Backyard Bug Battle: A Buzz Beaker Brainstorm (Graphic Sparks : a Buzz Beaker Brainstorm)

Nickel, Scott

ISBN 10: 1598890549 ISBN 13: 9781598890549

Publisher: Stone Arch Books, 2006

Synopsis

When Buzz Beaker confuses his super-sticky bug goo with his father's super-fast grow juice, the Beaker backyard becomes a zany zoo of gigantic bees and fleas.

About this title

About the Author

Born in 1962 in Denver, Colorado, Scott Nickel works by day at Paws, inc., Jim Davis's famous Garfield studio, and he freelances by night. Burning the midnight oil, Scott has created hundreds of humorous greeting cards and written several children's books, short fiction for ""Boys' Life"" magazine, comic strips, and lots of really funny knock-knock jokes. He was raised in southern California, but in 1995 Scott moved to Indiana, where he currently lives with his wife, two sons, six cats, and several sea monkeys.

Reviews

Grade 2–5—These books vary greatly in their ability to embrace the tools and conventions of sequential art. Bug is the less successful of the two. Slim in scope and in substance, although certainly wryly amusing in a slightly predictable manner, it has little to indicate that it is anything other than a picture book. Having characters speak with word balloons and having multiple images on a single page does not constitute a graphic novel, and this book will do little to establish or encourage the visual skills that proponents of the format espouse. A pleasant if innocuous tale, it seems to be called a "graphic novel" for the purposes of hype only. In the second title, fourth-grader Tiger Moth, self-proclaimed ninja and superhero, has to discover who stole a valuable painting from his elementary school. Multiple puns and the trappings of multiple genres are all tossed at readers so that there is at least a goodly potential of some of them finding a receptive audience. Clever, and with a solid moral about assumptions and good intentions, the book exhibits the basic visual literacies of graphic literature.—Benjamin Russell, Belmont High School, MA
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Edition details

• Publisher: Stone Arch Books
• Publication date: 2006
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1598890549
• ISBN 13: 9781598890549
• Binding: Library Binding
• Illustrator: Smith Andy J.
• Number of pages: 33