Graphic adventures
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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