This post is the first in a series of three.

This year's Eisner Award nominations came out on May 15, and my most recent post here listed the nominees in categories that especially interest me, in particular those for young readers' books: Early Readers, Kids, and Teens. Since then, I've been scrounging books from the LA Public Library in hopes of reading all the nominees in those three categories before the (gulp!) June 5 deadline for voting.

Below are this year's nominated books for Teens. This is a fantastic list! Clicking on a book's title will take you to a publisher's informational page about the book. At the end of this post, I'll discuss which book I'm most likely to vote for (or at least the ones I'm having trouble choosing between!). 

Ash’s Cabin, by Jen Wang  (First Second/Macmillan) 
In this morally complex fable for living under the climate crisis, Ash, a disaffected fifteen-year-old fed up with human inertia and corruption, hikes into California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest in hopes of locating a secret cabin built by their late grandfather and staying there forever. Sympathetic, shaded, and beautifully drawn, Ash’s Cabin refuses simplicity and asks to be reread again and again. I found myself, first, chiding Ash for their stubbornness, but then rooting for them: a confounding experience that forced me to check my own moralisms at the door. Reviewed here on 12/05/2024. This made my best-of-2024 list for The Comics Journal.

Big Jim and the White Boy, by David F. Walker and Marcus Kwame Anderson, color by Isabell Struble  (Ten Speed)
This is not so much a retelling of Huckleberry Finn as an adventure story intertwined with Twain’s novel: a reimagining of the characters Jim and Huck, their origins, and their relationship. Framed by sequences of the aged Jim and Huck sharing their story during the Depression, and then again by the reflections of a 21st-century descendant, Big Jim depicts the traveling pair as Underground Railroad agents and soldiers against slavery whose long-buried history must be told. It’s a statement about how history gets made, and remade — suspenseful, complex in its sympathies, and bittersweet. The visual storytelling is expert and absorbing.

The Deep Dark, by Molly Knox Ostertag (Scholastic)
This magic-realist novel charts a slowburn romance between two young women: Nessa, bright, determined, and transfem, and her childhood friend Magdalena (Mags), now elusive and withdrawn, whose family harbors a frightful secret. Nessa comes back to town hoping to reconnect, but Mags can’t embrace the opportunity; something in (literally) her cellar is eating at her. This is by far Ostertag’s best-written, most persuasive book — to me, the only one that doesn’t feel rushed. She writes deftly about race, culture, and gender, and conjures a beautiful Mojave Desert setting. The two leads are wholly convincing, the cartooning gorgeous. A new classic.

The Gulf, by Adam de Souza (Tundra Books)
Thematically parallel to Ash’s Cabin, yet tonally and aesthetically very different, this Canadian GN follows a group of runaway high-schoolers who escape to a rustic island. There they hope to join a commune and opt out of social expectations and the heartless grind of capitalism. One of them, Olivia — impulsive, at times furious, and complex — is the story’s driver, but all the characters are well realized. De Souza captures their confusion, cluelessness, and changeability so well that I sometimes wanted to shake them! I love De Souza’s scratchy cartooning, artfully limited color palette, and powerful sense of environment and space. 

Lunar New Year Love Story, by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham (First Second/Macmillan)
This winsome romcom, another structurally ingenious graphic novel written by Gene Yang, is sumptuously drawn by LeUyen Pham, whose Vietnamese heritage informs the book’s choice of protagonist and depiction of diverse Asian American communities. The plot is rigged: a young Vietnamese American woman, Valentina, traumatized by the revelation of family secrets, rejects the once-loved rituals of Valentine’s Day (her namesake) and swears off romance. However, connections made through the joyful practice of lion dance test her resolve. The story is typically charming, though daubed with Yang’s usual darkness, and the hoped-for climax arrives by unconventional means. A robust, delightful collaboration.

