This week (Oct 5th – 11th) is Booktrust Children’s Book Week. a nationwide celebration of reading for pleasure for young people here in the UK. The theme this year is Words and Pictures. They’re focusing on picture books, which is awesome of course, but I want to talk about another type of visual storytelling — COMICS.

Over my next couple of posts (maybe!) I’m going to talk about some comics I’ve found that I think are brilliant, and that perhaps (if you haven’t seen them already!) you might, too…

If you like thrilling storytelling, one writer whose work you should definitely check out is Robert Kirkman. Where much of mainstream comics publishing in the US seems (a little weirdly, I sometimes think) to depend on reworkings of superhero stories first created up to sixty years ago (the Marvel universe, DC’s Superman and Batman, etc) Kirkman has made a name for himself by taking the radical step of starting awesome new stories from scratch.

Pick up any of Robert Kirkman’s books and you’re in for a treat. His surefooted command of pace and his light-touch but utterly effective characterisation feel effortless – which, as someone who knows exactly how hard those are to pull off, makes him a jaw-droppingly impressive author in my book! And the stories themselves? /Well/…

If werewolves are your thing, then The Astounding Wolf-Man is an absolute howl – fresh, fun, and fast as the swipe of a claw. You like zombies? The Walking Dead is a sort of zombie survival soap opera, epic and engrossing with an emphasis on ‘gross’ (I hear it’s soon to be turned into a tv series. Read it first, folks!) But my absolute favourite of Kirkman’s various ongoing projects is Invincible. It’s about a young man whose father is a superhero, and who begins to acquire superpowers of his own. It’s funny, it’s approachable, it’s unpretentious, it’s spectacular and you can read the whole of the very first issue for free, gratis, nothing on the website of Image Comics, here. (Hit the link, scroll down and you’ll find it on the bottom right hand corner of the page).

Next time, my current favourite MANGA. Snee hee hee!

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