unadulterated.us

A greatness of graphic novels - Winter 2015

Locked down and blizzarded up, you need a dose of color, don't you? The kids are kind of eating each other and you're sick of telling them to get off YouTube. Time to hit the graphic novel section:

 

The Golden Compass Graphic Novel, Volume 1 (His Dark Materials)

"You're going to have to realllly convince me," I can hear famous curmudgeon Philip Pullman mutter as he surveys the latest in what I imagine must be a never-ending parade of proposals to adapt his 1995 masterpiece trilogy His Dark Materials into graphic novels. He probably imagined himself as Penelope at her loom, trying to wave off a crowd of greedy suitors. He's got a Classics turn of mind, does our Phil.

But I'd say that the old atheist let the right one slip the ring on. This art - patently Frenchy in its scritchy artiness - is specific enough to let the reader's personal mental images of Lyra, Pan, Lord Asrael and NOT NICOLE KIDMAN Mrs. Coulter persist. It hews extremely closely to the original text (it's going to have to be hella long), so first-time readers will be no more lost than the rest of us were at first. 

 

 

And the images of the College, the bogs, the gyptians' boats, and the glowing, faded sky of Lyra's England are beautiful. Panels are very small - there are often as many as a dozen per page - but the exterior scenes are extraordinarily full of light and air. Go ahead and click on that right-hand image to see it larger. Yum.

More after the break...

What just happened at the Newbery/Caldecott Awards

The ALA Youth Media Awards were just announced about an hour ago. These honors are awarded by committees of librarians who read, evaluate, and discuss approximately a femto-jillion books in a year and decide which book in a given category is THE BEST of the year and which few are THE RUNNERS UP.

I generally don't comment on these awards on this blog because, like any other award, calling any given anything THE BEST in a year is ridiculous. YOU ARE THE BEST TOMATO. WORLD'S BEST JOKE 2014 IS WHAT EDDIE IZZARD SAID ON TWITTER NOVEMBER 13th. THE AWARD FOR BEST LEFT BOOB OF 2015 GOES TO KATY PERRY'S LEFT BOOB.

 

I also have found these awards to be kind of stuck in the mud. Historical fiction or relationship drama tends to get recognized while funny books are disregarded. Lotta "girl books" have gotten the Newbery, while the Caldecott has gone to a disproportionate number of men. Creators of color are under-represented, as they are in all of children's publishing, except in the awards that are specifically given to African American or Latino authors and illustrators, which often go to the same squad of (very talented and totally deserving) people every year.

Put it this way - when an illustrated prose novel (The Invention of Hugo Cabret) won the Caldecott Medal one year everyone went, "WHOA!!" And when a nonfiction book (Good Masters! Sweet Ladies! Voices from a Medieval Village) won the Newbery people all gasped. This is what has passed for bold in previous years.

 

This year's awards are something else, though.