Out of Left Field, by Jonah Newman (Andrews McMeel)
In this frank coming-out story, a nerdy high schooler goes out for his school’s baseball team while closeting his gayness. Newman charts the anxious social maneuvering of teens with secrets while evoking adolescent homophobia (including internalized homophobia) in a sharp and knowing way. The story skirts cliché, with an open-ended denouement that does not quite exonerate its morally confused protagonist but foretells an out and happy future. The depiction of teen sex (and sex talk) startled me with its openness, though the visuals are not explicit. Alas, Newman’s cartooning feels bland and sterile, and is no match for his writing.

​Final notes: This is such a hard category to choose from — an excellent list of books! I was glad to read every one of them. I came in with a bias toward Ash's Cabin (Jen Wang's best book, IMO), but in the last week have read two or three others that I'd be almost equally likely to vote for. At the moment, I'm divided between Ash's Cabin and The Deep Dark (a new high for Molly Knox Ostertag). Big Jim is going to be remembered as a landmark book, rightly so, and The Gulf is a tremendous feat of cartooning.

The above books are affirming, progressive, and either explicitly or implicitly political, yet also complex, layered, and unpredictable. Several are challenging in ways that "adult" graphic novels usually don't manage. Most are splendidly designed and graphic beautiful. One hell of a ballot.

Wish me luck as I race against time to finish reading all the Early Reader and Kid nominees!

Gotta admit, I spent a good part of Ash's Cabin waiting for its protagonist, Ash, to "come to their senses." For a while, I was less a sympathetic reader than a fretful parent, waiting for his wayward child to realize the error of their ways. This kneejerk response of mine had the effect of, not exactly blunting, but complicating my interaction with the book. In fact, Ash is not depicted as senseless, unreasoning, or in error, but their story challenged my preconceptions. It's quietly radical and, true to form for author Jen Wang, beautifully told.

Ash, an alienated fifteen-year-old from a complex Chinese American family, is working through a tense transition. They are implicitly trans or nonbinary (resistant to labeling, certainly), also lonesome and inward-turning, mindful and resourceful, and strong of will. Repulsed by the routinized world around them, Ash plans to withdraw into the wilderness: to hike into California's Shasta-Trinity National Forest and find a secret cabin built by their late grandfather, in hopes of staying there "forever." Ash perhaps has a touch of Greta Thunberg about them, but strikes me as not so much an outward-looking activist as a lost soul seeking a Walden-like retreat from everyday compromise. Lost, but determined.

It seems fair to assume (in a YA book like this) that the protagonist will come to realize that they need community, their quest for beatific isolation will fail, and they will end up back in the bosom of family and schoolmates. And indeed (no spoiler here, I don't think) Ash's Cabin does trace that sort of arc. Yet it's not predictable. To Wang's credit, the desires and values that drive Ash into the wild are never dashed or scolded away. What Ash stands for is never dismissed as naive or impossible. Although Ash's quest resolves in a way that they do not expect, it is transformative. That's why I call it radical.

It may come as no surprise that even during the loneliest parts of Ash's journey, the most telling scenes are those that depict social encounters, interdependence, and the process of getting and giving help. Even in the wild, Ash is never quite alone, and of course they eventually realize this. Though the novel focuses resolutely on Ash (and their loving dog Chase), and Wang devotes many pages to the  fascinating details of wilderness survival (sheltering, foraging, fishing, improvising), what sticks with me are the vivid characters and the connections they make. The same sensitivity and social acuteness that distinguish Wang's Stargazing and The Prince and the Dressmaker (the first book I ever reviewed on this blog) are abundantly here. 

The book's gorgeous, open pages suggest a journal — essentially, this is Ash's survival diary, even before they enter the wild. There is an uncluttered airy quality about the spreads, which are less packed, or more loosely joined, than in Wang's previous books (even Stargazing, with its open spaces). Lovingly drawn with mechanical pencil, ballpoint pen, and watercolor, Ash's Cabin often seems like Ash's own fugitive handiwork. Ash moves freely through the layouts, as they move through and explore the world. Wang excels at scenes of research and handiwork, and Ash does plenty of both. They are a character we get to know through their doing: dogged, brave, brilliant, often alone. Much of the book involves getting ready to do things, then learning to do things differently when push comes to shove. In a way, the book is a record of mistakes, missteps, and losses — and yet not. Ash has integrity and never stops living intently. They never stop risking everything, so the story's ending doesn't register as defeat.  

