The Silver Six

In a bleak and urbanized future Boston, self-sufficient 12-year-old Phoebe Hemingway’s luck runs out when she is found illegally living on her own and is placed into child welfare services. It’s been a year since her parents and 10 others died in a shuttle accident while working for Craven Industries, an unscrupulous and omnipresent energy corporation that supplies the world with power. CEO Hayden Craven has an interest in Phoebe and pursues her relentlessly after she and five other kids escape the prisonlike orphanage to an abundantly vegetated moon. The six eventually discover that their parents all died in the same shuttle explosion, which certainly wasn’t an accident, and that whatever they were involved with could bring down Craven. In their first comic for young readers, Lieberman (Harvest) and Rawlings deliver an earnest and enjoyable SF adventure, balancing thrilling action with chirpy dialogue, ably rendered in Rawlings’s Blade Runner–meets-Nickelodeon cartooning. The likeability of the characters shines through the somewhat formulaic plot, but the creators are clearly enjoying themselves, showing readers just how much can be overcome by working together. Ages 8–12. (July)