The American Library Association sets aside the last week in September to celebrate Banned Book Week. Their Web site explains:

“The ALA Office of Intellectual Freedom (OIF) promotes awareness of challenges to library materials and celebrates freedom of speech during Banned Books Week. A challenge is an attempt to remove or restrict materials, based upon the objections of a person or group. A banning is the removal of those materials. Challenges do not simply involve a person expressing a point of view; rather, they are an attempt to remove material.”

Books are challenged for a many different reasons. In Children’s Literature, it is usually because some feel the content is not appropriate for the age group for which the book was intended. These are usually the cutting edge books that try to push the envelope. I will not be looking at any of those books in this blog post. I want to look at the books that most people dismiss as literature - graphic novels. Graphic novels are a type of comic book that is longer in length and has a storyline more like a novel. Though authors of the graphic novel genre even challenge the term “graphic novel” (Perhaps Banned Book Week really is “We Cannot Make Everyone Happy Week”).

So here are a few graphic novels ... or um ... comic books for children.

My first selection is Dave Pilkey’s Captain Underpants. (Dave Pilkey made the ALA list as one of the Most Challenged Authors of 2004 - all right Dave!!!) The story starts out with the story of two fourth grade boys, George Beard and Harold Hutchins, who deal with their troubles through a comic book they create with Captain Underpants as the hero. During an incident involving a hypnotizing ring, the boys inadvertently turn their grumpy principal into Captain Underpants. Captain Underpants books are filled with forbidden fruits: underwear and bathroom humor. The book has black and white illustrations that include George and Harold’s comic books intertwined with text. The best part is the “Flip-o-Rama” feature where you flip between two pages of the book and the pictures really do seem to move.

Girls may enjoy Baby Mouse series by brother and sister team Jennifer Holm and illustrated by Mathew Holm. Baby Mouse is a girl mouse with a vivid imagination. She takes on many different personas (Cinderella, an astronaut, a cow girl, among the many) to face the challenges of life as a fourth grader like hoping to get invited to popular Felicia Furrypaws's sleepover and hoping a meteor will crash into the school so Baby Mouse won't have to play dodgeball in gym class. Of course things never work out as Baby Mouse plans - typical. The Baby Mouse series is made up of fast paced books, set up in the traditional comic book format, and is illustrated in three colors: black, white, and pink.

For older students there is the Bone series by Jeff Smith. This is a 9 part series of full color more traditional comic book style illustrations and set up. Booklist says,

“the series chronicles the adventures of the Bone cousins--plucky Fone Bone, scheming Phony Bone, and easygoing Smiley Bone-- who leave their home of Boneville and are swept up in a Tolkienesque epic of royalty, dragons, and unspeakable evil forces out to conquer humankind. The compilation makes it evident how fully formed Smith's vision was from the very beginning--although the early chapters emphasized comedy, as do the final pages, the tale quickly found its dramatic bearings. His remarkably accomplished drawing style, in the manner of such comics masters as Walt Kelly and Carl Barks, was fully formed from the start, too.”

Why read these? These are junk you say??!?! Scholastic.com’s article Bad Books Make Good Reading: Does your child want to read silly romances or stacks of comic books? Let her do it! states:

“Here's ... reason to keep kids reading: the volume of reading accomplished has a direct and positive impact on reading fluency, vocabulary development and establishing the reading habit. As kids' competence and confidence grows, so will their interest in reading for pleasure, including ‘good books’”.

So go read a challenged book - I dare you!

Captain Underpants and Baby Mouse book photos: amazon.com Bone book photo: www.boneville.com

Lisa Bankey is a parent, an Enrichment Facilitator for the Ann Arbor Public Schools, and a librarian-in-training who blogs about Children’s Literature for AnnArbor.com. Lisa can be reached at lisabookblog@gmail.com.