The TeachingBooks Blog
The seed for my newest young adult novel, This Thing Called the Future (Cinco Puntos, 2011), was planted five years ago when I was studying the Zulu language at a university in Pietermaritzburg, South Africa. The Zulu family I stayed with had two young teenage girls—thirteen and fourteen—who were incredibly hard-working girls and always respectful of their elders. Yet the thirteen year old got in trouble while I was there because she was caught kissing her boyfriend at church. Her boyfriend was a man in his thirties.
Although my books are printed on thinly sliced pieces of tree, they would be utterly impossible without the Internet. Paper Towns (Dutton 2008), for instance, is built around this weird cartographic phenomenon wherein mapmakers intentionally put fake places on their maps.
The incredible thing about comics, to me, is the medium’s diversity. Some people hear the word “comics” and are reminded of newsprint pages filled with superheroes. Others see shelves of manga stacked tight, while some readers are more familiar with hardbound graphic novels and nonfiction volumes. All of these formats and types of books rightly describe comics.