Rating: WORTHY!
This was a cute, small format, and amusing little graphic collection of stories related to school. It's mostly an advertising flyer (or a sampler, if you like) for full length comics, but that's not a bad thing when you get an amusing story (at least amusing if you're middle grade or thereabouts!), and it's a good way to find comics that might interest and entertain you. Graphix is an imprint of Scholastic, and I have no affiliation with either, fyi!
There is less than seventy pages and eleven stories all told (so to speak!), so they're very short:
- Dream Jumper: Permanent Detention by Greg Grunberg, Lucas Turnbloom, Guy Major is a poor kid trapped in a dreamworld (or maybe a nightmare world...) of detention until he's busted out by a friend. It has a certain element of gross-out, but it's not too bad. Graphics and color are nice.
- Amulet Stonekeeper School by Kazu Kiribuishi is semi serious fantasy tale about kids with magical amulets. Who can ask for more?! Nicely drawn
- Bird & Squirrel by James Burks is about bird and squirrel - what did you expect?! Very stylistic illustration which might be useful for young kids to copy.
- Sunny Side Up by Jennifer L Holm and Matthew Holm is how I spent my summer kind of a story and it's a doozy. Artwork scrappy but effective.
- Space Dumplins by Craig Thompson features kids and aliens in a satellite school. Nice art.
- Twist and Pout by Jimmy Gownley is about a shy kid at a school dance. Simplistically, but nicely drawn.
- Newsprints by Ru Xu is about a first day at a new school and has great art.
- Nnewts (yes I spelled it right!) by Doug TenNapel is not so well illustrated but tells a fun tale of a school for...yep, you guessed it - newts! Talking newts. We've all been there.
- Cleopatra in Space by Mike Maihack. What more is there to say? Maybe that the art is quite good?
- The King of Kazoo by Norm Feuti is am amusingly and startlingly illustrated story of a strange people. Really intriguing art.
- Ghosts! by Raina Telgemeier is an intro to a new comic (or at least new at the time this was published) about a new girl at school who seems to be quite pleased that it's not haunted. But she could be mistaken.... Art is simply but not awful.
So all in all I think this is a fun read, and a chance to maybe find something you might like to follow on a longer-length more permanent basis. As such, I recommend it.
