Bill Willingham

Bill Willingham has spawned several great graphic novel series which takes various characters from fairy tales, myths, and folklore and puts them into New York and other Earth scenes.  With adult situations, these tales are best suited for adults and perhaps well-read mature teens. Fables Collected editions 1 – 22 (issues 1 – 150). Fairest…

Doreen Cronin

Doreen Cronin specializes in picture books with euphonious prose not afraid to include challenging vocabulary.  Dooby Dooby Moo is one of my favorite read-aloud books – featuring singing “Born to be Wild” in quack. Large format hardbacks, glossy pages, large serif font, one or two sentences per page. Duck Series Betsy Lewin is the illustrator…

Lindsey Leavitt

Going Vintage A modern Southern California teen (a junior in high school) goes retro (including no cell phone) in the wake of discovering that her boyfriend (her first steady) has been carrying on a (low-key, tame, but nevertheless emotionally invested) virtual affair.  She’s kind of OCD – she’s an inveterate list-maker – but is endearing. …

Mo Willems

Mo Willems is a writer (and illustrator) of picture books including the popular Pigeon series and a TV writer and animator including an early career stint for Sesame Street.  I picked up The Pigeon Finds a Hot Dog! on the recommendation of Daliyah Marie Arana.  (At the age of four, Daliyah had already read 1,000…

Assassination Classroom

The Assassination Classroom Japanese manga series by Yusei Matsui is quirkily endearing and only somewhat misogynistic.  The setting is a rigidly hierarchical, private Japanese junior (?) high school with Classroom E at the bottom of the pyramid.  Classroom E, the class for students with low grades and/or disciplinary problems, is physically segregated from the rest…

Hindu Epics and Near Eastern Fables

Rama Epic (See the Oct 2016 – Jan 2017 exhibit  “The Rama Epic : Hero, Heroine, Ally, Foe” at the Asian Art Museum.) Mahabharata Epic (See Fairest : The Return of the Maharajah in the Fables series for the character Nalayani.) This Hindu epic has multiple versions and interpretations. Draupadi is a main female character…

iZombie

Manga The iZombie Omnibus written by Chris Roberson, art by Michael Allred, and color by Laura Allred, collects all 28 issues of the iZombie manga series.  Though shelved in the adult section, this series doesn’t include sex, drugs, or non-monster related violence and would be fine down to tweenies.  The bad guys do get their…

Jack Frost

Jack Frost : The Amityville by JinHo Ko is a Korean manga series full of violent clashes set in a dystopian parallel universe.  Based on Volume 3, I don’t recommend the series: too much fighting and too little motivation and plot.  Aside from overly curvy, scantily dressed women; schoolgirl crotch shots; and S&M soft porn;…

Crescent Moon

Crescent Moon, a graphic novel series by Haruko Iida based on a story by Red Company / Takamura Matsuda, as represented by Volume 1 wasn’t very engaging.  Admittedly part of my issue with the story were flashback scenes: the tiny, loopy, serif font was literally difficult to read – especially when on low contrast grey…

iPhone App Backup and Recovery

Storage Management xx On the iPhone, navigate to ‘Settings’, ‘iTunes & App Store’.  Verify that the only slider in the ‘on’ position (green) for automatic downloads is ‘Updates’. Backup To iCloud 5GB of free storage for each iPhone is available on iCloud.  You can buy more storage.  App data is included in the backup.  Backups…