Sunday, November 19, 2006

Book-A-Day #124 (11/17): Owly: The Way Home & The Bittersweet Summer by Andy Runton

Here I go: cheating again. I was running off to a convention (Philcon), so I threw the first two Owly books into my bag, to make sure I'd finish a book every day.

The Owly books are very sweet, nearly-wordless comics (the only words are on objects within the panels -- sometimes the words are necessary to the story, though) suitable for even very young readers. I intend to read them with and pass them on to my younger son, Thing 2, over the next few days.

This is the first book, which has two stories (the first about sixty pages, the latter roughly ninety) about a cute little owl. Owly is very sweet, and wants to be helpful and friendly, but other animals don't always believe him at first. The animals are very anthorpomorphized, but the art has a slightly rough, almost mini-comics feel, as if Runton were running the pages out just as fast as he can to get the story told. I found that gave the stories a lot of charm and life, but people who prefer a lot of "mature content" in their comics probably won't like this.

The Fabulous Book-A-Day Index!

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