White Flower Day

Plot

White Flower Day is an all-ages humor graphic novel starring a precocious gang of supernatural kids: Pullapart Boy, Kid Medusa, Li'l Bloody (a vampire toddler), the Li'l Tin Stars, and more. Think Hal Roach's classic Our Gang comedies (before child labor laws made them impossible to replicate, unless you're a cartoonist) meets the Universal Monsters, with a tad of Manga-style energy thrown in. The book consists of three stories: "White Flower Day," "Hostiles," and "I Saw You," all dealing with the theme of revenge (a new emotional desire to most of the tykes). "I Saw You" introduces Pullapart Boy's cousin, College Boy, who is younger, smarter and far more accomplished than P.B., attending university and hard at work on a secret science project. "Hostiles" tells of a bizarre, three-day nature hike with Li'l Bloody, the Li'l Tin Stars, "Mean" Chubby Cheeks' and Chubby's usually-absent father, involving grisly forest-action and baffling acts of sabotage! Weissman's charming and respectful approach to his child characters has been compared to Charles M. Schulz's Peanuts, though Weissman employs a distinctly darker sense of humor without excluding younger readers from his audience. White Flower Day is his best book to date, a mix of absurd imagination and very human emotion, certain to entertain and enlighten readers of all ages.