Little, Brown Adds Three Tintin Books

To mark this year's Hergé centennial, this fall Little, Brown will publish three Tintin books previously unpublished in the United States, the ICv2 retail website reports. Tintin in the Land of the Soviets, the first Tintin adventure drawn by Hergé, was never redrawn in a manner consistent with the later albums and has only been available in foreign facsimile reprints aimed at collectors. Tintin in the Congo has a troubled history; despite having been redrawn and re-edited twice by Hergé in his lifetime, the book is still being challenged for its depiction of colonialist attitudes (previous editions also included depictions of casual animal abuse). The third book, Tintin and Alph-Art, collects sketches and other material from Hergé's last, unfinished work.

Kochalka's Kids Comics

James Kochalka announces that his new children's book, Squirrelly Gray, has just been published by Random House. According to the artist, the book "alternates a page of verse with a page of comics, and tells the story of how color was introduced to the world." Kochalka, a frequent contributor to Nickelodeon Magazine's comics section, further discusses the book and his previously published children's comics in an interview with Newsarama:

I'm not sure if many copies of my previous books for kids (Pinky & Stinky, Peanutbutter & Jeremy's Best Book Ever) actually ever made it into the hands of actual children. They probably mostly sold to my adult fans. I hope that now, with the backing of a huge children's book publisher, we might be able to get this book into the hands of more actual children.

Kochalka notes that he recently finished another children's comic, Johnny Boo, to be published by Top Shelf next year, and is currently working on another unattached children's project.

Bone Sales Information

Jeff Smith notes recent sales figures for Scholastic's repackaging of his Bone graphic novel series: "[T]he paperback edition of BONE 6: Old Man’s Cave, which just shipped last month, is in its third printing for a total of 260,000 copies! The combined hard cover & paperback sales for the series to date: nearly 2,000,000."

Horn Book Examines "Boys' Love" Manga

The September/October issue of The Horn Book features J. D. Ho's piece "Gender Alchemy: The Transformative Power of Manga," about the appeal shonen-ai "boys' love" manga holds for girls. The piece is available in full on the magazine's website.

Review: The Professor's Daughter

Elizabeth Bird reviews The Professor's Daughter by Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert at the School Library Journal's website. The book has been translated from the original French and published in the U.S. by First Second Books.

Childhood Cognition and Motion Lines

Neil Cohn examines a pair of studies examining childhood comprehension of motion lines and other visual indicators of movement as conventionalized in comics. Both papers compare understanding of action lines with that of other visual cues, including body posture and "polymorphic features (i.e. repeating legs over and over to show motion)."

Review: Casper the Friendly Ghost

PopCultureShock reviews Casper the Friendly Ghost, the first in Dark Horse Comics' series of books reprinting Harvey children's comics.

Unlike some of the other children’s comics that are currently being reprinted–notably Carl Barks’s Duck stories and John Stanley and Irving Trip’s Little Lulu–the Casper comics are not good in any traditional sense. They are perfectly serviceable children’s stories, but there’s no reason for a grown-up to read them. Comparing Lulu to Casper is like comparing Edward Lear to Stan and Jan Berenstain... Yet there is one reason why an intelligent adult might want to pick up this collection. Simply put, Casper featured some of the best art ever to grace a comics page.

The next volume in the series will reprint selected stories from Richie Rich.

Disney Adventures Cancelled

Disney Adventures Magazine has been cancelled, The Beat reports. The magazine had included comics among its contents. Most of these were based upon Disney properties, but the magazine at one point serialized Jeff Smith's Bone and has included work by cartoonists including Evan Dorkin and Rick Geary.