Reading Rants! Out of the Ordinary Teen Booklists!

Ever wonder how we got here? How the Earth was formed, how we human beans popped into existence? There are several versions of the creation myth–you can take your pick when it comes to explaining how we emerged from the Great Black Void: Christian, Hindu, Egyptian, Norse, the list could go on and on. But my favorite has got to be that wacky Greek version, so recently made popular by former middle school teacher Rick Riordan. But forget Percy Jackson, he’s just some johnny-come-lately compared to the dude who made the lightning in the first place, the very first international playboy and rebellious teenager, Zeus. Artist and author George O’Connor provides readers with a crash course in the Greek creation myth, which basically consists of Mother Earth and Father Sky giving birth to some big nasty gods, including Kronos, who wants to keep all the temporal goodies for himself. So every time his wife has a baby, he swallows it so it can’t grow up to challenge him. Eventually his wife gets sick of giving up her babies for dinner, so she hides one. Zeus is raised in secret by hot nymphs (which will explain his later lady-killer ways) and tricks his father into swallowing a poison plant which makes him vomit up all Zeus’s sibs, now fully grown and totally pissed off! What happens next is the story of how Zeus claims his father’s throne with the help of his super sibs (more about them later) and gets the lightning that Percy’s gotta find in couple thousand years. O’Connor’s hyper-kinetic art is old school comic book illustration, full of action, energy and bursts of color. For those of you also interested in more than just a good celestial butt-kicking, there’s also a helpful Greek god family tree in the front and some fun extras in the back, including minor god and goddess profiles and some cool websites you might want to visit. For more Greek superhero action, pair this GN with the new and improved Clash of the Titans.

The crackerjack team of Hale, Hale & Hale are back with another rootin’ tootin’ graphic adventure of that wild girl Rapunzel and her trouble-making friends. This volume covers the back-story of ‘Punzie’s scheming sidekick, Jack. Before he met Rapunzel out west, Jack made his living swindling chumps in the big city with his partner Prudence, a stylish pixie with a serious attitude and an addiction to fancy hats. He was forced to skip town after a problematic beanstalk, a golden-egg laying goose and an angry giant named Blunderboar made it unsafe to return home to his hand-wringing, bakery-owning mama. After hightailing it west and meeting Rapunzel, Jack knows it’s time to head back home and make things right. Except in his absence, the fearsome giant Blunderboar has set up a corrupt shadow government and taken Jack’s mother prisoner in order to force her to bake his human-bone meal bread. Now Jack and Rapunzel must team up with Prudence and verbose muckraking journalist Frederick Sparksmith III to uncover Blunderboar’s citywide scheme and prove to the people once and for all what a, well, BOAR Blunderboar really is! All the while, Jack is trying to work up the courage to tell Rapunzel how he really feels about her. But will silver-tongued Frederick sway her heart instead? This action-packed sequel is every bit as entertaining as its predecessor, and then some. Jack’s big city, in contrast to Rapunzel’s Wild West, is a bustling technological marvel, which adds a little steam punk to the whole whimsical affair. The imaginative team of Hale to the 3rd power envisions their fantastical teeming urbanity as a magnet for diverse immigrants of every color and creed; from Native and African Americans to fairies and porcine half-men. Thanks to Nathan Hale’s meticulous attention to detail, each full color panel is a little work of art. This GN was so much fun that just writing this review makes me want to read it again! Batten down the hatches and tie up the dirigibles–this is one wild ride.

“We didn’t fully understand the reason our fathers were fighting. We only understood that they had to fight…We could only cross our fingers and wish on stars and hit refresh, refresh, hoping they would return to us.” Cody, Gordon and Josh all live in the same small town, and all have fathers who are fighting in Iraq. Even as they constantly refresh their computer screens waiting for word of their dads’ safe return, they try to distract themselves from their worry by engaging in their own “fight club,” where they hit each other as hard as they can in an attempt to honor their fathers’ sacrifice by denying their own pain. “If you stepped out of the ring, you lost. If you cried, you lost. If you got knocked out or if you yelled stop, you lost.” Each boy is taking his own emotional knocks, as well. Cody struggles to raise his little brother on his own while his mother works endless factory shifts in order to make ends meet. Gordon suffers at the hands of bullies and longs to use his hunting rifle for something other than shooting deer. Josh’s secret college acceptance letter is his ticket to a better life, but will he use it if it means leaving his best friends behind? One brutal confrontation takes away all choices but one, and suddenly the boys find themselves facing a future that was once improbable but now seems inevitable. This bleak and emotionally raw GN, based on a short story by Benjamin Percy, realistically captures the pain of modern reservists’ families, who are often left in limbo when their breadwinners are sent off to war. Danica Novgorodoff’s gritty unpolished style and earth tone palette help convey the boys’ hopelessness and sorrow, the only bright colors being the red of their boxing gloves and spilled blood. A violent and heartbreaking tale that didn’t leave me feeling any better about the situation in Iraq and Afghanistan, but maybe that was the point.