Graphic Novels

 

The graphic novel that I chose was "Shop Cats of China", by Marcel Heijnen. This isn't the graphic novel in the typical sense, but I felt it sufficed because it used images and words to tell a story. The pictures show a typical day in a shopper's market in China, and one aspect of Chinese markets is the shop owners tend to let stray cats live in their shops. The cats chase and kill mice and rats that destroy the products. Reading this book and looking at the pictures told an interesting story about China, a story I didn't realize was reality. I'm also a big cat person, so naturally I would be drawn to content like this. Accompanying each image is a haiku written in the typical Japanese format; the haikus were meant to show the reader what the cat was thinking in each image. Some were funny, others were sweet and cute. It was super cool to learn how street markets in China typically operate and what they look like, and I also really enjoyed the fact that shop owners used cats to their advantage. Reading this book definitely brightened my day.