Backyard Bug Battle

January 1, 2007
Gr 2-5-These books vary greatly in their ability to embrace the tools and conventions of sequential art. "Bug" is the less successful of the two. Slim in scope and in substance, although certainly wryly amusing in a slightly predictable manner, it has little to indicate that it is anything other than a picture book. Having characters speak with word balloons and having multiple images on a single page does not constitute a graphic novel, and this book will do little to establish or encourage the visual skills that proponents of the format espouse. A pleasant if innocuous tale, it seems to be called a "graphic novel" for the purposes of hype only. In the second title, fourth-grader Tiger Moth, self-proclaimed ninja and superhero, has to discover who stole a valuable painting from his elementary school. Multiple puns and the trappings of multiple genres are all tossed at readers so that there is at least a goodly potential of some of them finding a receptive audience. Clever, and with a solid moral about assumptions and good intentions, the book exhibits the basic visual literacies of graphic literature."Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, MA"

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