Two weeks ago I shared some comics for kids. This week I’ve got some more comics, this time for young adults. The age definition for “young adults” can be a little hazy at times, but generally I’m using it for kids 12 and up. Most of the books in this stack have high schoolers as their main characters, so that usually gives you a sense of the target audience, though of course there’s always some wiggle room there. Many of these also involve romance, so that’s another good indicator—if your kid is still in the “ew, gross!” stage when it comes to romance, then you should probably wait a few years on those.
Disclosure: I received review copies or advance galleys of the books in today’s column. Affiliate links to Bookshop.org help support my writing and helps independent bookstores instead of funding vanity rocketship projects.
Look on the Bright Side by Lily Williams and Karen Schneemann
Back in 2020 I wrote about a comic book called Go With the Flow, featuring four high school friends advocating for period health. While it’s not all about menstruation, that’s the connecting thread that ties the little stories together. Although it’s been a few years in the real world, Look on the Bright Side picks up during the following school year, when the four girls are starting their junior year. Brit has just had surgery for endometriosis—in the first book she was experiencing severe pain during her periods and she wasn’t sure why—but aside from that intro the primary focus in the second book is more about relationships.
Sasha has a steady boyfriend who appears from time to time, but the other three are still navigating romance. Brit has a crush on a charming barista, but it takes her a bit longer to figure out the nerdy guy in her AP English class. Meanwhile, Christine has developed a crush on Abby but is afraid to tell her. This part of the plotline is like one of those rom-coms with plenty of miscommunication (or lack of communication), with a bonus helping of teenage hormones to make things more complicated. Christine’s worried that saying anything could not only mess up her friendship with Abby, but it could disrupt the entire friend group.
While the book has a happy ending, it did remind me that there are a lot of kids for whom coming out to your close friends is still a scary thing. My own kids had so many classmates who came out as gay or trans during high school, and their friend groups were all so supportive of each other; many of their parents were also supportive, though I do know of instances where that wasn’t the case. It’s easy, in those circumstances, to see intolerance more as something that my own generation and previous generations have lots of hang-ups about and to think that kids nowadays are all past that. Look on the Bright Side shows how it can be scary, but also shows a positive outcome in the end.
Hockey Girl Loves Drama Boy by Faith Erin Hicks
Here’s another high school rom-com, this time featuring the odd couple of Alix, a star hockey player, and Ezra, a theater kid. Alix loves hockey—it’s the only place she really feels like she really excels, because she is socially awkward. But it doesn’t help that the team captain, Lindsay, is emotionally abusive and is constantly picking on Alix and berating her for every little mistake. Alix finally loses her cool and punches Lindsay after a game, which could cost Alix her spot at a national hockey camp. More importantly, Alix is terrified of the way she lost control of herself.
She approaches Ezra after she sees him brush off homophobic insults from Greg—maybe he can teach her how to handle jerks. The theater kids are a little mistrustful at first, particularly because Lindsay has been a terror to them for years (and Alix has just stood by and let it happen), but Alix and Ezra begin to develop a friendship that could might become something more.
This one is a lot of fun—there are exciting hockey action scenes, silly drama with the drama kids, fraught conversations with parents, and more. Although a lot of the characters initially feel like stereotypes, as the story develops you start to see the depth behind many of them. (Not Lindsay and Greg, though–they just seem to be your standard awful power couple.) This one, despite Greg’s slurs, feels closer to my kids’ experiences—there are a few intolerant people, but among their friend groups there is a strong core of acceptance and they’re comfortable with each other. Seeing Alix discover this, as a contrast to the toxic culture of the hockey team, was a delight.
Lunar New Year Love Story by Gene Luen Yang and LeUyen Pham
I mentioned Lunar New Year Love Story in my favorite books post earlier this month, but I wanted to say a little more about it here. It’s another romance story, this time one that ties together Valentine’s Day with Lunar New Year, two different holidays that often occur close to each other. Valentina has always loved Valentine’s Day, making handmade valentines for her classmates (even into high school) and one for her dad (from her mom in heaven). But then things fall apart—one classmate tears up her valentine, and her dad gets angry when he sees his.
Then her grandma—who she hasn’t had contact with in nine years—shows up unexpectedly, and Val starts to learn some secrets that have been kept from her. Among them, that her family is cursed: they have bad luck with love, with no lasting marriages. Val refuses to believe that—after all, she’s just met a cute lion dancer at the New Year festival. But a ghostly St. Valentine haunts her, telling her to hide away her heart to protect it from heartbreak. She asks for a year to find true love before she gives her heart to St. V for safekeeping.
I love all the various details that show up in this book. Val had never been to a Lunar New Year Festival before her grandmother arrived, and she is swept away by all the sights and sounds and tastes. She even ends up learning lion dancing, which leads to some more surprising revelations about her past. The characters are a lot of fun, especially Val’s grandma, who is boisterous and demanding and has some tricks up her sleeve. Just flipping through the pages again while writing this reminded me again how much I enjoyed reading this one.
Stars in Their Eyes by Jessica Walton and Aśka
Maisie is headed to her very first fan convention with her mom, who is a major geek (and has multiple cosplay options for the weekend). Maisie is there for her favorite show, Midnight Girls, whose star is also an amputee like her. A lot of the book features the various ways that the con is made accessible for Maisie, from the disability access pass to skip past lines to quiet rooms where attendees can chill and have a snack. It also shows a lot of the things that disabled people have to deal with, whether it’s the physical discomforts of a prosthetic leg or the looks and comments from strangers.
