French illustrator Regis Faller's The Adventures of Polo is a comic book suitable for very young children. At three, Z finds it absolutely thrilling, and has progressed rapidly from suprised laughter at Polo's antics to a deep affection for this book and an interest in sustained solo reading - she's been doing a bit of this for a while, but the consistency and sustained interest this book inspires is unusual. The wordless book, in addition to being a source of continual amusement to her, is teaching her to read from left to right, from the top to the bottom of the page, and from the lefthand page to the righthand one. "Reading" the book to her is an exercise in finger-pointing from one panel to the next, short silences, copious sound effects, and a lot of shared laughter.

Faller's 2007 follow-up, Polo: The Runaway Book, is great too.

This post from the ZRecs Archives was first published October 24, 2007. - Jeremiah