The Stan Lee Excelsior Award is the only children’s book prize in the UK dedicated to graphic novels and comics. Every year the Junior Literary Society meet to cast a critical eye over the latest shortlist and eventually decide which of the books will be the Emanuel School winner in the wider national competition.
Capucine, Jadyn, Jake, Emma, Alexander, Ellen, Sophie, Hope and Atitiya all spent five minutes reading each of the seven shortlisted before moving onto the next one, casting a critical eye over the selection. We will be repeating the process in the next meeting on Monday 24th January, when we choose our winner. The four criteria for judging the winning book we will be using are story, artwork quality, characters and dialogue.
As always with the Excelsior Award there is a weird, wonderful, striking and original range to choose from. However, from first impressions, “Skyward: My Lo-G Life”, where gravity disappears, raised more than a few chuckles from the group and is the obvious front-runner. “Supergirl: Being Super” and “Heavy Vinyl: Riot on the Radio” were also good fun.
All the books in the 11-14 age category are in the library for any pupils who would like to find out more about the Excelsior Award or try the books. The library also has the shortlists from all previous years the competition has been running.
Find out more about the Excelsior Award here.
Mr Jones (Senior Librarian)