In this electrifying graphic novel debut, Polish animator and cartoonist Wojtek Wawszczyk uses magical realism to tell a moving tale of finding light in a life full of darkness. Mirroring the world we live in, the protagonist of this graphic novel comes from a broken home. However, in this case, the term is quite literal. Due to freak accidents at the steelworks where his parents work, his mom is snapped, his dad is flattened. As if that wasn’t enough to deal with, one day, he suffers his own life changing experience: mistakenly swallowing a glob of molten metal gives him the strange power to radiate heat and light like a lightbulb. As he grows up, evolving from Bulb Boy to Mr. Lightbulb, he finds that his unique abilities can be a curse and a blessing; while they alienate him from others, they also allow him to shine.
Poland
Materials from Poland
Goblin Market
In this story inspired by Polish folklore, two sisters face a goblin prince in the dark forest.
Marie Curie: A Life Of Discovery
“A graphic account of a pioneering scientist who conducted innovative research on radioactivity. Marie Curie was the first woman to win a Nobel Prize, the only person to win a Nobel Prize in two different sciences, and first woman to become a professor at the University of Paris.”
Malo And The Merry-Go-Round
“Malo the shrew promised to make pickles with Poto-but when he hears there’s a new merry-go-round in the forest, he selfishly sneaks off to find it, learning lessons about the importance of kindness, friendship, and integrity in the end”
The Silent Unseen: A Novel Of World War Ii
In July 1944, as the Red Army drives the Nazis out of Poland, sixteen-year-old Maria Kamińska must work with a captured Ukrainian nationalist to find her brother, who is a special operations agent and leader of a Polish Resistance squad, when he disappears while on a mission.
The Seventh Voyage
In this graphic adaptation of a story by Stanislaw Lem, a meteoroid damages astronaut and space traveller Ijon’s spaceship, and he finds himself caught in a time loop, contending with past and future versions of himself.
The Button War
Patryk and Jurek are as much friends as rivals in the small Russian-occupied Polish village where they live. When, in August 1914, Patryk finds an old button on the forest floor, Jurek becomes wildly jealous. Not long after, World War I comes to Poland, bringing one invading army after another to the village. Jurek devises an exciting dare among the seven boys in their pack: whoever steals the best military button will be Button King. The boys agree. The contest is on. The competition escalates from stealing uniform buttons on a wash line to looting the bodies of dead soldiers to setting up an ambush. Leading the charge is Jurek, who will do anything to be Button King. It’s only Patryk who tries to stop Jurek’s increasingly dangerous game before it leads to deadly consequences.
It Rained Warm Bread
A fictionalized account of the experiences of a Polish Jew, Moishe, who with his parents, brother, and sister, struggles to survive the Nazi invasion and Holocaust.
Someday We Will Fly
Lillia, fifteen, flees Warsaw with her father and baby sister in 1940 to try to make a new start in Shanghai, China, but the conflict grows more intense as America and Japan become involved.
Resistance
In 1942 sixteen-year-old Chaya Lindner is a Jewish girl living in Nazi-occupied Poland, a courier who smuggles food and documents to the isolated Jewish ghettos in southern Poland, depending on her forged papers and “Aryan” features–but when a mission goes wrong and many of her colleagues are arrested she finds herself on a journey to Warsaw, where an uprising is in the works.