"Adventures in Cartooning" by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost

Adventures in Cartooning is more of an adventure story than the how-to book the title would indicate. It follows the story of a princess who wants to create a comic.  She is helped by the Magic Cartooning Elf.  He shows her how to take simple pictures add dialogue and panels to make a comic.  The comic then takes off as a knight and his cowardly horse try to defeat the candy-stealing dragon.  In the end, the knight is revealed to be the princess who wanted to have an adventure as well as create a comic.  The Magic Cartooning Elf introduces vocabulary such as panel and word bubbles that are used in cartooning.  

The book is presented as a graphic novel or comic.  The princess and the elf are simple figures and the directions on how to draw them appear in the back of the book.  Most of the illustrations in the book are created using basic shapes; they are the type of pictures that seem possible for the reader to draw.   The Magic Cartooning Elf demonstrates the necessity of comic features such as panels.  The continuity of the story makes much more sense once panels are added.  He also demonstrates how perspective can be shown by placing objects differently within the panel.   On page 30, the reader feels the horse is going quickly downhill because the panels are placed in a downward diagonal on the page.  

The Magic Cartooning Elf also demonstrates how words and pictures work together in comics.  For example, on page 34, the elf gets the knight to admit that the wall is ten miles high and a thousand miles long because the knight said so.  The reader adds the information the characters provide through spoken word or thoughts to the illustrations to get the full picture in a cartoon.  

Adventures in Cartooning is an entertaining read just for the story it contains.  When you add the useful information about how comics work, you get a must read for anyone interested in cartooning.  I would recommend this book for anyone aged 5-12.  It is a great way to get a budding cartoonist going! 

Adventures in Cartooning won the 2010 Gryphon Award presented by The Center For Children’s Books. 

Sturm, James, Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost. Adventures in Cartooning. New York: First Second Books, 2009. Print.