Audience Pick!

Title: The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl
Author: Barry Lyga
Category: Fiction, Young Adult
Rating: 3/5
Why I Read It: Because you told me to!

Summary: Fanboy gets picked on at school, he has only one friend who happens to be embarrassed by him, and his mom’s pregnant with his neanderthal stepdad’s kid. The only thing keeping him going is his dream of publishing his graphic novel, but then he meets Kyra, who turns his world upside down.

Review: I had fun reading about a kid who loves comics and graphic novels, since I’m just dipping my toes into that world now. And the climax of the story had me zipping through the pages to find out what would happen.

This part opened my eyes to the process of creating a comic book or graphic novel, which I never really thought about before:

This is actually the toughest part: not the writing or the drawing, but the lettering. Figuring out where to put the word balloons. Trying not to obscure too much art, or too much of anything important, at least. Making sure that the balloons are placed so that the dialogue flows naturally and leads the reader’s eye correctly. Prose writers have it easy: Everything starts in the upper-left-hand corner of the page and goes downhill from there. In a comic book, you start in the upper-left-hand corner, but from there you can go right, down, diagonal, whatever. You can have panel borders, or none. You can have word balloons that are connected, disconnected, broken. You can have characters speak from off-panel, or in voice-over captions. You have to decide if the words are important enough to cover up the artwork that’s telling half the story.

Overall, I enjoyed this story, but it didn’t stand out to me.

Borrow: Your local library | Swap
Buy: Your local bookstore | Powell’s | Amazon

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