TOMO takes the Bronze!

Tomo Volume 1: I Was an Eighth-Grade Ninja has just been awarded the Bronze Award in the Comics and Graphic Novel category of the Moonbeam Children's Books Awards.

The Moonbeam Awards are designed to honor the year's best children’s books, authors and illustrators, and to bring increased recognition to exemplary children’s books and their creators. Their ambition is to support children's book publishing and to promote childhood literacy and life-long reading.

One of the more significant aspects of Tomo's placement is that these awards are not CBA related, but draw from the large pool of mainstream material. There is a separate category for Religious works, but the Comics and Graphic Novels category is completely open.

Congratulations go to Andrew Simmons, Ariel Padilla, Tom Bancroft and Rob Corley of Funnypages Productions for producing such an excellent book. It's a pleasure to work with them.

Read more about Tomo here: www.zgraphicnovels.com/series/tomo.php

Silly Daddy Online

Joe Chiappetta (or Joey Chips as he is sometimes called) has been drawing his Silly Daddy comic sine 1991, the year he became a father. It’s gone through several incarnations since then, beginning as a photocopied and hand stapled zine and moving all the way through to trade paperback collections of his comics. He even won the Xeric Award in 1998 for his for his graphic novel, Silly Daddy: A Death in the Family. One of the most amazing things about following Silly Daddy through the years and the formats is tracing Joe’s life, not only as a father, but as he came to Christ. He has now made the internet Silly Daddy’s home as a daily webcomic at: http://joechiappetta.blogspot.com/.

Silly Daddy is at times absurd and at times touching, but always fascinating. Joe present’s life as he sees it or imagines it to be (or sometimes should be), and his cartoons provide a remarkable insight into contemporary times.

Here’s a small sampling if his cartoons:

All art is © 2007 Joe Chiappetta

Check out more at: Joe Chiappetta is Silly Daddy

Another Recommended Graphic Novel

Good As Lily
Story by Derek Kim Kirk
Art by Jesse Hamm
Published by Minx (An imprint of DC Comics)

I’ve been waiting for this graphic novel ever since I first saw some of Jesse Hamm’s art on it back in the summer of 2006, and it was well worth the wait.

First a disclaimer:
I’ve known Jesse Hamm for well over ten years and fell in love with his work at first sight. He’s a brilliant cartoonist, a master of body language and facial expression, and his layouts are very well thought out and invite the reader into the story. So, yeah, I was sold on the art right away.
I’m also somewhat familiar with Derek Kim Kirk’s writing, having followed several of his other comics online (especially Same Difference), and I'm impressed with his ability to flesh out characters in an appealing and believable nature. With that team attached to the book, it held a lot of promise to me.

The story of Good As Lily centers around Grace Kwon on her eighteenth birthday and what happens as she suddenly comes face to face with herself at three different periods of her life (as a child, as a woman nearing her thirties, and as on older woman). As the four Graces interact, they come to terms with their regrets and other emotional baggage, resulting in a closure that frees the contemporary, 18-year old Grace, to move forward into adulthood. It’s an optimistic story filled with likeable characters, warm humor, and a lot of heart.