Publisher: Stone Arch Books
Publication Date: 2012
Perfect Bound: Appox 120 pages
Various authors
When Tony Hawk landed the first-ever 900… EVERYTHING CHANGED. A mysterious force shattered his board and scattered the pieces across the globe. Now, a talented group of teens unite in a quest to bring the board — and its power – together again.
That’s the level of corniness you have to overcome immediately in this series of books aimed as pre-teens you’d have to assume. Teens aren’t going to put up with that unless there are wizards involved. Maybe this is sone strange way to combine Extreme Sports and the supernatural. Each book is about 120 pages long and includes the same 2 page intro in graphic novel style, plus 16 pages of graphic novel style content towards the end of the book, drawn in a sort of generic style.
The end of each book also contains a (the same) Tony Hawk bio and a bio and short Q&A from the author. The books have various authors and some authors have written at least 2 books I the short sample size I was sent. There’s also a bio of a character bio at the end, and they got lazy on some of these books because the code name is sometimes their first or last name. Not much of a code there.
Here’s some details of the covers. Prerelease versions featured a single backwards mounted truck on cover of “Tunnel Vision,” a setup that would have resulted in an immediate slam as soon as Omar dropped in. They sort of fixed that… It’s still got one backwards mounted truck but the kingpin is covered up so it’s not as noticeable. I can imagine the conversation went something like “Hey man, you need to fix this illustration, his truck is on backwards!” followed by the illustrator scratching their head and turning in another one. The publishers either didn’t notice it or they didn’t want to pay the illustrator to draw it a third time.
Are these books any good? I don’t know. I couldn’t put myself in the mindset of the target audience, but I suppose they action sports tie in and the supernatural might convince and engage some young kids into reading this series. They could have made them more engaging by adding a little more graphic novel content in between chapters, but they probably didn’t want to pay for that. I’m not sure how hard Tony looked into these before he agreed to license his name and likeness to this project. Was it more or less than the BMX bikes to be sold at Target? This is probably less controversial for sure. It’s for the kids, and reading is fundamental!
More Info: TonyHawkReadingRevolution.com