A few weeks back, I got two new comics in the mail from great new-ish comics publisher First Second Books. They're both worth your time.

The Eternal Smile is a collaboration between young cartoonists Gene Luen Yang (author of the rightly-celebrated autobio-comic American Born Chinese) and Derek Kirk Kim (author of the very good Same Difference and Other Stories). It's made up of three stories that are slightly thematically linked. All three stories are about imagination.

The first story, "Duncan's Kingdom," is the weakest of the three. It's about a young man who could potentially save a magical kingdom. There's a twist, obviously, and it gets a little schmaltzy. The second story is basically an homage to those great old Carl Barks Uncle Scrooge books. Called "Gran'Pa Greenbax and the Eternal Smile," it's about a greedy old frog and his attempts to become the richest frog in the world. It's a fun story with a bit of a ridiculous sci-fi twist thrown in. Unlike the first story's twist, this one really works. The third story, "Urgent Request," about a lonely office worker who becomes seduced by a Nigerian e-mail scammer, is perhaps the best of the lot. It's sweet and sad and hopeful, the work of two young men who are starting to figure out what they can do with the medium.

On the whole, The Eternal Smile would work for teenage readers, but Adventures in Cartooning is intended for kids. As in, kids who just learned how to read. A knight goes on a quest to defeat a giant dragon and he's assisted by a cute little elf who teaches him the physics of cartooning along the way. ("Comics are made up of many little picture boxes which are called panels!!!...without panels, it looks like you are surrounded by four elves. Now, with panels, you can see it's just me flying around! Panels make it easy to see how things happen over time!") It's a great little art instruction book for boys and girls who like to doodle but haven't quiet put together how to make those doodles tell a story. Cartooning could be a bit more instructional, but it serves as kind of an Understanding Comics for the kindergarten set. I hope every library in America gets a copy, because as a comics instruction textbook, there's nothing else quite like it.

First Second fills an important hole in comics publishing: It's not as Serious-Arty as Fantagraphics or Drawn & Quarterly, but it's not as disposable as much of Marvel or DC's output. They're solid books for general-interest readers, and both these books are great introductions to the publisher. You should check them out the next time you're at the bookstore.