Training Day: El Toro and Friends (Family Comic Friday)

Spinning off from the very popular series ¡vamos! (Let's Go!) comes this bilingual graphic novel from Raul the Third!

El Toro is a very popular luchador (that's a masked wrestler who combats in lucha libre style wrestling. He's about to take on the world champ. But El Toro is just too lazy to train. Thankfully, he's got encouragement in the form of his trainer, Kooky Dooky.

I recently read and reviewed the all-ages graphic novel Lowriders to the Rescue. It was the amazing artwork by Raul the Third that I was a huge fan of. I am in awe of Mexican artwork. Especially sugar skulls. While Raul the Third doesn't seem to have added any of those signature dia del los muertos decorations in this book, it's that art style I became enamored with in my previous experience with Raul the Third which flourishes throughout every page..

Adding to the wonderment of the art is the brilliant color palette used. Mega kudos to Elaine Bay for making every page explode with color.

Training Day is a little bit silly. But it's also a little bit of a travel guide about Mexican culture. Plus it's a language lesson book as well. I love that Raul the Third first has the characters say phrases first in English and then follow up in Spanish. I've read a few bilingual comics that assume that the reader knows both Spanish and English. Here, the author allows readers to see how the two sentences might be saying the same thing. But  he also shows how the voice and sentence structure can change in translation.

Training Day was published in 2021. There's currently 4 books in the World of ¡vamos! series. I think with the most current release of Tacos Today in March, 2023, that's why my local library had this and the other 4 books in the series on the new shelf. 

Amazon recommends this book for readers ages 6-8. I think that's a perfect age group for this book. If you know of a child that speaks English as their primary language and they're about to start learning Spanish in grades 1-3, get them this book! If you have a young readers in which English is a second language, get them to this book. Forget the age suggestions. Books like this one can be a valuable tool helping integrate Spanish speaking students who are learning English into the multilingual integrated classroom. 

I hope that Raul the Third continues to produce important learning tools such as this one. I also hope parents, guardians and teachers will use these books to teach both English and Spanish. 

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 10 out of 10 stars.

Lowriders to the Rescue (Family Comic Friday)

Lupe, Flapjack and Elirio, the Lowriders of outer space fame, return to earth in this 2022 graphic novel for young readers. When the automotive detailers of Los Angeles meet a young monarch butterfly named Sokar, they learn that her family is stranded in the wildfires of Northern California. But before going to rescue them, the Lowriders first help Flappy get some new glasses, assist a local shop in danger of going out of business, revitalize the run-down community center and solve the climate crisis! 

What really struck me was the artwork! Artist Raul the Third (such a cool name!) uses colored ink pens for the art. That cover of a flying car with flames shooting through the air was just amazing. I really thought that the art was pen but was thinking that it was just a computer program to make it look like it did. Yet at the end of the book writer Cathy Camper (10 Ways to Hear Snow) confirmed that it was the type of pens you might have used in high school that was the medium used here and I was in awe. Now I need to know how they were able to print the book without the inks fading... I must know these print secrets!

A large portion of this book is in different languages. Both Spanish and Arabic is used interchangeably by characters throughout the book. So, there's an educational aspect here. Thankfully, there are translations provided throughout the story. However, I thought on more than one occasion, an erroneous definition was thrown in that I couldn't match up with the dialogue. Maybe use footnotes to help the reader with this next time. 

This is the kind of children's graphic novel that Ron DeSantis would not be a fan of. It's got a lot of ideals and lessons that could be considered too liberal. Or just plain woke. I did think stylizing one of the antagonists to be like Donald Trump, all the way from the orange skin to blue suit with red tie was a bit too much. Not because of any sort of fan fare to the former POTUS. But because using Trump to be your villain just seemed to be a bit of a cop out and that the creators of this book just could have done better. And to make him the villain of a children's storybook just sends some sort of wrong message about our elected leaders, no matter how wrong they may be.

I thought a lot of the ideas that the Lowriders used to try to make not only their community but the world as a whole better were pretty clever. The use of the index to explain how similar ideas like a automobile tire made of food byproducts was really interesting. It helped to make many of the fantastic ideas thrown about in this book become more real. Though, I don't see a lot of younger readers engaging in that section of the book as the font is like at a 5 and there's no pictures. 

By the way, I'd love to see a soda container made out of an edible material as what Flappy comes up with. I just don't have a clue as to how you'd sell it without cross-contamination of such a thing.

I was rather thrown off by how much time transpires from when the Lowriders meet Sokar to when they actually go to save her family. It's not revealed until later in the book that the heroes' flying car can't operate in smoky conditions. But until that information came to light, I really felt like everyone had kinda put off the urgency to save the butterflies trapped in the wildfires upstate.

As for the wildfires themselves, that opening scene is jarring. There are animals on fire. A rather gruesome looking death, especially for a book recommended for readers aged 9-12. Sokar gets badly injured as well. The opener reminded me of the first 8 minutes of Saving Private Ryan; both of which made me kinda nauseous. I think parents are going to have to be ready to handle a lot of burning questions about the first act than anything else in this book.

Lowriders to the Rescue is multilingual, multicultural and with it's various different plots, multifaceted. The messages of unity, ecology and friendship are quite clear. But the pathways the writer used to get to the solutions felt a bit roadblocked.  This book probably will ruffle some feathers with those who feel that such difficult topics should be off limits to younger readers. That wasn't why I rate this book the way I did. I thought the opener was too raw for sensitive readers- to the point of inducing nightmares or possible panic attacks. In regards to that opener, some things that I felt were urgent were left on the back burner. This is the 4th book in the Lowriders in Space series. Perhaps if I had started with book 1, I might have felt differently. Or are those books just as in-your-face as well?

Worth Consuming!

Rating: 7 out of 10 stars.