Your Pal Fred by Michael Rex. Viking Books for Young Readers, 2022. 9780593206331. 272pp. Michael Rex (Fangbone!) has created a kid-friendly post-apocalyptic world full of slime cannons and mostly ridiculous weapons. (It’s kind of You Can’t Do That On Television meets classic The Road Warrior, though I know that dates me.) Two brothers, Pug and Plug, stumble into the ruins of a toy store and accidentally activate Fred, a fresh-faced robotic friend from a bygone age that is intent on spreading kindness and friendship. In quick succession Fred is taken prisoner twice and told he’s a subject of first Lord Bonkers and then Papa Mayhem. Fred gets free, but decides to visit each ruler and ask them to stop fighting over resources. (Fred’s new friend Wormy thinks it’s a crazy plan.) The ruins, costumes, and even the weapons are all very cartoony, and there’s very little sense of danger despite the dirt and the wreckage of our civilization. And guess what? Kindness wins the day. My favorite part: when Fred meets Lord Bonkers and gives him a gift, a tiny rock with a face on it. (Fred does voices for the rock. Lord Bonkers is not amused.)

The Great Zapfino by Mac Barnett and Marla Frazee. Beach Lane Books, 2022. 9781534411548. Circus performer The Great Zapfino climbs a 10-story ladder to jump into a tiny trampoline, but then decides not to make the leap. He runs for the airport and heads for a place that might be Florida instead. There he works as an elevator operator, but his circus skills do eventually come in handy. This is the most beautiful and stupendous black and white comic I’ve read in a while. Best part: the crowded elevator scenes. Take A Breath by Sujean Rim. Atheneum Books for Young Readers, 2022. 9781534492530 . Bob can’t quite fly like all the other red birds, despite practicing a lot. He kind of loses it, but then he meets the helpful Crow who teaches him to BREATHE. (This all helps Bob relax, and he feels great, and then guess what?) A beautiful little book abou slowing down that can even teach you how to relax when you’re nervous. (I’m giving this one to my wife to show her I am present sometimes.) Froodle by Antoinette Portis. Roaring Brook Press, 2014. 9781596439221. All the animals in the neighborhood make the sounds you’d expect until one day a little brown bird doesn’t peep. Crow isn’t happy, but can’t make the little bird stop. And then the silliness gets contagious. My favorite part was when I mis-read “Dove” as “Dave.” I laughed really hard. Oops. (My life is full of Daves.)      

I Eat Poop. A Dung Beetle Story by Mark Pett. Roaring Brook Press, 2021. 9781250785633. Dougie is the only dung beetle at his school, and he’s terrified the other bug kids will find out that he eats poop. So he ignores his former best friend Herman Housefly and pretends to be a regular beetle until one day the popular bugs want him to humiliate Herman because of his dining habits. (Don’t worry, it all ends well. It turns out each of the bugs has a secret.) Best part: all the poop-flavored products in the dung beetle household.       May I Have A Word? by Caron Levis with pictures by Andy Rash. Farrar Straus Giroux, 2017. 9780374348809. When refrigerator magnets gather to tell a story using words and pictures, K confronts C about stealing K’s sound. At the end of their argument, the two don’t want to stand next to each other anymore, which means all of the words containing “ck” can’t be spelled. Spoiler: K goes silent (and then gets together with N to form some words) before apologizing to C. Best part: All of the refrigerator drawings that look like they were drawn by kids with crayons.         A History of Underwear With Professor Chicken by Hannah Holt and Korwin Briggs. Roaring Brook Press, 2022. 9781250766496. After a lesson on invertebrates, Professor Chicken lectures about underwear from 3300 BCE to the present. The lesson includes examples from the Alps, ancient Egypt, early North America, Siberia, Europe, and China along with many from the U.S. There are questions for extra credit that give more information and ask readers to do a bit of thinking / reasoning / inferring, a selected bibliography, and a two-page grid-format underwear timeline that builds on the rest of the book. It’s as silly as it is educational.      

