By George O'Connor
The beginning of Greek mythology as a full-color comic that doesn't flinch: Kronos takes a sickle to his father, swallows his own babies whole, and Zeus grows up to take the sky off him.
George O'Connor starts where the mythology actually starts, before any of the heroes: with Chaos, with Gaia the earth and Ouranos the sky, and with Ouranos shoving his monstrous children back inside their mother so he never has to look at them. Gaia hands her son Kronos a sickle. Kronos overthrows his father with it, takes the throne, and then, warned that his own child will do the same to him, swallows each of his babies the moment they are born. Rhea hides the sixth. That baby is Zeus. He grows up in secret, gets his brothers and sisters back out of his father's belly, frees the hundred-handed monsters from under the earth, and fights the Titans for ten years for the right to rule. O'Connor draws it big, bright, and cosmic, and there are god profiles, notes, and a proper reading list in the back.
Some children have read the friendly retellings and figured out that something's being kept from them. This is their book. The gentle collections hand you the reassurance and cut the horror; O'Connor does the reverse, and he trusts your child with it. So the war between the Titans and the young gods finally reads like what it's supposed to be, a real fight between generations of gods, and Kronos comes across as genuinely frightening instead of a cartoon villain. It also fixes a specific problem: the child who loves Percy Jackson but can't get through a page of old-fashioned myth prose can read this in an afternoon and come out knowing the real material. There are a dozen volumes behind it, one god at a time, so a child who takes to it is set for a good while.