#BookBingoNW2019: Comics

Comics is a magical and mysterious medium that can fill one or all of your Book Bingo card squares this summer! It’s up to you!

Take a look at this recent staff booklist of Asian Pacific American Heritage Month Comics and Graphic Novels and maybe try out In Between, a collection of poetry comics by local creator Mita Mahato (and don’t forget to stop by the Ballard Branch where Mita will lead a graphic memoir workshop, Thursday, June 6^th @ 6pm).

For the hungry folks out there, maybe some Food-themed Comics & Manga is what you need in your life? Delicious in Dungeon (currently at 6 volumes of manga) is a dungeon-crawling adventure full of food, friends, and monsters (aka the food).

The Lambda Awards were just announced on June 3^rd, and the library has you covered with this list of finalists, including graphic novels. With On A Sunbeam, Tillie Walden (Spinning) interweaves a beautiful tale of moody space exploration, with an earthly recollection of two girls falling in love at boarding school.

If you’re a short story reader, then comics anthologies are for you! Puerto Rico Strong is a recent anthology published to support disaster relief and recovery in Puerto Rico in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria. With stories of survival, colonialism, diaspora, and science fiction by Puerto Rican comics creators, there’s something for everyone!

Looking for an experience that is more local and unique? Try visiting the Zapp Zine Collection at the Central Library to peruse or read a few of the over 30,000 self-published and small press zines and minicomics!

Browse the comics or graphic novels tags on our Shelf Talk blog for many more recommendations!

For more ideas for books to meet your Summer Book Bingo challenge, follow our Shelf Talk #BookBingoNW2019 series or check the hashtag #BookBingoNW2019 on social media. Need a Book Bingo card? Print one out here or pick one up at your Library. Book bingo is presented in partnership with Seattle Arts & Lectures.

~ posted by Mychal L.

OverDrive Comics and ‘The Best We Could Do’

The Seattle Public Library has physical comics for children, teens, and adults available for checkout in all of our 27 locations, as well as through our mobile services. We also have comics available through our Hoopla Digital service. But did you know, amongst all of the mysteries, memoirs, and literary fiction e-books, that we also have approximately 1,700 “comic and graphic works” in our OverDrive collection?! This collection includes popular kids comics like the Narwhal and Jelly series, relatable webcomics such as “Sarah’s Scribbles,” award winners like Kindred… and even the 2019 Seattle Reads selection The Best We Could Do by Thi Bui!

Narwhal’s Otter Friend: Narwhal and Jelly Series, Book 4 by Ben Clanton
This is the fourth book of the Narwhal and Jelly aquatic graphic novel adventure series for early readers! While Narwhal enthusiastically accepts newcomer Otter into the friend-pod, Jelly reacts somewhat jelly-ously… (Clanton, a local author, won the Washington State Book Award for the first book in this series.)

Food Comics and Manga

I’ve been reading a lot of food-focused manga and comics recently. Maybe I’m just a hungry person? I do like food, but really, while these manga and comics share the culinary theme they span some wildly different story-telling territory; from D&D-esque dungeon crawlers, to queer slice-of-life stories, to cooking competitions. Some of these stories even include actual recipes (though a few use fictional ingredients).

Delicious in Dungeon by Ryoko Kui
Follow a band of adventurers as they attempt to rescue a party-member from the dungeon’s infamous red dragon, but not before killing and cooking up other monsters along the way. You can try to make these recipes at home, but you’ll have a difficult time finding all of the ingredients…

Get Jiro! by Anthony Bourdain

Rick Riordan Presents

In early 2017, acclaimed author Rick Riordan, of Percy Jackson fame, announced he would be leading an imprint from Disney, with the goal of publishing “great books by middle grade authors from underrepresented cultures and backgrounds, to let them tell their own stories inspired by the mythology and folklore of their own heritage.”

He had been constantly asked by fans of Percy Jackson or the Kane Chronicles, “Will you ever write about Hindu mythology? What about Native American? What about Chinese?” Riordan could have easily written books about those topics, but instead decided to use his privilege to lift up the voices of those he could have just as easily overshadowed. Rick Riordan Presents leverages his position and experience to help put a spotlight on writers “who are actually from those cultures and know the mythologies better than I do. Let them tell their own stories, and I would do whatever I could to help those books find a wide audience.”

Thus far, two books have been released:

Aru Shah and the End of Time by Roshani Chokshi

Twelve-year-old Aru Shah lives with her archaeologist mom at the Museum of Ancient Indian Art and Culture in Atlanta. She hangs out in Spider-Man pjs, dreams of spending more time with her always-traveling mom, and really wants to impress her private school classmates. After lighting a supposedly cursed lamp in the museum, Aru frees an ancient demon whose job is to awaken the God of Destruction. People start freezing in place, and things don’t look great for Aru. Clearly in over her head, Aru must locate the other reincarnations of the legendary Pandava brothers, journey into the Kingdom of Death (& Costco), acquire some magical weapons, and eventually save the world!

Audiobook Narrator Spotlight: Robin Miles

Actor, audiobook director and performer Robin Miles has narrated hundreds of audiobooks. Miles has the ability to convincingly recreate a huge range of speech patterns and accents, conveying more about a character than comes across through their words alone. After an experience narrating the horror book The Good House by Tananarive Due, she realized she could leverage this ability to take on more audiobook work in the sci-fi, horror, and fantasy genres, whose stories typically require more range to portray a large diversity of character-types and voices. Robin Miles is now an industry legend, and a recent inductee of the Audible Narrator Hall of Fame. Here are a few titles read by Miles in the collection:

Barracoon by Zora Neale Hurston

In 1927 and 1931, author Zora Neale Hurston met and interviewed Cudjo Lewis, the last person alive who had been enslaved and transported from Africa as part of the Transatlantic Slave Trade. A Peak Pick!