Yasmeen by Saif A. Ahmed (creator, writer) and Fabiana Mascolo (artist). Scout Comics, 2021. 9781949514698. This graphic novel opens with a few pages set south of Mosul, Iraq, where two young women are fleeing across the desert. Yasmeen was one of them and survived that journey and arrives in Iowa, in 2016, where she’s reunited with her family. Then there’s a flashback to June of 2014 where hear family was in the process of purchasing their dream home in Mosul. The book is the story of what happened to Yasmeen after ISIS forced her Shiite family to flee Mosul without her, of how she was to be the bride of an ISIS fighter before being forced into sexual slavery (from which she was escaping in the opening pages). It shows how she survived and it’s also about her trying to make a new home in the U.S., of finding new friends and trying to reconnect with her family. (Her parents and brother really seem to have no idea what happened to her, and her father especially seems to want to avoid the topic.) This was a tough read but I’m really glad I picked it up. There is quite a bit of violence but it’s less graphic than most R-rated films. There’s also trouble when Yasmeen helps a new friend, deals with a boy who calls her an ISIS bitch at school, and tells everyone the truth about what she went through. Worth noting: the cover, with its pale blue “cloud” of memories above Yasmeen’s head, made me suspect that she had superpowers of some kind. I’m glad that was wrong. I hope, if you add this to your library, you have some way to indicate (especially to readers like me who don’t like to read the back of a book first) that it’s a realistic story, whether by where it’s shelved or with a genre label of some kind.

Mister Miracle: The Great Escape by Varian Johnson and Daniel Isles. DC Graphic Novels for Young Adults, 2022. 9781779501257. 198pp. plus a short preview of the House of El graphic novel. Scott Free and his friends are students at Granny Goddess’s Goodness Academy on Apokolips, where they’re training to become foot soldiers in Darkseid’s army. Scott is a bit of an escape artist, and the only person to have ever escaped the X-Pit, a place near the planet’s core full of monsters and traps. Now he’s trying to help his friend and “family” and unlikely new girlfriend (the head of Granny’s Female Furies) escape to Earth, where he might take up superheroing and learn who his parents are. Standing in the way are Granny, Darkseid’s son Prince Kalibak, and all of the school’s security features. Even if you didn’t grow up reading Jack Kirby’s Fourth World / New Gods comics, you may have heard of a few of the relevant DC comics universe details about Darkseid and all in that Justice League movie. But I have to say this book probably works well enough for those who haven’t grown up reading about super heroes — it’s enough to know that Scott Free is a kid trying to escape a miserable military boarding school to save his friends and go to Earth where he hopes he can enjoy life a bit. It’s a fun reboot of a classic character, well written and illustrated. And there’s even a little Kirby krackle in these pages if you’re a fan and look for it.

Mr. Watson’s Chickens by Jarrett Dapier and Andrea Tsurumi. Chronicle, 2021. 9781452177144. Mr. Watson lives with Mr. Nelson and a sensible number of chickens: three. But soon there are more and more until they’re everywhere. Chickens are everywhere, and then Aunt Agnes leads the other chickens in a sing-a-long. It’s all too much for Mr. Nelson. This book’s level of love and fun and utter catastrophe (chickens everywhere!) make Tsurumi the perfect artist for it. (It’s kind of a spiritual cousin to their picture book Accident!) The Katha Chest by Radhiah Chowdhury, illustrated by Lavanya Naidu. Salaam Reads, 2021. 9781665903905. At her Nanu’s (grandmother’s) house, Asiya loves to explore the family’s kathas, quilts made out of old saris. As she explores the threads and the patterns she thinks about the stories of her aunts, uncles, grandmother, and mother. (These stories are wordless, four-panel narratives that feature the katha Asiya has unfolded on the previous page.) It’s a brilliant book, full of wonder and colors and patterns, the triumph of amazing lives and the sadness of difficult lives, too. According to the notes in the back, the patterns in the book were inspired by both the the author’s and illustrator’s families’ saris. The Journey by Francesca Sanna. Flying Eye Books, 2016. 9781909263994. This story of refugees fleeing their home because of a war is narrated by the family’s daughter. After her father dies, they flee to a safe place her mother has heard of — it sounds kind of magical. The picture of them packing, and leaving their pet cat behind, is heartbreaking, and there’s nothing magical about the journey which includes a wall, scary border guards, a sea that must be crossed, and more. (Spoiler: the jouney never ends, but it’s hopeful and beautiful because of the mother’s stories and Sanna’s illustrations.) Worth noting: Sanna’s later picture book, Me And My Fear, feels like a sequel of sorts to this book — it’s about a young girl at a new school where she doesn’t speak the language, and her fear, a creature that keeps her safe but also keeps her isolated.

