Author: Penelope Gordon

A rich source of somewhat futuristic, quasi religious outfits for cosplay, Bleach by Tite Kubo is a popular Japanese manga.  While it doesn’t veer as widely between the intense and the juvenilely silly as does Naruto, it does share a fascination with overly endowed female fighters.  The central characters start as teens who refine their…

The Shonen Jump One Piece manga series by Eiichiro Oda is translated and publish in English by Viz Media.  The series has a dedicated English-language wiki.  Though created in Japan and possessing distinctly Japanese sensibilities, the characters and settings are for the most part definitely not Japanese.  As with many Japanese manga, characters not in…

Manga / Graphic Novel ‘name’ (nah-may) is the Japanese term for a storyboard, a rough sketch of a few manga (graphic novel) pages.  A storyboard is used to visualize describe a story proposal to editors and others involved in approving story concepts for creation and publication. A ‘gi’ is a martial arts uniform.  A ‘dojo’…

A predecessor of J.K. Rowling’s, Eva Ibbotson wrote 16 children’s books and 7 adult / young adult books.  Best known is The Secret of Platform 13 due its parallels with Rowling’s Harry Potter series (published three years later).  On the plus side, The Secret of Platform 13 features a strong, assertive heroine; on the minus…

Searching for Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede is a cheeky sequel to Dealing With Dragons (second book in the Enchanted Forest Chronicles series).  Princess Cimorene, who has found a way around the restrictions constraining princess behavior by providing service to Kazul, King of the Dragons, is paired with Mendanbar, who, as the King of the…

The Witches by Roald Dahl was not one of my favorite Dahl books; perhaps it was the physical overlap between the story’s evil witches and breast cancer and diabetes patients – the hero is told by his grandmother that witches (all evil; all female) wear wigs to hide their bald heads and cram their toeless…

Operation Bunny, book one in the Wings & Co. series written by Sally Gardner and illustrated by David Roberts is an amusing English take on a kid escaping a mean adoptive mother with the help of magical friends.  (The opening description of a suburban couple with a villa in Spain and garden topiary is a…

Dealing with Dragons by Patricia C. Wrede and performed by the Words Take Wing Repertory Company of Syracuse, New York was a very entertaining twist on the standard tale of knights, princesses, and dragons. In a fashion similar to Hamster Princess : Harriet the Invincible (by Ursula Vernon), Wrede’s princess has little patience for what’s…

Hamster Princess : Harriet the Invincible Volume 1 by Ursula Vernon is a great new series – even better in some respects than Vernon’s older Danny Dragonbreath series. Harriet has the brash bluntness of Danny but she’s a bit brighter and more independent – her sidekick is her trusty quail steed Mumfrey who, though brave…