These days, deciding what to get depressed about is like visiting a fabulous smorgasbord where the presentation is first-class and every delicious dish is cooked to perfection. Hmmm… what shall I have today? Let’s see… a generous spoonful of climate-change anxiety is guaranteed to make a good appetizer. Now let’s have some sides… umm… a little state of the economy worry is always tasty, and… where are they hiding it? Oh! There it is — it’s just not a meal without a steaming portion of AI apocalypticism. And now for the main course. Well, we all know that there’s nothing as filling as… er, let’s just stop there, shall we?

For myself, I tend to go in for the more exotic entrees. For instance, one of my favorites is a heaping plateful of “dammit, kids just don’t read comic books as much as they did when I was their age!” Though it might not be enough for a whole meal, it is something that I frequently find myself chewing on.

It’s true, too — in my role as a fourth-grade teacher, I spend every day in the company of elementary-age children, and I can attest that actual comic books play almost no role in their lives, certainly compared with the space those gaudy booklets took up in my life — and my bedroom closet — when I was a child.

Well, who can blame them? What does a comic book cost today, anyway? Three or four bucks? (Back in the 70’s, I only had to cadge twenty cents or a quarter from my parents to buy an issue of The Flash or House of Mystery.) And aside from cash flow problems, there are video games and Tiktok and VR headsets and texting friends and all the other ways youngsters can waste time… er, engage themselves online, almost none of which foster a love of reading in any of its forms. That being the case, it’s certainly no surprise that 21st century kids leave comic books to aging specimens like… well, me.

Of course, children do know hordes of characters who originally sprung from the four-color pages, but their acquaintance with and knowledge of those characters is entirely based on their movie versions, which leads to certain, shall I say, deformations, like knowing countless more Marvel characters than DC ones (Green Lantern? Who’s that?), and operating under the absurd (if not outright criminal) delusion that Batman could somehow kick Superman’s butt.

All is not lost, however. Today’s Troubled Youth remain susceptible to the pleasures that can be found in good graphic storytelling. The first thing to do when you go fishing, though, is to make sure you have the right bait. A few years ago, thanks to the recommendation of my librarian daughter Samantha, I discovered Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales, and from that day on, my class hasn’t looked back.

Written and illustrated by a guy actually named Nathan Hale (no relation to the original), the Hazardous Tales is a series of twelve books, each of which focuses on a dramatic, dangerous, usually violent and bloody episode in (mostly) American history. The volumes are:

One Dead Spy (the original Nathan Hale and the American Revolution)

Big Bad Ironclad (the clash of the Monitor and the Merrimac in the American Civil War)

Donner Dinner Party (you know)

Treaties, Trenches, Mud, and Blood (the Western Front in World War One)

The Underground Abductor (Araminta Ross and the Underground Railroad)

Alamo All-Stars (Crockett, Bowie, Houston, and the Texas War of Independence)

Raid of No Return (the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo)

Lafayette! (the heroic Marquis helps pull the rug out from under the British Empire)

Major Impossible (John Wesley Powell’s white-knuckle exploration of the Grand Canyon)

Blades of Freedom (Toussaint L’Ouverture and the 1791 Haitian slave revolt)

Cold War Correspondent (Marguerite Higgins’ front-line Korean War reporting)

Above the Trenches (the air war in World War One)

The central conceit of the series is that the ghosts of Nathan Hale, the British officer who supervised at his execution, and the Hangman who tied the knot, travel together through time and space to see what was going on at other significant (and grisly) moments in history. There’s plenty of silly banter between our lead characters, much (though not all) of it of the sort that especially appeals to kids, but it does serve to lighten the many grimmer moments that Hale necessarily deals with. (People with low pun resistance are advised to read the books only under a doctor’s supervision.) In later entries the original trio is joined by the ghost of Bill Richmond, an African-American prizefighter who was a witness at Hale’s 1776 execution.

Each volume is about 130 pages long, and Hale sticks with one very limited color scheme for each book — pale pinks, reds and browns for One Dead Spy, teal green for Donner Dinner Party, blue for Raid of No Return etc. Physically, the books are small (seven and a half by five and a half inch) hardcovers that I could almost call elegant. They’re sturdy enough so that I expect my personal copies to last for the rest of my life, but some of the ones in my classroom have been read literally to tatters, which speaks for their popularity.

The back cover of each book features a color-coded “Hazard Level”, along with a jaunty preview of just what you’re in for, features that are sure to whet the appetite of even the least susceptible reader. For instance, the Alamo All-Stars earns a rating of “Purple: Doomed; punching, biting, grinning, big knives, filibustering, cholera, finger shooting, stabbing, slicing, dueling, firing squads, presidential coups, hard drinking, arson, artillery, snipers, and too many fandangos.” Who could resist?

Small though the pages are, Hale packs them with panels, sometimes as many as twelve or thirteen or more. He has a lot of information to convey and he doesn’t scrimp on any of it, cramming the books with maps and diagrams and all kinds of in-depth information which you might think would be off-putting to ten-year olds (there are even bibliography pages at the end), but my students love them, and Hale’s refusal to cut corners or dumb down his material makes these books engrossing reads for history lovers of any age. (In some ways they remind me of the Library of Victorian Murder books that the great Rick Geary did many years ago.)

If there’s a young person in your life that you want to lure away from the screen and get interested in reading, Nathan Hale’s Hazardous Tales have earned the highest recommendation of someone crazy enough to have locked himself up with a roomful of ten-year olds every weekday for the last two decades, and if you’re an adult reader with an interest in history and visual storytelling, you can do no better than give this fine series a try. Even the most knowledgeable history buffs will often find out something they didn’t know, like the vital role exploding whales played in the War in the Pacific.

Want to know more? Read Raid of No Return! As we used to say when we were kids, once you read one, you’ll want to collect ’em all!

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Thomas Parker is a native Southern Californian and a lifelong science fiction, fantasy, and mystery fan. When not corrupting the next generation as a fourth grade teacher, he collects Roger Corman movies, Silver Age comic books, Ace doubles, and despairing looks from his wife. His last article for us was After Fifty Years: Childhood’s End