The Arrival

The Arrival is a migrant story told as a series of wordless images that might seem to come from a long forgotten time. A man leaves his wife and child in an impoverished town, seeking better prospects in an unknown country on the other side of a vast ocean. He eventually finds himself in a bewildering city of foreign customs, peculiar animals, curious floating objects and indecipherable languages. With nothing more than a suitcase and a handful of currency, the immigrant must find a place to live, food to eat and some kind of gainful employment. He is helped along the way by sympathetic strangers, each carrying their own unspoken history: stories of struggle and survival in a world of incomprehensible violence, upheaval and hope.

Laika:

The story of the first dog in space.

Laika was a Soviet space dog (c. 1954 – November 3, 1957) who became the first animal to orbit the Earth and the first orbital death. Little was known about the impact of spaceflight on living things at the time Laika's mission was launched. Some scientists believed humans would be unable to survive the launch or the conditions of outer space, so engineers viewed flights by non-human animals as a necessary precursor to human missions. Laika, a stray, originally named Kudryavka (Russian: Кудрявка Little Curly-Haired One), underwent training with two other dogs, and was eventually chosen as the occupant of the Soviet spacecraft Sputnik 2 that was launched into outer space on November 3, 1957. Sputnik 2 was not designed to be retrievable, and Laika had always been intended to die.

Think of talking animal stories and you’ll probably make the mental leap to Disney, who, with films like The Lion King, has been captivating family audiences for generations. Comics have their fair share of talking animals too, some of which have been highly sophisticated, like Grant Morrison’s We3, Craig Thompson’s Good-bye, Chunky Rice and Art Spiegelman’s Maus.

Pride of Baghdad

Pride of Baghdad has a lot in common with The Lion King, not least of all because it’s about a pride of talking lions. Their characters follow something of an archetype: there’s a world-weary matriarch; a young male, not quite alpha enough to take charge; a fiercely protective mother; and her precocious young son. Instead of the wilds of Africa however, this pride of lions are features of Baghdad’s zoo. Based on true events, the story follows what happens to the lions when the zoo gets hit by American bombs and the lions, along with a large number of other animals, escape their enclosures.

Garage Band

Four boys. Four lives. One band.

"Alex's bedroom window looks out over the chemical factory yard. His father was a manager at the factor for years. . . . After he disappeared, they discovered he'd been embezzling money from the company's accounts using a tax trick. Nobody's seen him since. . . . The songs that Alex writes are often about that."

Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood

author: Tony Lee
illustrator: Sam Hart 

 Beowulf

The epic tale of the great warrior Beowulf has thrilled readers through the ages — and now it is reinvented for a new generation with Gareth Hinds’s darkly beautiful illustrations. Grendel’s black blood runs thick as Beowulf defeats the monster and his hideous mother, while somber hues overcast the hero’s final, fatal battle against a raging dragon. Speeches filled with courage and sadness, lightning-paced contests of muscle and will, and funeral boats burning on the fjords are all rendered in glorious and gruesome detail. Told for more than a thousand years, Beowulf’s heroic saga finds a true home in this graphic-novel edition.