Thematically, I think Ash's Cabin ​could pair interestingly with Kengo Kurimoto's Wildful (reviewed here recently), a fable about biophily as a salve for grief, or with Jonathan Case's Little Monarchs (reviewed here in June 2023), a postapocalyptic environmentalist adventure. I'd even put it alongside Miyazaki's classic Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind (in its extended manga version), a work that wavers between humanism and misanthropy and whose naturalist-hero faces a similarly impossible set of choices. (Just thinking about these connections makes me want to design another syllabus!)

This is a great book, full stop.

Wildful is a beautiful graphic novel about getting yourself lost in the woods. Or, I'd say, about deep ecology, immersion in the environment, and biophily. It at once takes a posthumanist view (avoiding anthropocentrism and decentering human ego) and yet argues a deeply humanist viewpoint, that losing ourselves in the Wild is a way of recovering our best selves. Specifically, it's a book about biophilia as a salve for grief. It is a sparsely dialogued, in fact mostly wordless book in landscape format (for wide vistas), toned in warm sepia, and drawn naturalistically rather than cartoonishly.

​I hadn't known about the author, Kengo Kurimoto, til I picked up this book on a whim at my local library. Kurimoto is a game designer (LittleBigPlanet; Dreams) and animator, and Wildful is his first graphic novel. Its organic look differs from the obviously digital artwork that tends to dominate his website (though if you dig deeply enough, you'll find analog as well as digital treasures there, in plenty). Kurimoto highly values unmediated sensorial experience and close, patient observation, and he prioritizes drawing from life rather than using cartoon schemata. In Wildful, the results are rather stunning. This is a book about patiently, patiently, observing the natural world and finding yourself changed in the process. 

The plot, in outline, is simplicity itself: A young girl named Poppy and her dog Pepper accidentally discover the wild woods behind their house, where they meet a new friend, Rob, whose loving, unhurried appreciation of the environment rubs off on them. Over the course of several days hanging out with Rob, Poppy begins to notice and question more, and to luxuriate in her surroundings. She comes to experience the natural world more deeply. Poppy longs to bring her Mum out to the woods with her, but Mum, who is still grieving the loss of her own mother, is depressed, withdrawn, and housebound. The book's resolution brings Mum out of the house and involves an overnight kip in the woods. 

The story is that basic. There are four characters: three humans, one dog. We don't learn much about the circumstantial details of their lives. We come to know very little of Poppy's family or backstory, and next to nothing about Rob's other than the fact that he finds solace in the woods. What matters is the process of their shared discoveries and the adventure in perception and empathy that they undergo. On the level of paraphrasable content, or abstracted themes, Wildful is, again, simple, or it's the kind of thing we are tempted to call simple — but as an experience, it's stunning.

You owe it to yourself to experience this.

Paul Bunyan: The Invention of an American Legend is another TOON Graphic that juxtaposes a compelling comic with carefully curated (front and back) editorial matter. In this case, the introduction and back matter are not just instructive supplements but pointed rejoinders to the comic, and essential to the book's overall effect. Noah Van Sciver's comic takes up 36 of the book's 52 pages, but the remaining pages are emphatically not filler. What we have here is a package that both burnishes and yet undermines the "legend" of the faux-folkloric lumberjack, Paul Bunyan, with Van Sciver casting a skeptical eye on how the legend was promulgated while the other features remind us of what the legend hides. It's a great and startling project. I wish it had been among the Kids nominees for this year's Eisners, and was glad to see it among the finalists for this year's Excellence in Graphic Literature Awards (which is what reminded me to write about it here).

