With February over, it’s easy to switch mental gears: it’s March! Time to put the African American history books back on the shelf and pull together a women’s history display! But black history and women’s history are integral and ongoing parts of everyone’s history, and should be consistently represented in our curriculum and discourse.

A new graphic novel called The Silence of Our Friends (First Second, January) sheds light on a little-known moment of the civil rights movement. Written by Mark Long and Jim Demonakos with art by Nate Powell, The Silence of Our Friends is based on Long’s childhood memories of 1968 Houston. At the crux of the story is the uneasy alliance between Long’s father, Jack, a white television reporter, and Larry Thompson, a black professor and activist at Texas Southern University. The two meet during Jack’s coverage of on-campus civil rights protests and warily begin a friendship, with each man unsure how much to trust the other. When the protests escalate into violence and five students are unfairly tried for manslaughter, Larry and Jack find themselves on opposite sides of the case, their relationship further strained.

Long and Demonakos show the volatile racial tension in thoughtfully selected vignettes. Mark’s sister comes home from school one day to find a flier promoting a K.K.K. rally on their doorknob. Larry’s daughter gets knocked from her bike by a truck of men shouting racial slurs. The Longs have altercations with friends and neighbors who angrily accuse them of fraternizing. Larry and his son go crabbing, but the bait store owner refuses to serve them. This tension never really abates — even at social gatherings — and the cost of crossing racial lines is high. The words of Martin Luther King Jr. (including the title quotation), segregationist George Wallace, and spirituals adopted by the civil rights movement weave through the narrative like refrains. Nate Powell’s nuanced art eloquently captures moments both poignant and lighthearted.

One especially effective scene portrays the introduction of the Thompson and the Long families. Mark Long writes in his author’s note, “It was as if aliens had landed in our front yard… I had never met a black person before. And I don’t think [Larry’s children Danny and CC] had ever played with white kids.” The children are understandably curious about their differences, but soon forget them in a group game. Sam & Dave’s “Soul Man” on the record player gets both families on their feet to dance.

SLJ has compiled a great list of graphic novels on black history for reading all year long — not just in February.

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Big Nate: Comix by U!

becomes this:

Seven characters are on offer (Nate, Gina, Francis, Jenny, Teddy, Mrs. Godfrey, and Spitsy the dog), each one in at least a few poses and two sizes, regular and close-up. Backgrounds include school, home, and park; various props and sound effects provide comic prompts, possibilities, and punctuation. Comics can be saved and shared; all of the available options mix and match with drag-drop ease, and they provide just enough structure for users intimidated by a blank canvas. Just what trouble can you get Nate into?

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Jaded as I am, however, I’m still puzzling over Charise Mericle Harper’s The Power of Cute (Random House/Robin Corey, October), an appropriately adorable picture book for preschoolers about a baby whose superpower shrinks monsters down to size so that they are as cute as it is. The book has sturdy square pages; it has spacious double-page spreads; it has flaps and foldout pages and dialogue balloons; it has sound effects (“AAHHH!!”, “ROAR ROAR ROAR”).

It’s also billed as “My Very First Graphic Novel”. Wait, what?

True, the protagonist’s wide-set eyes lend it a passing resemblance to an anime or manga character, and the monsters could be Uglydolls. But aren’t all picture books precursors to graphic novels? Maybe the publisher is going after the adults who have heard picture books are dead but think graphic novels are cool. Maybe the crisis in current picture book publishing can be averted! We just need a different label.

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Larkin’s fourteen-year-old ambitions and cynicism will wet the whistles of Wimpy Kid followers who’ve been yearning for more every-kid heroics since the publication last November of Diary of a Wimpy Kid: The Ugly Truth (Amulet). Though Larkin bears more than a passing resemblance to Kinney’s Greg Heffley, Accidental Genius is far from a wimpy addition to pubescent boys’ bookshelves.

