Toon Books, which specializes in graphic novels for kids, has announced five releases for the Spring of 2016 headlined by Frank Viva’s Sea Change (May, 120 pages, $18.95, Ages 8+), a coming-of-age saga about a young boy who is sent away for the summer to a remote fishing village on the coast of Nova Scotia, a place that he hates at first, but learns to love over the course of a summer.

Another spring release aimed at eight year-olds and up is Oedipus: Trapped By Destiny (June, 48 pages, $16.95) by Yves Pommaux, the latest volume in the Toon Mythology series.  One of the positive trends in children’s literature over the past decade has been a renewed interest in mythology, and graphic novels like this give kids a way to learn more than is presented in the Rick Riordan novels.

Perhaps the most interesting of the five spring releases is James Sturm’s Birdsong: A Story in Pictures (April, 60-pages, $12.95, 5+), a word less collection of pictures inspired by Japanese Kamishibai (literally “paper drama”), a theatrical precursor of manga in which a storyteller narrates tales aided by illustrations that he changes to follow the story.  In Sturm’s tale an innocent bird meets two cruel children, but the images are open to various interpretations, so each viewer is forced to fill in the narration, which makes Birdsong a very interactive sort of graphic novel.

City kids won’t be the only ones interested in Kevin McCloskey’s The Real Poop on Pigeons (April, 40 pages, $12.95, 5+), though they may the ones who will have the easiest time seeing how accurate McCloskey’s well-researched and very funny look at those ubiquitous urban birds really is.

The “funny bird” theme is also central to the fifth Toon Books title of the Spring, Jean-Luc and Phillipe Coudray’s  A Goofy Guide to Penguins (May, 40 pages, $12.95, 5+), but this time there are no well-researched facts, just humorous flights of fancy that find the Tuxedo-clad avians carrying pink umbrellas and showering on the backs of whales.