Noah Van Sciver has become one of my favorite cartoonists. He is a terrific humorist and memoirist (his hilarious autobio comic, Maple Terrace, was one of my favorites from last year). What's more, he is one of the US's best and most prolific creators of historical and biographical comics (his brave book Joseph Smith and the Mormons is just the iceberg's tip). Paul Bunyan feels like it's right in his wheelhouse. The story, a fiction inspired by fact, takes place in Minnesota in 1914 on a westbound train, as lumber industry ad man William Laughead regales his fellow passengers with yarns about Paul Bunyan, "the best jack there ever was" and the epitome of the industry's clear-cutting zeal. Laughead's crazy, mythmaking anecdotes have the zestful absurdity of tall tales, and Van Sciver knows how appealing such tales can be. A shameless fabulist, Laughead imagines Bunyan as an unstoppable giant-sized version of himself. He meets challenges posed by skeptical listeners with a game face and ever-escalating bunkum. Van Sciver portrays him as folksy, funny, a bit desperate, and basically a shill. More critical perspectives are provided by other characters, especially a disillusioned lumber industry vet. The art is lively and joyous, but also insinuating, and the textures (drawn in ink but then colored digitally) are trademark Van Sciver. This is beautifully organic and readable cartooning. 

You could say that this is Van Sciver's project (the indicia assigns the copyright to him and TOON), but the elements provided by other creators are vital. Those elements, from Native writers and artists, decry the "seizure of homeland" and environmental devastation spurred by America's rapacious lumber industry, and champion forms of history and knowledge obscured by the aggressive expansionism of the Bunyan myth. Lee Francis IV (Pueblo of Laguna), well-known as an advocate for Native comics, provides a wisely ambivalent introduction. Deondre Smiles (Leech Lake Band of Ojibwe), critical geographer and academic, supplies an informative and well-illustrated essayistic postscript about the links among colonization, land theft, and deforestation. Marlena Myles (Spirit Lake Dakota), a multidisciplinary artist, provides essays, a bilingual, Dakota and English map, and strikingly stylized illustrations and endpapers. There is a meeting of talents and perspectives here that suggests careful project management (by editor Tucker Stone and editorial director and book designer Françoise Mouly). The whole definitely exceeds the sum of its parts. 

Paul Bunyan is the kind of project I've come to expect from TOON: distinctly individual, yet collaborative; personal, yet proactively curated by an expert editorial team. More than further proof of Van Sciver's historical imagination and cartooning chops, it's a multifaceted group effort, the kind that is needed when you're demythologizing and debunking an entrenched bit of Americana. It's a short read, but excellent, and I find myself paging through again and again with admiration.

This post comes belatedly and is not much more than a mash note. A few days ago, I called the Eisner Award-nominated Little Monarchs, by Jonathan Case, "an extraordinary piece of worldmaking, ... dense, involving, subtle, and beautiful." I stand by that. It is one of the best graphic books for readers of any age I've read in a while (and I've been reading a lot of good ones lately, now that school is out).

I dove into Little Monarchs hurriedly, without doing my usual obsessive reading of paratexts, indicia, and so on (I'm usually a bit compulsive about how I crack open books that are new to me). I had the book out from my local branch of LAPL and was bingeing before casting my annual Eisner votes, so I was rushing. I hadn't even read the jacket copy. So, it wasn't until I finished the first of the book's dozen chapters that I began to realize that the story was set in a world I did not quite recognize, or a changed version of our world where something had gone wrong (I overlooked a detail given on the first page: that the date is 2101). In fact, Little Monarchs is a post-apocalyptic survival story, though officially a middle-grade (ages 8-12) sort of book. In it, a ten-year-old girl, Elvie, and her guardian, a forty-something biologist named Flora, drive through a drastically depopulated North America in which most people dwell underground, unable to travel safely in sunlight. Elvie and Flora mostly avoid encounters with these "deepers," preferring to go it alone. They dread attacks by "marauders," that is, scavengers who would pirate their stuff.

