SINGAPORE – The reopening of the National Library Board’s (NLB) Central Public Library on Jan 12 following a revamp reminded me that during the pandemic, scores of people discovered NLB’s trove of e-books.
I was one of them and was delighted to find that its digital collection was wider than expected, especially in the realm of comics and graphic novels, pleasures that I had given up years ago because of the cost.
I have never been tempted by a Batman or Superman comic, but I gorged on NLB’s Old Man Logan collection featuring Marvel Comics’ Wolverine as a man past his prime, which was adapted for the movie Logan (2017).
The Old Man Logan comics have a griminess and toughness missing from standard superhero fare.
Here are more works that offer storytelling magic for grown-ups, all available for borrowing on mobile phones, tablets and PCs.
Some titles are a few years old, but are included here because they offer a great introduction to the writer.
The most recent works take some time to be included in the library’s collection. The newest e-books also often have longer wait times for borrowing because of their popularity, so why not dive into older material while you are waiting?
1. Hungry Ghost (2023) by Victoria Ying
People might be wary of American authors offering therapeutic literature, but I gave this winner of the 2023 Harvey Award for Best Children’s or Young Adult Book a chance, and do not regret it.
Valerie Chu is a Chinese-American teen who appears to be the perfect child, socially at ease, academically gifted and thin.
Her dirty secret is disordered eating, stemming from her need to conform to her mother’s abhorrence of the standard American physique.
In cleanly drawn panels that are light on dialogue and free of melodramatic cliches, book’s writer and illustrator Ying shows how poisonous well-meaning parental control can be. Giving a child a complex about food is especially insidious as it turns an event carried out three times a day into three daily opportunities for self-inflicted suffering, says Ying.
Extra marks for the clever title, which refers to the Chinese spiritual belief as well as Valerie’s constant but invisible state of ravenousness.
All hungry ghosts think about is food, as does Valerie.