When Ida starts school in the fall, she's just one of many kids in Ms. Raymond's class who comes with an imaginary friend in tow. But by springtime, only Ida's Dotty—a huge, horned, spotted bovine creature—is left; everyone else has moved on. "You don't still HAVE her, do you?" asks Katya, flaunting her newfound maturity (this is the same Katya who at one time had a imaginary spiderlike creature named Keekoo that liked swinging on her braids). Perl's (Chicken Butt!) brisk, reportorial prose allows her to be sympathetic to her holdout heroine without over-romanticizing her or discounting the progress of her peers. Denos's (My Little Girl) paintings are an unadulterated delight, combining the naïf styling of scribbly children's drawings for the creatures and the easy, playful elegance of pattern book illustrations from the 1950s. But the ending, which reveals that the pretty, poised Ms. Raymond still has an imaginary friend of her own, may divide readers struggling with their own maturation. Does that make her cool—or a case of arrested development? Ages 4–8. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

This would be an unsettling story if Murphy's (Baby Polar) heroine, a plucky girl in a polka-dot nightgown, weren't so comically sure of defeating the icy-fingered Cold Water Witch. Hovering over the girl's bed and dressed in a splendid white gown, the witch extends her bony fingers and says, "Come with me to where the waters run cold. Come with me to where the world is covered in snow." But the girl isn't having any of it: "You'll have to drag me," she replies. In a clever twist on Gretel's oven gambit, the girl tricks the witch into entering the icebox without her ("I smell coconut. I hear waves. Are you sure you're sending me to the frozen land?" she asks innocently), then discovers that the witch is actually a girl under a spell. Lintern's (The Tooth Fairy Meets El Ratón Perez) spreads glow with cold light, like computer screens; their flat, cartoon feel is well suited to Murphy's eerie premise, though the pastel palette keeps things from getting too dark. It's a crooked, tense tale, but a satisfying battle of wits. Ages 4–7. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

A consummate bedtime read, Martin's story circles around a single question: "Where," a moon-obsessed girl named Luna wonders, "does the Moon go all day?" Martin's prose dwells on soothing, soporific imagery ("Perhaps the Moon slips softly into the ocean during the day") and slips in lots of sound words ("Whoosh... wash, whoosh... wash went the waves"), while Latyk's spreads show Luna on dreamy excursions underwater in a bulgy little bathysphere, a balloon journey over snow-capped mountains, and a rocket trip that leads her all the way to the Moon. Martin, an editor at Templar, wrote this book as a vehicle for the work of French artist Latyk. His retro spreads feature the flat, graphic figures and slick surfaces of '60s commercial art, but his palette of Prussian blue, robin's egg, and pale orange softens the mix, while the eerie moonlight that bathes objects in its reflected glow adds depth. "I'm always here in space, watching over you," the Moon tells Luna fondly. It's just the thing for a read-aloud after a long, busy day. Ages 4–7. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Tippy Toes is an orange cat with expressive lime-green eyes and a penchant for exploration. Gentle rhymes speculate on Tippy's self-assured movements, as die-cut pages and flaps reveal his daily (and nightly) activities. A nervous mouse in a hole knows "the soft pit pat.../ of Tippy Toes's step on his welcome mat," and when Tippy steps out for his nocturnal adventures, his zingy eyes blend in with a sky full of fireflies. Sometimes Tippy's "purring snore" gives him away, as when he sleeps in a messy dresser drawer, unveiled behind a large flap, and sometimes it's the tracks he leaves behind: "And everyone knows, but they don't know why,/ he tippy toed through the blueberry pie!" Lewin's (Click, Clack, Moo: Cows that Type) smudgy watercolors—traced with bold, chalky outlines—convey Tippy's ever-inquisitive but lovable feline nature, as he trades his nighttime wanderings to curl up with a sleeping boy beneath a starry blanket: "No, nobody knows where Tippy Toes creeps/ when darkness falls and the whole world sleeps... except me." Readers fascinated by the lives of their pets should welcome this tender offering. Ages 3–7. (July)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 07/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Newcomer Teague debuts with a story about Franklin, a boy whose bedtime is repeatedly interrupted by the arrival of workmen with sheaves of plans, followed by gigantic planes and trains that roar through and quickly disappear (and that look suspiciously like the toys in his room). Franklin is remarkably cool about it all, though he's left lonely after the action dies down. By the time an ocean liner sails through a canal hastily dug through his room, he knows who he'll see on it ("Leaning against the bow rail was a kid whose ears stuck out in a memorable way") and what will happen afterward ("But after a while, he fell asleep and dreamed of seas no one had ever seen"). The next time the workman shows up, Franklin's figured out how the system works, and he's off to the moon. Kulikov (The Eraserheads) lavishes painterly attention on the giant transport, with rows of golden lights and indigo shadows, but leaves plenty of rough edges and scribbled lines, too. It's a cinematically scaled tale engineered for those who wish bedtime offered a little more action. Ages 3–7. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Not surprisingly, it's Taxali's slickly produced retro spreads that draw all the attention in his picture book debut. Channeling candy wrapper script, amusement park funhouse art, and comic books, Taxali creates an odd gang, hybrids of human, animal, mechanical, and geometric features. Their bodies are shaped like boxes, or peanuts, or toys; their legs and arms curve like rubber bands, and their eyebrows arch and crease to express emotion. Silly Sol wears a fez and a striped shirt, Billy has pink bunny ears, and Manic Monkey, a sour-faced toy with a key in his back, drives a little red speedster. "There goes Manic Monkey,/ Beep! Beep! He drives too far./ All around, up off the ground,/ He WRECKS that kooky car!" Other characters leap about, everybody laughs ("Ho-ho, ha-ha, yuk-yuk, tee-hee"), and Silly Sol points to a mirror that is embedded in the last page and asks, "Can YOU be silly, too?" and the fun ends a little abruptly there. Strangely compelling, with shades of Roy Lichtenstein and early Warner Bros. cartoons, its most appropriate home might be on a coffee table. Ages 3–5. (Aug.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

