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As a writer, you know you are over the hump of winter when your new spring titles start arriving from the publishers. Fortunately, 2006 was a busy year for me, so there are a few new book arrivals to talk about. The first are my three new Graphic Science titles from Capstone Press. These books take the graphic novel format to the uncharted (for me anyway) waters of non-fiction.

I wrote three of the eight books in the series and it was a lot of fun. Not only because I learned a heck of a lot about the subjects, Electricity, Food Chains and Photosynthesis, but because I was able to play with the way the information was displayed for for the reader. One of the biggest challenges with writing non-fiction books for young readers is making the subject come alive, so that the reader is engaged. The graphic novel format helps overcome that hurdle. The images immediately grab the reader’s attention and (hopefully) getting him or her reading and (if I’ve done my job well) understanding the text. Below is a page example that shows what I mean (and that I need a scanner desperately!)pagesample.jpg

This is a page from the Electricity book and it shows Max Axiom (a scientist with superpowers) explaining how electrons move from atom to atom to create an electrical charge. (Click on the image or here to see a larger image.)

To liven the information up, I had Max shrink down to the size of an atom and get up close to watch the electrons jumping. While all the standard non-fiction information is there, I think it’s the illustrations and the colour that really bring this page alive. And hopefully so will the readers.

The whole series is full of this stuff. Max shrinks, flies, uses x-ray goggles and a bunch of other cool gadgets to literally get inside the scientific subject. It’s a great character concept created by the editors at Capstone and brought to life by many great comic artists. The fantastic artwork in the Electricity book was done by Richard Dominquez and Charles Barnett III.

You’ll see me using the graphic novel format to tell non-fiction stories a lot more in the coming months. In addition to the these three science books, I have the three “Graphic Guide Adventure” books coming out from Orca later this year and next year. Each one of these graphic novels takes this non-fiction element further by actually blending a fiction adventure story with non-fiction facts and guides. More on those when they start hitting the bookshelves.

In the meantime, if you’ve got readers who need to get charged up and engaged by science, head over the the Capstone Press website and check out the rest of the titles is the Graphic Science series.