up
Book Review by Kevin Wolf When I was a child, perhaps age 8 before my younger brother was born, my mother sat down to read me a book with the title Where Do Babies Come From? I don’t recall the author. It was a picture book. My mother wasn’t very comfortable talking about sex, and used this book to give me my sex education; I only remember the picture of a sperm finding an egg. There’s a new graphic sex education guide with five fictional adolescents (Rico, Malia, Max, Sam, & Alexis) talking “about everything.” The book is called Wait,… Read More
The Return of the Honey Buzzard by Aimée de Jongh
By Kevin Wolf This fictional graphic novel has the impact and realism of a non-fictional work about bullying, depression and suicide. The back cover indicates this work is Aimée de Jongh’s first graphic novel, though it’s a very mature work. The drawings are beautiful, showing scenes from nature, grade school, and adulthood. The story flows naturally with events surrounding Simon. He’s having trouble closing the multi-generational used bookstore he inherited from his father. The graphic work shows recent and past painful moments that he feels extreme guilt about observing but not preventing. Some scenes Simon lives and some are… Read More
Moose
Book Review by Kevin Wolf Moose is a tale of a bullied high school student, Joe. The story begins on a winter’s day outdoors with a slow zoom in on a house, a window, a child eating breakfast and not wanting to take the school bus. He’s consistently late for school because he refuses to take the bus and instead climbs a fence and trudges through a woods where he sometimes encounters a moose. The moose towers over Joe, but leaves him alone and walks away. Nature, and not among people, is where Joe feels most safe. I recommend this graphic… Read More
Sky in Stereo
Book Review by Kevin Wolf I recommend this black and white graphic novel which is narrated in the first person by Iris. Starting in 1989 Iris’ mom, Gina, becomes a Jehovah’s Witness. Gina’s live-in boyfriend is skeptical about the Witnesses. Iris initially joins her mother’s new belief system through supporting “evidence” in the apocalyptic messages in her childhood Narnia books by C.S. Lewis. Iris finds the Kingdom Hall meetings tame relative to the end-times that they’re supposed to be awaiting. Iris becomes frustrated in her teen years, flees the conservatism of her mom’s religion, and turns to illicit drugs to… Read More
Survive Manhwa Anatomy Series
review by Kevin Wolf Survive! Inside the Human Body Volumes 1: The Digestive System (ISBN 978-1593274719), 2: The Circulatory System (ISBN 978-1593274726), and 3: The Nervous System (ISBN (978-1593274733) written by Gomdori Co. (Seok-Young Song in actuality) and illustrated by Hyun-Dong Han and published by No Starch Press © 2013 English translation These books are translated from Korean and come from South Korea. The term for Korean comic books is Manhwa (pronounced man-wa). The characters show exaggerated emotions through facial and body expressions, sweat and salivating, and jumping around. Narration comes from a disembodied head of the character narrating. The… Read More
The Truth About Stacey
Special guest review by Kerri Sparling of the diabetes blog sixuntilme.com. Stacey McGill had diabetes and – holy islets – she was cool. She was one of the lead characters in Ann M. Martin’s The Baby-Sitters Club series, acting as treasurer of the club. You can go deep in this wiki, where Stacey is described as having “a very sophisticated style, which comes from having lived in New York. She loves wearing flashy clothes and jewelry and doing different things with her hair, which she keeps looking fabulous.” FABULOUS! Some of Stacey’s likes are cited: “babysitting, math, money, shopping, pigs, Mary Poppins,… Read More
New Podcast Wednesday: Joyce Brabner’s Keynote Address
Use the Quicktime player above to view images along with the audio. If you don’t have Quicktime, you can listen to the audio-only version below. This week’s podcast is the keynote address Joyce Brabner gave on July 23 at the 2012 Comics & Medicine conference in Toronto. She opens by describing her talk as, “What happens to us when we tell these stories.” Brabner then talks about some experiences in writing reportage comics, primarily about young victims of war and other atrocities. She talks about collaboration with her husband Harvey Pekar, and she talks about her role as “character Joyce.”… Read More
The Road to God Knows
awaiting GM review. Amazon blurb: ‘The road to god knows… is the story of Marie, a teenage girl coming to grips with her Mom’s schizophrenia. As a result, she’s struggling to grow up fast; wrestling with poverty, loneliness, and her Mom’s illness every step of the way. Betty, Marie’s Mom, can’t help; she’s living with an illness that’s slowly getting worse and increasingly frightening, and she just doesn’t have the resources left over at the end of the day to help Marie. With her Mom absorbed in her own problems, Marie is essentially alone while she learns to deal with… Read More