So, the world of Little Monarchs is different. In it, about fifty years have passed since a "sun shift" has killed off most mammal life. Prolonged exposure to direct sunlight (more than a few minutes) can be fatal. Most human survivors are socked away in underground bunkers, and only a few crepuscular or nocturnal mammals, such as bats, can hope to survive. Flora and Elvie are able to live topside because Flora has developed a medicine that keeps them safe from "sun sickness" for up to about a day and a half at a time. The medicine derives from the milkweed within monarch butterflies, so Flora and Elvie follow the yearly path of the monarchs' migration, catching butterflies, harvesting scales from their wings, releasing them, and creating ever more batches of meds. At the same time, Flora seeks a more permanent solution in the form of a heritable vaccine. Little Monarchs, then, is the story of an never-ending road trip and a scientific quest.

Remarkably, this survival story reads less like horror and more like an adventure. That has everything to do with the character of Elvie, a Black girl who is resourceful, eagle-eyed, courageous, decent, and funny. Elvie explores and improvises and above all uses her head. She can face down her fears and make do when disaster strikes. The heart of Little Monsters is the bond between Elvie and Flora, her White caregiver, who is something like a mom, big sister, tutor, and friend all at once, and whose quirks Elvie knows and forgives. You can believe that these two understand and love each other. The book gains heft from Elvie's journal entries: expository interludes that serve to orient the reader while showing off her smarts. These entries combine Elvie's home-school assignments (given by Flora), drawings, reflections, and tips. Elvie knows how to live in the wild world Jonathan Case has imagined, and her entries impart a great deal of knowledge. Case has mapped her story onto real locations, using real geographic coordinates, and included a wealth of fascinating detail about everything from knot tying to the monarchs' life cycle. The story-world fits this girl to a tee, and vice versa. 

Little Monarchs takes interesting risks. As a survivalist story in a broken world, it delves into the hard ethical questions that such scenarios tend to pose: What are you willing to do to survive? Do the ethical constraints of civil society apply when the world has been upended? Must you be willing to hurt others to protect yourself? The story kicks into gear when Elvie finds another, much younger child wandering in the sunlight and has to take him in, which leads to Elvie and Flora nervously weighing the risks of involvement with other people. At first, Flora seems somewhat mistrustful, even phobic, about taking that risk, but, as things turn out, she has good reason to be. There are reversals, betrayals, and shocks in the story. The last act depicts hard things — and Elvie has to do some hard things, too. Little Monarchs isn't The Road, of course (RIP to the brilliant Cormac McCarthy), but does ask its readers to weigh questions of ethics and risk in the face of grave danger. Somehow it does this and remains a thrilling adventure and credible middle-grade story about a plucky ten-year-old kid. 

And the visual artistry of it! Little Monarchs is a feast of lovely images made by hand, from the lettering to the gorgeous watercolors. Reading it against a backdrop of other recent graphic novels for young readers, even good ones, I was reminded of how seldom I get to see work at this scale that is handcrafted even down to its finest details. Case is a terrific comics artist, designing dynamic pages, drawing believable characters and environments, pacing and punctuating riveting sequences of high-stakes action as well as quiet scenes of discovery, and making every detail count. As I said a few days ago, he cartoons with an economy and grace that recall Alex Toth as well as latter-day classicists who have drunk from the same well: Jaime Hernandez, R. Kikuo Johnson, and Chris Samnee. His character designs, breakdowns, staging, and layouts are equal to his terrific writing. 

Little Monarchs urges engagement with the natural world and offers readers all sorts of potential adventures off the page as well as on. You could take this book on the road with you and learn a lot. More than anything, it is a classic quest story, pulled off with warmth, wit, and bravery, surprising and gutsy right up to its very last page. After reading so many well-intended moral and political fables for children in which messages are reliably delivered and conclusions are just what one would expect, I took delight in its splendid eccentricity. Highest recommendation!​