High school | Daddy Mojo

The Mad Files Review: Nostalgia and Humor Explored

I bought a Mad Magazine at our local comic book store a couple of years ago. As a teenager, back in the early-to-mid 80’s, I read Mad Magazine quite often. My friends and I would sleep over, share our monthly copies, bring the Mad paperback books we’d collected, read silently and occasionally repeat one of the jokes aloud. My favorite flip-flopped between the art by Sergio Aragones, Spy Vs. Spy, and the Snappy Answers to Stupid Questions segments. If The Mad Files: Writers and Cartoonists on the Magazine that Warped America’s Brain! had a song that played along while you were reading it would be Little River Band and Reminiscing.

The Mad Files, a collection of funny and thought-provoking essays about the genius irreverence of Mad Magazine brings back good love.

Take an essay-bourne trip down Mad Magazine Memory lane

Discover a Zen Monk’s Guide to Peaceful Living

So, you’re telling me it’s not a problem if I wander without direction or purpose through life? No, that is not what the book, nor I, are saying that’s what you should do or how you should act. It’s Okay Not to Look for the Meaning of Life: A Zen Monk’s Guide to Living Stress-Free One Day at a Time sounds like it could be an alternate title to a Korean drama or a positive affirmation statement you’d see in a middle school. However, in the latter situation, those students might’ve taken it as a carte blanche to do even less than their doing now. This is not a Spicoli get-out-of-jail-free card, it’s simply a book that encourages you to take a step back and think.

It’s Okay Not to Look for the Meaning of Life is immediately disarming and puts living stress-free in the driver’s seat with vignettes on living a more chill version of you.

Stop, collaborate and zen

The Snow Woman and Other Yokai Stories From Japan delivers the folky creeps

Do you remember a couple of years ago when Yo-Kai Watch became a semi-phenomena outside of Japan? For a moment there were a couple of the cool, elementary kids, who were down with a magical watch that allowed them to see ghosts and monsters. The Snow Woman and Other Yokai Stories From Japan is jammed with 77 short stories about ghosts, spirits, mysterious people, samurai, and a handful of recent stories that blur the line between reality, paranoia and tall tales. Japan is an ancient country with thousands of years of history that has yielded stories still woven into folklore and pop culture today. These stories survived for so long due to being handed down or told from one generation to the next. It wasn’t until modern times that these stories, as well as, folktales from other cultures, were written down.

Folk AF and the better for it

Westfallen is mglit that perfectly baits the hook and rewards readers

Westfallen is the mglit book that you didn’t know that you needed. In this case the ‘you’ that we’re referencing are upper-elementary, middle school or just those good-time readers who want to engage in a solidly paced, semi-plausible action novel that feels like something that makes you think ‘they don’t make em like that anymore’. Westfallen also flies in the face of recent mglit books that brazenly start their book series by putting a number on its spine. I’m all for optimistic thinking, but stating the goal that more books in the series will follow this one, before establishing their awesomeness is a practice that’s fallen far short lately.

Westfallen is the adventure of two trios of kids, separated by 80 years who are communicating via a radio they found in the waning days of WWII.

Start with the end in mind when creating a series

Ready or Not, a teen-graphic novel that’s build just for them

Ready or Not is a graphic novel that isn’t quite what you think it will be. The cover shows a group of four upper-teenage friends on the roof discussing and looking like the typical teens who might have just graduated from high school. One of them is even wearing a beanie in early August, which is a fashion statement for the only 17-year-olds or those who can’t discern when their body temperature is uncomfortably hot and if only there were something simple that they could do like remove a wool cap. Now get off of my lawn. Ready or Not is an example of the graphic novel as a communication device for high school readers who need to see that people are just like them. Other teens, even ones that are shown in a graphic novel, but are in their same generation, will empathize with the characters and hopefully apply those lessons to themselves.

Ready or Not is a coming-of-age graphic novel geared at high school students that’s better than you think it is.

high school teen Breakfast Club Jam

Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition, a searing, timeless graphic novel

There’s something special about a book being out of print for a while. The classic animated Disney films used to go “in the vault” and then had a big hoop-de-do when they could be viewed again. Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition was out of print for over a decade. The only way to get your hands on it was to find the original two-issue comic book miniseries from 1997 or the graphic novel that followed its release. The 2024 presidential election is nigh and Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition is as pointed and aware as it was when it was originally released. It’s a beautiful, paranoid fever dream of a graphic novel that sears its way through the political spectrum leaving both sides wondering what went wrong with modern America.

Uncle Sam: Special Election Edition is a reissued, timeless, relevant graphic novel that’s just as powerful, now as it was in 1997.

Wow. A graphic novel that commands your attention.

Exoplanets, STEM that reaches wide from elementary to high

Exoplanets: A Guide to the Worlds Outside our Solar System is illustrated wonderment at the planets that reside in another neighborhood.

Somehow or another, Exoplanets: A Guide to the Worlds Outside our Solar System snuck past my review radar. Oh it landed in our office, but it gravitated towards our reference books and not in the ‘new’ books to review area. Exoplanets prematurely made its way into our ‘forever’ book stack, instead of the working book column that gets cycled through and written up. It certainly would’ve helped had we read Exoplanets when it was initially released because at that time we were planning our 2023 Dragon Con interviews. At that event we chatted with a handful of scientists researching conditions on various planets and the propulsion methods that astronauts would use to get there. Even though Exoplanets is an illustrated book, a medium that’s stereotypically thought of as a children’s book; it’s testament to the equally correct belief that just because the book is intended for children, it can reach far beyond its target audience.

Space, the frontier is calling you.

Olivetti, mglit that makes you believe that a typewriter can communicate

If these walls could talk. The aspect of inanimate objects communicating or having personalities is a fun way to think isn’t it? The walls of a school would have a different story than that of a hospital and a home would be something much more personal. Olivetti is the story of a typewriter and how it came to communicate with the family where it’s lived for years. Kids, a typewriter is a manual device that would create documents when the keys are pressed down. The hammer would physically move the specific letter that you pressed before raising a thin film of ink that would allow the indention of said key to create the letter on the paper upon impact. It’s also a go-to for some creative types who like the tactile process of creating manuscripts and find the clacking sound of keys rapidly and correctly hitting their intended destination soothing, cathartic, and an enhancement to the process. As a novel, Olivetti is a charming throwback of an mglit book that asks you to suspend belief, and then effortlessly brings you along if you chose to believe that a typewriter has a personality all its own.

Olivetti is mglit that delivers heart and a strong story in a very sneaky way that will charm reluctant readers and make fans of the genre happy too.

See: Charming and surprising