CAT KID COMIC CLUB: PERSPECTIVE

Li'l Petey, Molly, and Flippy are back making their own comics inside this book, and Dav Pilkey uses their comics-within-the-comic to actually teach readers something about how perspective works — how the same event looks different depending on who's telling it, and how a few drawing choices change what a reader feels on the page. Graphix publishes it for the same 6-to-10 range as the rest of Pilkey's books, continuing the Cat Kid Comic Club series, and like the rest of his work it never feels like a lesson even while it's teaching one.

The characters hit real creative roadblocks along the way and have to work through them, which is a more honest picture of making art than most kids' books about creativity bother to show. That honesty is what makes this one worth handing to a kid who insists they can't draw or can't write a story: the whole cast is figuring it out in real time, badly at first, right there on the page. Keep some blank paper nearby afterward, because the likely result is a kid who wants to go make a comic of their own immediately, not just read another one.