Next week is Banned Books Week! This means now is your chance to take everything you learned in our 8-Week #ChallengedChallenge and use that knowledge to fight the good fight. Let every one know about why banning and challenging books is bad. Maybe even go to your local library or book store and find a…
We made it to Week 8! Yay! For our final Challenged Challenge book, we discuss Maus by Art Spiegelman. This Pulitzer Prize winning graphic novel is written about the author’s father’s experiences in a Polish Jew who survived the Holocaust. Obviously, the subject matter is brutal and is aimed at those who are mature enough…
Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi is our penultimate book in the ComicMix Challenged Challenge — and probably our favorite book of the bunch. This is a first hand account of Marjane’s childhood in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran. This graphic novel not only takes the roots of very serious current events issue and breaks it down so…
Learning, YAY! Last weekend, I was at LI-Con helping staff the Browncoats of NYC table. It was great fun and I met a ton of browncoats and other fandoms the two days I was there. At our meetup event, I got the chance to speak briefly about the Firefly comics from Dark Horse Comics. The…
Sidescrollers by Matthew Loux is about three boys who try to keep their friend from dating a football player who’s a total jerk. It was taken off a 9th grade OPTIONAL reading list because a parent thought the language and sexual content was inappropriate. We go kind of crazy over this. We’d like to explain,…
For week 5 of the ComicMix Challenged Challenge, we discuss Kim Dong Hwa’s graphic novel, The Color of Earth. Aside from the over use of flower metaphors, we loved the book. It’s about a Ehwa, a girl living in Korea with her widowed mom. The book deals with Ehwa growing up and so there’s talk…
It’s Week Four, which means we are at the half-way mark of the ComicMix Challenged Challenge. This week we take on The Graveyard Book Vol. 1, the graphic novel based on Neil Gaiman’s novel of the same name. This witty and compelling story was enhanced by P. Craig Russell’s graphic adaptation which includes amazing artwork…
For week #3 of the ComicMix Challenged Challenge, we discuss This One Summer by Jillian Tamaki & Mariko Tamaki. This Caldecott Medal winner was challenged because some over-conscended parents didn’t bother to read the book jacket, assumed this ages 12 & up recommended book was meant for their young readers. Duh! So, yeah, we talk…
It’s Week #2 of the Comic Mix Challenged Challenge! We talk about Drama by Raina Telgemeier, why some parents wanted to ban in school libraries, and why this drama over Drama isn’t about “sexual inappropriateness” it’s about homophobia. As middle schoolers (8th grade in the Fall, y’all) who are active in drama club, we break…
Welcome to Week 1 of the ComicMix Challenged Challenge, where we take a different book on the CBLDF’s list of the most challenged & banned comic books for young readers and we break down the reasons why it might be on the list. We also give it a quick review and discuss some of the…
It is officially summer for us! Yay! So, we thought this would be the perfect time to tell you about our summer reading plans. In this week’s episode, we tell you about the CBLDF and announce our Challenged Graphic Novel Reading Challenge. Our hope is that kids and parents (and everyone else) will read along…
You have to at least admire the resilience of Platinum Studios. Even as they’re raked over the coals for not paying the winner of a past Comic Book Challenge, they push ahead with the 2008 event. At the Comic Book Challenge Web site, they’ve announced the top 50 in this year’s competition, who will fight…
