Giants Beware! by Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre

Diminutive Claudette might be small in stature, but she makes up for her vertical challenge in spunk and persistence. She is certain that there is a baby-feet-eating giant in the forest beyond her village and even though everyone else in the village just wants to ignore the problem, Claudette insists that she go out and kill the baby-feet-eating giant. So she tricks her aspiring chef of a little brother and her aspiring princess of a best friend into going with her on a quest to kill the giant. When word gets back to Claudette's father of her plan, he soon has the whole town searching for her so she can make it back home before she finds the giant. But as Claudette soon discovers, just because you find a giant, doesn't mean that you know how to kill it once you do.

Giants Beware! was a complete surprise to me. Truth be told, I only picked it up and purchased it at the Kids Read Comics event in Ann Arbor because there was a pug on the cover. I really had no interest in reading about giants. But it didn't take long for me to realize that Giants Beware! is a genre-defying graphic novel. I have explained many times on this blog that fantasy is not a genre I have been able to do much bonding with. It just doesn't speak to me. But humorous fantasy such as The Hero's Guide to Saving Your Kingdom and Bad Taste in Boys does speak to me because it almost subverts the fantasy tropes and pokes fun at them.

The characters in this graphic novel are also what kept me interested and laughing out loud the whole time. Cluadette's obsession with slaying giants and her feisty defiance of the adults she encounters is comedy gold. And her brother Gaston's culinary ambitions are certainly worthy of some laugh out loud moments as he treks a whole menagerie of cooking supplies with him in the forest so he can not just have sustenance, but so he can continue to prove his culinary skills to his family and friends.

Reading Giants Beware! made it quite obvious that both Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre have worked in animation and TV. I could easily see these characters and this story becoming a TV series. In fact, I really hope it does.

  
Giants Beware! by Rafael Rosado and Jorge Aguirre*
Published: April 12, 2012
Publisher: First Second
Pages: 208
Genre: Fantasy/Graphic Novel
Audience: Middle Grade
Disclosure: Purchased Copy

*Purchasing the book from the above Bookshop affiliate link supports independent bookstores and gives me a small percentage of the sale.