With a title right out of a romance manga and a premise that sounds like Clone High, at first glance Afterschool Charisma doesn't seem promising. But that first impression is most emphatically wrong. Suekane's story of a school full of cloned historical geniuses and a very ordinary boy who observes them is another success for Viz's experimental manga line. Cloned for undisclosed and morally dubious reasons, the students include not only the great and the good (Mozart, Marie Curie, Elizabeth I) but also the world-shatteringly brilliant and driven of every stripe (Napoleon, the infamous Dowager Empress Cixi, Hitler). But locking would-be world leaders up in a boarding school and disappearing the more rebellious students to "another school" works about as well as you might expect. Unlikely alliances and conspiracies form—Napoleon will hardly go tamely to his fate, for example, and Sigmund Freud revels in using his cynical psychological insight to be the perfect power behind the throne. Suekane's art is all clean lines and expressive faces, even if the characters look disconcertingly little like their historical counterparts. Tensely plotted and sparkling with sharp dialogue, the story succeeds by not underestimating the intelligence of teenagers, in both its characters and its readers. (June)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 06/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Dinski's story of plastic surgeons in a culture where image is all important aims to be provocative, but ends up not as substantial as it could be. Dr. Fingers is an accomplished cosmetic surgeon whose most prized client is Hollywood superstar actress Vanessa Zimba. Fingers is so proud of Vanessa's appearance that he both imitates her features in other clients and constantly seeks to find new ways to perfect Vanessa's face. This causes constant distress for Fingers's wife, Jennifer, herself resembling an aging version of Vanessa. It's also a source of inspiration and jealousy for Fingers's assistant, Yumiko Tatsu, who finds herself performing most of the actual surgery and soon leaves to start her own practice. When he sees his assistant's work take popular culture by storm, Dr. Fingers finds himself suffering at the expense of his long-held belief that people are defined by their appearances. Dinski provides both art and writing, and the basic visuals further hit home his point of how worrying too much about how people look can lead to all people looking the same. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 09/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Famed artist and graphic designer Chwast has turned his talents to the graphic novel form for the first time, and we can all be happy about it. In a highly compressed version of Dante's Divine Comedy, Chwast takes us on a whirlwind tour of hell, purgatory, and heaven. With his signature mix of humor, artistry, and high-level design, he conveys a breathtaking amount of information in clear black and white line drawings. One graph illustrates "reasons for different levels of punishment," with sins ranging from "no self-control" (deemed "not so bad") to "insane brutality" (which is "terrible"). In another, the levels and regions of purgatory are laid out in an ascending birthday cake format. Much of the book is beautiful, with page design showing naked sinners tossed in a wind of words, a two-page spread of men and snakes wrapped in writhing battle, or a large flower made of angels as they fly from God. Dante himself is portrayed as a pipe-smoking detective type in sunglasses and a trench coat, while his guide, Virgil, wears a porkpie hat and wire-rimmed spectacles with his suit. It all works seamlessly as Chwast does a stunning job of telling Dante's story in his own brilliant style. (Sept.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 08/01/2010 | Details & Permalink

Fusing the unsettling kitsch of EC horror comics, the storytelling sensibility of Euro-classics like Tintin, and the astute observations about young adults that made Black Hole so engrossing, Burns has turned out a haunting first chapter in what promises to be a spellbinder. The opening pages flip among the various realities of Doug, a young man recovering from a head injury of some kind with only a box of pills and some strawberry Pop-Tarts to speed his recovery. Flashbacks and dreams switch among various scenes: Doug and his hypocrite father; a wild party gone awry when Doug's crush object's crazy (but unseen) boyfriend goes on a rampage; and, most mysteriously, another world—found behind a hole in a brick wall—where dead cats live, worms weep, and a giant hive rules a grim city of deformed creatures. Burns's control of the story is masterful—the recurring imagery make it unclear just which is the reality and which is the dream. His sharply delineated art captures a grotesque yet sympathetic view of kids thrust far beyond a world that they can control or even understand. The only disappointment about X'ed Out is its brevity—the first of several installments, it will leave you begging for the rest of the story. (Oct.)

Reviewed on 07/05/2010 | Release date: 10/01/2010 | Details & Permalink