Mixed into all of that is a bit of romance—Maisie and her mom meet Ollie, a teenager who’s volunteering at the show with their dad. They end up spending much of the day together, geeking out over their respective favorite shows, which leads to a whirlwind romance. This part was cute, but also felt really fast to me, because in the course of a single day they go from meeting to sharing their first kiss, before having to go their separate ways (to different cities!) after the convention ends. But it’s a lot to pack into a fairly brief book, so they didn’t have a lot of time for this romance to build up slowly.
I really enjoyed the relationship that Maisie has with her mom, largely because it feels a lot like the sort of relationship we here at GeekDad and GeekMom hope to cultivate with our own kids. The mom is clearly somebody who loves cons and is excited to share this experience with her daughter, and is also trying really hard not to crowd Maisie too much so that she can figure out her own interests and favorites.
There were a few things that stuck out to me while reading Stars in Their Eyes. One is the silly parody names used for real shows: Sci-Fi Wars and Fusion Universe and Danger Things, for instance. The references are pretty obvious (even to the point of quoting Star Wars outright) so it’s not entirely clear why they used the made-up titles for them. Maisie’s and Ollie’s favorite shows are fictional, though, probably because we get to see those characters a lot more, and some of the story involves the two of them creating some fan fiction linking the two shows.
One other thing that stood out to me was that, despite the fact that the book centers around accessibility and inclusive practices at a convention, there’s no mention of masks or medical safety. At a time when medically vulnerable people are feeling forgotten because everyone has returned to “normal,” it feels like a big oversight to have a convention that does not require any sort of COVID precautions—which is exactly what is happening in the real world too. Not only do we need conventions to take into account those who are physically disabled, but we should also acknowledge that there are ways to make them safer for everyone, and it was somewhat frustrating not to see that in the book. On the other hand, I also realize that it’s only the fact that this book is about accessibility that made that omission stand out—the other books on this list also don’t have any references at all to the pandemic, because they take place in some undefined era so you can pretend they were pre-2020. If not for the fact that this book has a copyright date of 2021, I’d probably not be bothered as much.
Forest Hills Bootleg Society by Dave Baker and Nicole Goux
Here’s another story about four high school girls, but this one is not quite as upbeat as Look on the Bright Side. Three of the girls attend a conservative Christian boarding school, which the town is basically built around, but each of them has some strong reasons to dislike the school. Throughout the book we get little sidebar pages delving into things like “A Brief History of Every Time Brooke Thought About Burning in Hell,” to give you a sense of the oppressive nature of the religious community represented in the book.
When a midnight run to buy some bootleg anime turns out not to be Miyazaki cartoons but actually some Japanese adult films, the four make a plan to burn DVDs and sell them to boys at the school, and they find themselves suddenly flush with cash–which brings a whole new set of problems, when the popular kids start inviting them to hang out… but just never seem to remember their wallets.
The big warning I’ll give with this one is that it’s pretty painful to read. The problems that these girls are dealing with, whether it’s insecurities or jealousy or secrets kept from each other, are not neatly resolved by the end of the book with a big bow on top. Instead, things just kind of fall apart. It’s the sort of book that makes you think there are going to be some shenanigans, but then everything works out in the end (because, you know, that’s what books for young adults usually are like)—and this one ends with mostly heartache and pain. There are shenanigans and there are some very funny parts, but once the money starts rolling in, the friend group never quite recovers.
DeadEndia Book 3: The Divine Order by Hamish Steele
DeadEndia has an interesting story arc—and I mean the book series itself, not just the story between the covers. I wrote about the first two volumes here and here (I read them out of order!) back in 2019. The second book has a surprise twist that feels like it will lead to more… but then there hadn’t been a volume 3. Instead, the books got picked up for a 2022 Netflix animated series called Dead End: Paranormal Park… and now this upcoming graphic novel is kind of based on the TV series, I guess? Hamish Steele was also the showrunner for the cartoon series, so maybe it let them figure out the ending, which then became this comic.
At any rate, things are intense. The demons are gearing up for all-out war, and the various human (or mostly human) characters we’ve come to know are teaming up with them. In this volume, we get to see a lot more of the upper planes, where the angels reside, and we learn a bit more about how the 13 planes of existence came to be. What’s more, Pael, the right hand of The Divine, is making some noise about dividing the planes yet again. And, even though the world is ending, there are also a bunch of characters who are trying to sort out their relationship issues and figure out what they actually want, in case they manage to survive.
There’s a whole lot happening here, and as our heroes (anti-heroes?) dig into the history of how the world came to be as it is, they find some really shocking revelations—all is not as it seems. It’s an action-packed finale for the book series and wraps things up in a satisfying conclusion. I haven’t seen the TV show myself, but this makes me curious to see it. You’ll have to wait a little, though—DeadEndia: The Divine Order isn’t out until the end of April.
My Current Stack
I’m continuing to make my way through my stacks and stacks of comics, but I’ve also read a couple of time travel books so maybe in a couple weeks I’ll have another time travel column!
Click through to read all of “Stack Overflow: 6 Comic Books for Young Adults” at GeekDad.If you value content from GeekDad, please support us via Patreon or use this link to shop at Amazon. Thanks!
