3 New Comics for New Readers – April 11, 2012

A funny adventure for young readers starring a young giant-slayer with a lack of giants, a fascinating look at two sisters growing up in New York’s Lower East Side in the early 1900s, and a classic super-hero story from the ’70s – check out our picks for this week’s new releases.

Wednesday is New Comics Day! Each week, The Comics Observer picks three brand new releases worth checking out that should be suitable for someone who has never read comic books, graphic novels or manga before.

If you like what you see here, click the links to see previews and learn more about them. Then head to your local comic book store, or check out online retailers like Things From Another World and Amazon. Let us know what you think in the comments below or on Facebook.

Giants Beware! by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado

Giants Beware!
Written by Jorge Aguirre
Illustrated by Rafael Rosado
Published by First Second Books / Macmillan
Genre: Fantasy Adventure
$14.99

Make way for Claudette the giant slayer in this delightful, fantastical adventure! Claudette’s fondest wish is to slay a giant. But her village is so safe and quiet! What’s a future giant slayer to do?

With her best friend Marie (an aspiring princess), and her brother Gaston (a pastry-chef-to-be), Claudette embarks on a super-secret quest to find a giant-without parental permission. Can they find and defeat the giant before their parents find them and drag them back home?

Giants Beware! offers up a wondrous, self-contained world in the tradition of the very best of Pixar. Claudette and her friends will have you laughing out loud from page one.

Unterzakhn by Leela Corman

Unterzakhn
Written and illustrated by Leela Corman
Published by Schoken Books / Random House
Genre: Historical Fiction / Jewish Studies
208 pages
$24.95

A mesmerizing, heartbreaking graphic novel of immigrant life on New York’s Lower East Side at the turn of the twentieth century, as seen through the eyes of twin sisters whose lives take radically and tragically different paths.

For six-year-old Esther and Fanya, the teeming streets of New York’s Lower East Side circa 1910 are both a fascinating playground and a place where life’s lessons are learned quickly and often cruelly. In drawings that capture both the tumult and the telling details of that street life, Unterzakhn (Yiddish for “Underthings”) tells the story of these sisters: as wide-eyed little girls absorbing the sights and sounds of a neighborhood of struggling immigrants; as teenagers taking their own tentative steps into the wider world (Esther working for a woman who runs both a burlesque theater and a whorehouse, Fanya for an obstetrician who also performs illegal abortions); and, finally, as adults battling for their own piece of the “golden land,” where the difference between just barely surviving and triumphantly succeeding involves, for each of them, painful decisions that will have unavoidably tragic repercussions.

X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga by Chris Claremont and John Byrne

X-Men: The Dark Phoenix Saga
Written by Chris Claremont
Illustrated by John Byrne
Published by Marvel Comics
Genre: Superhero Fantasy
200 pages
$24.99

An epic tale of triumph and tragedy! When the Dark Phoenix rises, suns grow cold and universes die! The X-Men embark on an adventure that will span the cosmos as one of their own, Jean Grey, has unwittingly attained power beyond conception – and been corrupted, absolutely.

The X-Men must decide: Is the life of the woman they cherish worth the existence of an entire universe? This touching tale of ultimate power and the triumph of the human spirit has been a cornerstone of the X-Men mythos for more than three decades.

Now, relive the Dark Phoenix Saga with this deluxe collection, bursting at the seams with extra stories that illuminate new and different facets of the world of the Phoenix!