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I grew up watching The Muppet Show and the Muppet movies with my family and I’m counting down the days until the movie opens, so I’ll admit I opened the books with the bar set high. Overall, I think the creators manage to capture the spirit of Jim Henson’s original characters and the tone of the Muppet productions.

The adaptations of literary classics (to date: Robin Hood, Peter Pan, King Arthur, Snow White, and Sherlock Holmes) are more successful than The Muppet Show Comic Book stories, which serve as enjoyable companions to the TV show. Sure, literary purists will scoff at the Electric Mayhem rock band portraying the Seven Dwarfs and the Great Gonzo as Sherlock Holmes, but those folks probably won’t pick up these books anyway. Muppet completists, on the other hand, will get a kick out of seeing old friends in these classic roles. The characters retain their own quirky personalities (e.g., Fozzie Bear’s sense of humor, Miss Piggy’s diva temper), humor, and Muppet-centric cultural references.

Most of the illustrators’ renderings of the characters are passable, but a note to Roger Langridge: your Kermit (left) looks like he was stretched on the rack, and the rest of the characters are also frightening versions of themselves. The texts would have benefitted from some fine-tuning, but the venture is one I’m glad BOOM! Kids (now Kaboom! as of February 21) has undertaken. Every book acknowledges The Muppets Studio, which adds an additional level of credibility. What stories should the Muppets and Boom! Kids/Kaboom! tackle next?

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What I’m really looking forward to is the Samuel L. Jackson–authored Cold Space. Starring Samuel L. Jackson Mulberry, “a wisecracking, butt-kicking, on-the-run-outlaw [who] crash lands on a hostile planet,” looks like it’ll be either awful or awesome. Knowing Samuel L. Jackson (of Snakes on a Plane fame/infamy), it’ll likely be a bit of both.

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First he was in my email (in a new Peta2 ad) and home snail mail (on the cover of Vanity Fair; my roommate exclaimed in dismay, “This is the last issue of my subscription?”). Then he was in the HB office with his memoir First Step 2 Forever — “includes free poster!”

The final straw? The biographical graphic novel Fame: Justin Bieber by Blue Water Comics, which arrived as a PDF preview in my HB inbox. As a non-”Belieber,” I can’t help but feel it’s a bit wasted on me. Now that I’m past my teenybopper heyday, here’s what I want to know: where was Fame: Leonardo DiCaprio when I needed it?

(There’s plenty more where that came from. The Fame series also includes bios of Lady Gaga, Taylor Swift, Beyonce, and the casts of Glee and Twilight.)

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Rick Riordan’s Percy Jackson and the Olympians: The Lightning Thief (adapted to the graphic novel format by Robert Venditti; art by Attila Futaki and color by Jose Villarrubia) introduces Percy, the half-human son of Poseidon, and the other inhabitants of Camp Half-Blood, a haven for young demi-gods. A feud between the gods provides Percy with the opportunity to prevent celestial war and make his distant father proud. Jackson devotees may miss omitted or compressed scenes (no Medusa in the Garden Gnome Emporium? Di immortales!), but the spirit of the original holds up well. The precise timing of panels lends extra oomph to punchlines and action scenes, while settings spanning multiple panels or full pages suggest the epic scale of Percy’s quest.

The first in Jonathan Stroud’s Bartimaeus series, The Amulet of Samarkand (adapted by Stroud and Andrew Donkin; art by Lee Sullivan and Nicolas Chapuis), follows magician’s apprentice Nathaniel and his unwilling djinni Bartimaeus as they try to stop an overthrow of magician-run Parliament. Readers may wonder who’s really in charge: ambitious but inexperienced Nathaniel, or cheeky Bartimaeus, who’s been around the block a few thousand times. This version suffers a little from the loss of Bartimaeus’s flippant footnotes, a prominent comic device in the novel. But the smart-aleck djinni still gets in plenty of verbal and visual cracks, maintaining the book’s balance of humor and danger.

Both adaptations seem better suited to an audience already familiar with the series than new readers, but fans will appreciate these new incarnations of favorite characters.

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