My oldest recently turned 9. And with birthdays, it turns out, come gifting opportunities. While there are always some good standbys for him (e.g., LEGO), he’s really been enjoying the Tin Tin collections from our public library. Since it’s been hard to get him to read long narratives—or even listen to them—we have been excited to encourage him. And so I took to Twitter to get recommendations for something age appropriate.
[blackbirdpie url=”https://twitter.com/#!/briancroxall/status/176492749648953344″]
As I’ve come to expect from the great real-time community of Twitter, I got a lot of suggestions that were new to me. I also got more than a few requests to share all of the suggestions. So here’s a condensed list of everything that was mentioned:
- Asterix & Obelix
- Bone
- Tin Tin
- Little Vampire
- Owly
- Salt Water Taffy
- Lockjaw and the Pet Avengers
- Time Warp Trio
- Super Dinosaur
- Lucky Luke
- Amulet
- Complete Peanuts box sets
- Calvin and Hobbes
- Reed Gunther
- Tower of Treasure
- Taiko
- The Boom! Studios Muppet Show Books
- G-Man
- Gladstone’s School for World Conquerors
- Sketch Monsters
- Johnny Boo
- The Shy Creatures
- Secret Science Alliance
- The Little Prince
- Buddha
- Ramayan 3392 AD
- G-Man
- Wizard of Oz graphic novels
- Supergirl: Cosmic Adventures in the 8th Grade
- Marvel Showcase and Essential collections
- Shazam!
- Unshelved
- Amelia Rules
- The Courageous Princess
- Usagi Yojimbo
- Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind
- The Manga Guide to Molecular Biology
- The Baby Sitters Club graphic novels
- Cartoon History of the Universe
- The Magic Flute (adaptation of the opera)
- Tales of Vishnu
- Kaliman (if you read Spanish)
Now, I know that some of these are comics or comic strips rather than graphic novels proper. But since they were suggested, I’m including them just the same. And there were some overwhelming winners on this list. I’ve ordered it roughly with the volumes with got the most mentions toward the top. Without question, Asterix & Obelix, Bone, and Tin Tin got the most votes.
There were also some suggestions for graphic novels that people acknowledged were probably too old for 9 year olds, but here they are for the record:
- Persepolis
- The Rabbi’s Cat
- Vampire Loves
- X-Men: Dark Phoenix Saga
- X-Men Legends Volume 3: Arthur Adams
- Castle Waiting
- Kill Shakespeare
- Kings in Disguise
If you want to see the original tweets that led to this list, as well as who suggested what, check out the Storify I made with all the tweets. Apologies for not citing you all by name in this space, but I want to get this published.
Ultimately, we ended up getting him the first Asterix & Obelix omnibus (which has 3 different stories in it) and Super Dinosaur. Both have been great hits. We were also able to get Owly and almost all the Tin Tin volumes from the library. I’ll be hunting for more soon.