Squid Happens (The Adventures of Team Pom) by Isabel Roxas. Flying Eye Books, 2021. 9781912497256. 96pp. In the opening pages, a giant squid takes refuge in a New York City storm drain pursued by two mice in a submarine. Elsewhere Ruby, Agnes, and Roberta rush to an interborough synchronized swimming conference. The story has bunnies, glitter, pigeons, and a tragically misunderstood swim routine that sets up what happens later in the book, which defied my expectations for a kids graphic novel in the best way while fulfilling exactly what it had set up. Roxas’s illustrations are great and this graphic novel’s colors are exceptional. Buy this book for your library’s children’s collection or your favorite kid, and check out the sequel, The Last Dodo, when it coms out in October 2022.

Radium Girls by Cy. English translation by Ivanka Hahnenberger. Iron Circus Comics, 2022. 9781945820991. 134pp. This graphic novel opens in 1918, with Gracey reporting for work and setting about to train Edna in how to paint watch faces using Undark, an expensive, glowing “color.” Unfortunately for both of them and the rest of the women who do the same work, this involves using their lips to smooth the brushes before dipping it in the paint and ingesting a little radium each time. When they go out to dance together, they glow a bit, and some of them even use the special paint to play practical jokes. When they’re warned by the scientist who invented the paint that they shouldn’t put the brushes to their lips, others deny that it’s dangerous. But then they start getting sick and dying and by the time they realize the truth it’s too late. (Their lawsuit led to the establishment of industrial and occupational safety standards, and the creation of the OSHA.) The book is based in part on The Radium Girls: The Dark Story of America’s Shining Women by Kate Moore. Cy brings the story of these women to life with a limited color palette using colored pencils, and the green of the radium glows amidst the dark purple throughout. This is one of the most stunning graphic novels I’ve seen in a long time.

Clementine Book 1 by Tillie Walden. Grey tones by Cliff Rathburn. Skybound Comet / Image, 2022. 9781534321281. 256pp. Set in the world of The Walking Dead, Tillie Walden’s new graphic novel centers on Clementine, a seventeen-year-old who has been through some serious shit in the seven years after the zombie apocalypse. She’s hardly willing to accept help, though she does get some from a dentist turned prosthetist in an Amish community where her brief visit is quite the topic of conversation. She leaves as soon as she is able to and meets Amos, a young man heading to Vermont as part of his Rumspringa. He hopes to help build a homestead on a mountain peak there, and maybe to fly in an airplane. Clementine sees him as too naive and nice to handle the realities of life in the wider world, and they end up traveling together. In Vermont they become part of what seems like it will be an ill-fated attempt to build a mountain settlement, helping twins who refuse to give their names (the group calls them Left and Right) and Ricca, whose eyesight is failing. Things are always about to go wrong (and many things do), but Clementine has clearly made a few friends and, despite how that has gone for her in the past, it was more than enough hope to carry me through this book, which offers so much more than most zombie novels and graphic novels. (Walden’s other graphic novels are all amazing too!)