Overview

The first book collection of Heart of the City comics by the strip’s new creator, Steenz, who packs the daily comic strip with outstanding art, a more diverse cast of characters, and engaging, positive storylines about friendship, drama, ghost stories, pop culture, and real-world issues. Heart is a girl with big dreams living in Philadelphia with her single mom. Heart loves theatre, but like many middle schoolers, she runs into plenty of drama off-stage, too. Luckily she has her two best friends, Dean and Kat, to help. School plays, cliques, and rumours may all take centre stage – with real-world family concerns and social issues playing bigger and bigger roles – but together, they can navigate any challenge. In her first year writing and illustrating the longstanding syndicated comic Heart of the City, award-winning writer/illustrator Steenz creates a diverse, positive, and welcoming tone for the strip that will pique the interest of middle grade readers and provide parents and teachers with talking points, laughs, and inspiration to dig deeper into their own senses of humour, creativity, and imagination.

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9781524871598

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Reviews

Gr 4-8 - Philadelphia-based middle school student Heart Lamarr leads the life of a typical middle-class teen: making new friends; going to sleepovers, parties, and concerts; and begging her mother to let her get her ears pierced. But what she's most interested in is starring in the next school play, if only she can stay out of detention long enough to audition. This graphic novel is a compilation of strips from the daily syndicate of the same name-created by Mark Tatulli in the late 1990s and taken over by Steenz in 2020-which gives it a page-by-page episodic feel, while also maintaining a longer story arc that is sporadically interrupted by an out-of-sequence, single panel. However, because the source material is an ongoing story, the graphic novel ends abruptly. The characters are modernized and older than who they debuted as in the 1990s, but Heart doesn't stray far from the mostly harmless rascal-next-door character popularized by comics of yore ( Dennis the Menace, Calvin and Hobbes, etc.). Blues, gray, and beige dominate, with pops of warm colors (red, pink, orange) that complement the minimalist backgrounds and solid line work, as well as the characters' rounded, full designs. Characters are diverse in terms of body type and LGBTQIA+ representation. Heart is white, her friend Charlotte is Black, and some background characters present as BIPOC, though many appear to be white. VERDICT Readers who enjoy slice-of-life stories that focus on friendship will appreciate Heart's story, which subtly and naturally offers positive diverse representation. (Alea Perez, School Library Journal)

Author Information

Christina Stewart, known as Steenz, is a St. Louis-based cartoonist, editor, and professor. She's the cartoonist on the syndicated comic strip Heart Of The City, the co-creator of Dwayne McDuffie Award-winning graphic novel Archival Quality (Oni Press), and is featured in short story anthologies such as Eisner and Ignatz Award-winning ELEMENTS: Fire, Mine!, and Dead Beats. Steenz launched and edited the popular RPG periodical Rolled & Told. She participates in and creates community-building comics-related programming, and is a frequent panelist at comic cons. Steenz currently teaches cartooning at Webster University while editing titles from Mad Cave Studios. She lives with her husband, two cats, and watches a lot of esoteric social documentaries.

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