Thank you to netgalley and the publisher for giving me access to the advanced copy of this book to read.

A young boy is told that his grandfather went to a better place. So armed with his favorite comic book this sidekick goes on a quest to find his grandfather.

So I knew that Grandfather was going to die, it is in the description of the book, so when you see the first page of the two of them dressed as their favorite comic duo the feels start right away. Normally I am not a person who cries at fictional death. But the first time I read Better Place I cried so many tears. Tears of happiness and tears of sadness. I cried for a little boy who doesn't understand where his grandfather is. When I say cry I don't mean I got teary eyed. I mean full tears, crying hard enough the pages of the book got blurry.

Then release day came. This story came out on the New Comic Book Day that my aunt passed away after fighting MS. It was like I became that little boy. I cried because I saw myself. Wanting desperately to put on my own comic book costume and find her. Duane Murray wrote a story that walked me through the stages of grief. Even writing this review right now I am getting teary eyed. This book is going to help so many people!

The art is by Shawn Daley, who also did the art for Samuari Grandpa and I cannot imagine a better artist for this story. You can see every emotion. The book is mostly black and white, but the scenes with the comic book add splashes of red to the book and the costumes which just adds so much.

It isn't often you come across a book that is perfect. There is nothing I would change and I cannot wait to get this into the hands of my students. If you haven't read Better Place you need to fix that now! If I could I would give this more than 5 stars!

Creative Team:
Story: Duane Murray
Art: Shawn Daley

I think the moral of this story was to preserve a sense of fun and memories of those you love, but the main lesson I took from it was don't be vague with your children about death. The characters were well fleshed out, and the art was charming, but the plot had too many easy coincidences to be really interesting.

Dylan and his grandfather are inseparable – Red Rocket and Cosmo Kid. When his grandfather ends up in the Better Place, Dylan goes on a mission to find him. Meeting many people along the way that try to help him… but finding out the Better Place is more than a physical location, is really hard on Dylan and his mom.

What a sad, yet comforting story. The illustrations are nice. I like the colored pages for the imagination and comic book frames. The graphic novel does a great job taking a rather hard topic and adding some humorous twists. The last frame brought tears to my eyes.

One question I had, about size. What size will this be published in? There were many frames and the dialogue was sometimes really hard to read without zooming in – I don’t think my eyes are that bad. Hopefully this book is published larger than the average graphic novel, so the text is readable.

Thank you Netgalley and IDW Publishing for this ARC. I look forward to sharing this book with my students.

Read this before Nutflix make a movie out of it. Just bloody read it. The main character is a young lad whose entire life is taken up with pretending to be the spacemen in his favourite comic, but luckily enough, while his single parent mother is too busy to engage, his granddad is all too keen to encourage such imaginative, outdoorsy pursuits. But when an exasperated mother wants the old man packed away into a home, only for such a request to be irrelevant, our juvenile hero is insistent on getting the pair of them back together for more adventures.

What follows is a lot more winsome, charming and sprightly than the mawkish version of this existing in an alternative universe. It's like "The Straight Story" twinned with all those seize-the-day dramas concerning children, whose names escape me because they're not really interesting. This certainly was – the subtle colouring, when the characters from the comic are brought to life, is just one sign of how classy this is. The art style was a little more rough and ready than I'd normally go for, but the emotion of the piece is certainly coming through, and the large proportion of wordless panels shows off the characters and the high drama of it all perfectly. It's one of the more finely crafted graphic stories of the year, and I honestly can see Hollywood coming a-knocking. The better place to experience this will always be on these pages, however.