This past week I read issue 3 of ‘There’s an Alien in my Toilet’ by the fun and talented Samuel Vera. In issue 3, the reader meets Herman, the Chihuahua who acts as the foil to Doodie’s adventures and exploration of this new world he is lost in.

Judd Winick took the characters' danger in the first one and set the bar hiring to create a unique sense of risk that the main characters had to face.

This goes more into depth about Hilo’s backstory while giving the main supporting characters more growth.  Because of this, there are more impactful decisions that are made by the children that appear to ripple into other books.

This past week I read Ben Hatke’s ‘Mighty Jack and Zita the Spacegirl’ I first started reading Ben’s work with ‘Mighty Jack’ but never read any of his Zita stories.  I must say, as someone who only knew half of the characters in this book, Ben did a fantastic job not getting the reader lost in the story. 

It takes a specific storytelling skill to start a book halfway through a character’s developmental story arc and not make a first-time reader get lost, and Ben did a great job with that.