These two books were both published as graphic novels for younger readers, by very different publishing houses – Owly comes from the small, quirky comics-oriented press Top Shelf, while The Arrival is a rare graphic novel from the childrens’ publishing juggernaut Scholastic – and they have interestingly different reasons for being wordless.

Owly is more obviously for kids; it’s drawn in a somewhat fussy comic-book approximation of a clean-lined animation style, with big eyes and heads on small bodies. The characters, with the possible exception of a friendly storekeeper, are all clearly meant to be kid-equivalents; this is a world like Arnold Lobel’s “Frog & Toad” stories where pseudo-children live on their own and deal with kid-sized issues themselves. It’s pretty obviously wordless so that even kids who can’t read yet can follow the story. (Talking about wordless comics can cause troubles with explaining just what “reading” means in a particular case – there are a lot of kids who can “read” the Owly books even though they can’t decode words in English yet.)

In the first three books, our main character, Owly, has made friends with a worm (Wormy – not Dave Trampier’s character, though), a snail, a butterfly, and what I think is a chipmunk (or maybe a field mouse). The stories are all about friendship: learning to trust each other and to make friends with creatures that you suspect might want to eat you. Since these characters are all in a sweet all-ages comics story, everything works out fine, but I do have to wonder about the lesson. (Or maybe this is exactly the lesson kids need right now, since they already get way too much of the opposite lesson: to hate and fear anything unexpected, strange, or different.)

In this book, creator Andy Runton introduces yet another character, an opossum. He, too, is scared of Owly – as an opossum should be; owls are serious predators, and real-world owls are probably the scariest, nastiest things these kind of small animals will ever know. (If Owly runs much longer, Runton’s reliance on the introduce-a-new-character-who’s-scared-of-Owly plot could cause trouble; it’s hard to have a large cast in a book where no one speaks or has names in the main story.) Everything works out well in the end, of course, though it gets a bit weepy along the way. Some kids who are physically able to follow this story might find it emotionally hard to take. But, if they’ve read the first three Owly books, they’ll be expecting the friendly, happy ending.

The Owly books do have some appeal to adults, particularly mushy, sappy adults who have young children (like myself). People who exclusively read mainstream comics would probably find Owly intensely sappy; I think it’s exceptionally sweet. I like Owly and his friends, and I want to see them happy. (more…)