Graphic Novels for Young Kids

January 2007

We are big fans of graphic novels here. One of the first books that really captured Jason’s attention was the Bone series and Kyle has really enjoyed wordless graphic novels such as Owly and Corgi. Chicken Spaghetti (one of my favorite Child Lit bloggers) just tweeted a link to an article that focuses on graphic novels for the K-4 crowd from the School Library Journal.

These days, children’s book and comics publishers offer tons of graphic novels for young readers. In fact, now there are probably too many choices, which, of course, is a nice problem to have. To help you keep up with this explosion, I’ve selected the cream of the recent crop, focusing on titles that have often been overlooked. To make things more manageable, I’ve limited my list to graphic novels published within roughly the last 18 months. Also, I didn’t include established series, superb titles that aren’t stand-alones (sorry, Jellaby), and comics collections. But don’t worry. There are still loads of great choices left.

We have read a few books on this list, but I found a couple of more suggestions that we will definitely check out. Graphic novels (along with comic books) are wonderful for emerging readers, especially for right-brained kids. The visual aspects of the book help them formulate the picture of the story in their minds, which helps ease the process of translating the words. Not to mention that they are just plain fun.

I have a few of our favorite graphic novels listed on my Books We Love page and it looks like we should have a few more to add soon. Geesh. And I just placed an order with Amazon…