Teen Read Month Read Beyond Reality Tournament!
Some wizards and vampires are frankly too adorable to fight.

Negima!? Neo! - Negi Springfield, mage in training and master of battle magic. He is backed by his fearsome and strangely skilled class 2A. No quidditch jokes, please.

Chibi Vampire – Karin doesn’t need to drink blood, she needs to give it away! When she finds an unhappy person, she can bite them and give them her extra blood, giving them confidence and happiness.

But don’t think being pretty or cute means they aren’t tough!

Courtney Crumrin is a magic user with an attitude and it ain’t nice. She doesn’t care about popularity or suffering fools. She does like the fairies and goblins and other things that go bump in the night.

Vampire Knight Yuki Cross protects the humans of the Day Class from the vampires of the Night Class at the Cross Academy, where the Headmaster is trying to improve relations between humans and vampires. Secrets and betrayals abound!

VOTE HERE!
Comment here to defend your choice!

EDITED TO ADD: The winners are Ninjas and Vampires. Come back for their match up in the third week.

I started out as a Marvel fan. I read Spider-man, then got into the Avengers, then, of course, the X-Men. Then I became a DC fan, then manga.

Marvel started to disappoint. Then they decided to cut the number of mutants at the end of the House of M and had mutant superpowers floating around in the upper stratosphere and I threw an online hissy fit. I can only suspend so much disbelief. (The logical conclusion of stopping mutations in the 616 Marvel universe should have lead to a dramatic rise in childhood cancers, stillborns, and a plummeting birth rate. Just saying.)

So I haven’t been reading much Marvel lately.

Still, I was a fan and I was fairly familiar with Wolverine’s myriad number of secret origins and personal histories. (He gets retconned a lot.)

So I was interested when Del Rey announced they would be producing an all new, alternate-universe book of Wolverine.

Logan is now a teenager, though the book is set in modern times. He still has very few memories. He was found in a forest and taken into a martial arts school, where he excelled.

Naturally, Logan’s unknown past has to come back and haunt him. Lots of messiness follows. Conspiracies, old enemies, huge agencies chucking medical ethics out the window, etc.

To the author’s credit, they aren’t just putting a retread on the original stories. There are new characters and new-ish situations.

Worth a read.

Note: Del Rey is also publishing a re-imagined X-Men starring Kitty Pryde as the first female mutant in her generation. So she’s off to the here-to-fore all-boys Xavier School. Teen angst ensues. With superpowers. And Japanese-school uniforms rather than the traditional black and yellow bodysuits.

Visual literacy (or, as it is colloquially known, visuacy) is the ability to interpret, negotiate, and make meaning from information presented in the form of an image. Visual literacy is based on the idea that pictures can be “read” and that meaning can be communicated through a process of reading. — Wikipedia

In other words (if you will pardon the expression): reading comics!

Now, most comic books do use words in a variety of ways; Spider-man contemplates via thought balloons, Superman exclaims, and villains monologue.

But you don’t need words to tell a story.

Owly is a graphic novel series by Andy Runton, featuring Owly, a kind-hearted owl who wants to help make other animals happy, and his friend Wormy, a clever earthworm who often has to help other animals learn to not be afraid of Owly. Simple symbols are used for dialogue. The series is aimed at a younger audience, but can be enjoyed by any age.

GON is a tiny fictional dinosaur with a big appetite, a short temper, and a big heart. He swims with the fish and (sort of) flies with the birds and will often use his enormous jaws to take a bite out of a bully. Gorgeous detailed drawings depict the animals and environments from all over the planet. Rated for teens because sometimes Mother Nature ain’t pretty.

It time for the Teen Summer Reading Program! Signing up is painless!

Teens get a card and when you get nine clips from the card, you can turn it in for the drawing and prizes! The grand prize drawing includes $50 cash cards from US Bank.

Anyway, just to tie back in to graphic novels, one of the clips on the card is reading a graphic novel. Or a graphic nonfiction. Or a biography.

So if you read Houdini, reviewed already in this blog, that would be a graphic novel – nonfiction – biography. Three clips!

For more information, see the Teens @ Duluth blog!