Thunder From the Sea: The Adventures of Jack Hoyton and the H.M.S. Defender - Hardcover

Jeff Weigel is the creator of Atomic Ace (He’s Just My Dad!) and Atomic Ace and the Robot Rampage. He lives in Belleville, Illinois.

In this historical-adventure graphic novel, 12-year-old Jack Hoyton enlists in the Royal Navy during the Napoleonic Wars period. On board the HMS Defender he soon learns that a sailor's life is full of hard, boring, sometimes dangerous work. The Defender, a midsize ship, has been on blockade duty along the French coast, plagued by the guns at Dumont. When some of the ship's crew go ashore to capture the battery, they are betrayed and only Jack is small enough to escape through the bars and warn the ship—just in time to fight with a much larger French ship. The book provides explanatory notes on each page; it also includes a bibliography and suggests further reading such as C. S. Forester's Horatio Hornblower series. Weigel's old-fashioned comics art shows lots of authentic details of eighteenth-century shipboard life, and there is some battle violence, including images of characters being shot. This picture-book-size graphic novel should find a ready audience of young adventure-loving readers. Grades 3-5. --Kat Kan