It’s a hot week here in Portland, so we’re trying to hole up and stay cool. Good thing I have all these books and games in my basement! This week I’ve got a stack of comic books (and one not-quite-a-comic), mostly for kids and young adults.
Disclosure: I received copies of these books from the publisher for review. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and independent booksellers.
Barb and the Battle for Bailiwick by Daniel Rajai Abdo & Jason Linwood Patterson
This is the third book in the Barb the Last Berzerker series, and it wraps up at least this story arc about Witch Head and the Shadow Blade. In the previous book, Barb learned to summon the so-called Ghost Blade, but she’s not able to do it consistently (and the other Berzerkers who didn’t witness it for themselves still think it’s a myth). Witch Head managed to wound Barb, carrying her and the Shadow Blade off to his fortress, where he planned to use the sword to raise a shadow army to take over all of Bailiwick. The various characters from Barb’s life—her Berzerker family, the yetis and other monsters that she has befriended, and the team of Wise Wizards—finally come crashing together to face off against Witch Head, and we learn a surprising secret about him.
As with the other books in this series, there’s a lot of silly humor mixed in with some tender parent-child moments, plus some epic battle scenes (which also often involve silly humor). The ending leaves the door open for more Barb stories in the future, but it also serves as a nice ending for this trilogy of graphic novels.
The Last Comics on Earth by Max Brallier with Joshua Pruett, illustrated by Jay Cooper and Douglas Holgate
I’ve gotten a little behind in the Last Kids on Earth book series, but I enjoyed this little detour into comics. The framing story is that the kids have read all of the comics about Z-Man, a zombie superhero, but the last issue ended on a cliffhanger (before the real-world monsterpocalypse). So they decide that they’ll write the next issue, turning themselves into a team of superheroes. Despite their comic book alter egos being best friends, none of them know the others are superheroes, leading to very silly excuses as they dash off to fight bad guys. The book has “real-world” sections where the kids discuss how the comic is going to go, and then the comics that the kids themselves created.
Unfortunately, the kids are each busy trying to outdo each other, which is reflected in the comic they create, where their superheroes end up fighting each other more than the big bad guy. It’s kind of a classic comic book trope, of course, but with a lot more puns and random asides. The kids’ comic-book personalities and powers are all over-the-top and absurd, and of course in the end they finally manage to work together to save the world. This book doesn’t really advance the overall plot of the prose series, but is a fun extra.
When Dad’s Hair Took Off by Jörg Mühle (translated by Melody Shaw)
This is the book that’s not really a comic book, but it’s funny and quite cute and kind of defies categorization. It’s kind of a picture book, but it’s a smaller size and has more text than most picture books. In this story, narrated by a kid you never see, Dad’s hair decided one day to just … leave. After leaping off his head and escaping the bathroom, the hair heads to town, gets in everyone’s soup at a restaurant, hides out among the animals at the zoo, and eventually makes it to the ocean and then to parts unknown.
The book is delightful, with plenty of hair-related puns (I applaud Shaw for making all of Mühle’s clever wordplay work in translation!) and the illustrations are hilarious as Dad attempts to track down his hair and recapture it. The hair itself is represented by the little dashes, which means that it can disguise itself in various forms along the way. This doesn’t seem to be book that really has a lesson at the end—it’s just an exercise in absurdity that will make you laugh.
A First Time for Everything by Dan Santat
Dan Santat is a Caldecott-winning illustrator, but before that he was an awkward middle schooler who preferred being invisible to being bullied. A First Time for Everything is a comic book memoir about a class trip he took to Europe, where he started to open himself up to some new experiences. While the story has been fictionalized somewhat, it is based on things that actually happened to Santat—sneaking into Wimbledon, having beer, stealing a bike, and falling in love. It’s a sweet story about getting outside your comfort zone and figuring out who you are. (Side note: some of the characters speak in French and German, and I found it really handy to just point my phone at it so it could translate it for me—cool technology that definitely didn’t exist at the time the story itself takes place!)
Twistwood Tales by A.C. MacDonald
The comics in this book are mostly four-panel comic strips, though some of the stories last more than a single page. And although they’re often gags with a punchline at the end, there’s some continuity that threads throughout the book, with frequent callbacks to events that happened earlier. There’s a strange cast of characters living in these woods: Bucket Boy, who has to wear goggles or his head leaks out of his eyes; Loghead, with his deadpan observations about anxiety and depression; the plague doctor whose favorite treatment for any ailment is amputation; a little ghost girl who wears a bedsheet ghost costume so that people will be less afraid of her; and so many more. This book is delightfully weird and weirdly delightful. As a bonus activity, there’s an index in the back of tiny objects hidden in the tales that you can go back and search for.
Hex Americana by Bree D. Wolf
Ken is still learning to drive, but he has dreams of racing someday. Dante died 20 years ago while racing his rival in some treacherous caves, and has become a local legend. Then Ken—who has always been obsessed with stories of the Speed Demon—actually meets Dante, whose ghost is tied to the car, and they strike up a friendship. Dante can hold the car together with his ghost power but it takes too much of his focus to drive, so Ken is able to finally get him out of the cave … and onto the racetrack.
The story includes deep rivalries and secret betrayals, various characters struggling against the burdens of expectations, and a car with chicken legs. Oh, right: in this version of America, various monsters and ghouls live among humans, so there are vampires and mummies and witches, and Baba Yaga is Dante’s old driving coach. Ken and Dante also start to realize they want more than just a friendship, though there’s some things they have to figure out to make it work.
Roaming by Jillian Tamaki and Mariko Tamaki
Cousins Jillian and Mariko Tamaki are well-known for some of their earlier collaborations like This One Summer, and they’ve teamed up again for another coming-of-age story, this time for an older audience. While This One Summer was about two young teenage friends, Roaming follows the adventures of three first-year college students on a trip to New York City for spring break. Dani and Zoe have been friends for a long time and are looking forward to seeing each other again after being away for college, and Dani brought her classmate Fiona. (whom she doesn’t know really well).
Things quickly get a little tense: Fiona is fashionable and jaded and treats everything with a heavy dose of cynicism, which is a marked contrast from Dani’s enthusiasm for finally seeing the big city. Zoe finds her loyalties torn, wanting to enjoy the city with Dani but also being drawn to Fiona’s brashness. The book is less plot-driven, but focuses on the relationships and characters, with little vignettes about the three girls as they explore the city. The Tamakis are remarkable together, with dialogue that feels real and faces that are incredibly expressive with only a few lines and marks. It’s been a long time since I was in college, but this book really brings back the intensity of emotions at that time: feeling some uncertainty about the future, but also feeling so sure about other things.
My Current Stack
In between comics, I’m working my way through some novels as well. I recently finished Counterweight by Djuna, a Korean sci-fi novella about a space elevator, and Sucker by Daniel Hornsby, a send-up of tech start-up culture mashed up with vampires. Right now I’m reading The Book Eaters by Sunyi Dean, about some secretive families that literally eat books.
I’ve also been making my way through a couple different books about videogames—some about the consoles themselves, and some focused on the games. More on all of these soon!
