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Graphic adventures

New trends in children’s picture books
by
November 2009, no. 316

Graphic adventures

New trends in children’s picture books
by
November 2009, no. 316

The line between picture books, graphic novels and comic books is becoming increasingly blurred as picture books adopt elements from a wide range of graphic forms of storytelling.

With The Hero of Little Street (Allen & Unwin, $29.99 hb, 32 pp), Gregory Rogers reprises the successful graphic-novel format of his Boy Bear series. The boy, whom we first met in The Boy, the Bear, the Baron, the Bard (2004), escapes from a gang of boys whose soccer ball he has inadvertently kicked into a fountain. He miraculously disappears inside Vermeer’s painting A Lady Seated at a Virginal, accompanied by a small scruffy dog that has found its way out of van Eyk’s painting The Arnolfini Portrait. The dog and the boy have many adventures together in seventeenth-century Holland, not least of which involves saving the dog from a butcher’s block.

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