By Rick Riordan, Robert Venditti
The whole Percy Jackson story your child is building toward, told in full-color comic panels first, so they get the plot and the thrill before they tackle the novel.
This is Percy's origin story in graphic-novel form. Twelve-year-old Percy Jackson finds out he's a demigod, the son of a Greek god, and that the monsters of myth are real and coming after him. Framed for stealing Zeus's master lightning bolt, he sets off across the country with his friends Annabeth and Grover to find the real thief before the gods go to war. It's the same adventure as the novel, adapted by Robert Venditti with bold, fast art by Attila Futaki, so a child gets the beats and the excitement carried by pictures.
This is the clever middle rung of the climb toward Percy Jackson. A child who isn't quite ready to sit with the 375-page novel can meet Percy, Annabeth, and Grover here, get the entire plot, and fall for the world at graphic-novel speed. The pictures carry the harder monsters and the mythology, so the reading load is light while the story is exactly the real thing. When they later pick up the novel further along this trail, they'll already know and love the characters, which makes the longer book feel like a reunion instead of a wall.