Friday, March 26, 2021

Guy Friday- Comics

Henry, Will. Wicked Epic Adventures: Another Wallace the Brave Collection
March 23rd 2021 by Andrews McMeel Publishing
Copy provided by the publisher

Amp! publishers so many great collections of comic strips; Wallace the Brave and Snug Harbor Stories are popular with my readers.  This strip debuted in 2015 and is now in over 100 papers. Daily strips can be seen at Go Comics. This latest collections not only has the strips, but instructions for building a pine cone bird feeder, happy rocks, and a papier mache mask. There is even a detachable pop-up card to make! 

A little quirkier than Peirce's Big Nate, more kidcentric than Harrell's Adam at Home, and as vaguely philosophical as Mutts, Wallace and his friends is a solid entry into the world of comics with young protagonists whose fathers could well have been Calvin (and Hobbes). 

Peirce, Lincoln. Big Nate: In Your Face
March 2nd 2021 by Andrews McMeel Publishing 
Copy provided by the publisher

I still think it is a terrible shame that students don't read the newspaper. I doubt that many of them have Go Comics bookmarked, although they really should. It also includes another one with great scenes at school, Frazz.  Reading the comics pages is a tiny little moment of being permanently ten years old. Big Nate has been around for 30 years, and always is a great deal of fun. The strips in this collection are from 9/5/16-2/25/17, and somehow, none of them seemed familiar to me. 

Big Nate is a staple of middle school libraries. The eight Big Nate Novels and the newer Max and the Midknights are essential to have, and if you have any collections of comic strips at all, you need as many of the 17 comic strip collections as you can afford. Follett has them in prebind, since frequent wear will reduce them quickly to piles of dust. The included poster always gets saved for whoever is the biggest Big Nate fan. 

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