Little Monarchs

This middle grade graphic novel explores monarch butterfly migration through an imaginative adventure that takes place far in the future after a sun shift changes life on earth as we know it.

It's been fifty years since sun sickness wiped out nearly all mammal life across the earth. Towns and cities are abandoned relics. Autonomous machines maintain roadways here and there, but otherwise the world is being slowly reclaimed by nature. The few communities of surviving people keep to themselves in underground sites, only able to come out at night. But now there are two humans who can survive during daylight--10-year-old Elvie and her caretaker, Flora, a biologist, who has made an incredible discovery of how to make an antidote to sun sickness from the scales on monarch butterfly wings. Free to travel during the day, they are on a mission to develop a vaccine that will permanently protect people from sun sickness and save humanity from extinction.

To do this, Elvie and Flora must follow the monarchs as they migrate through what was once the western United States, but making the medicine is laborious, and the effects are temporary. Will they discover a way to go from an antidote to a vaccine and preserve what remains of humanity, or will they fall to natural disaster, sickness, or even the very people they're trying to save?

Little Monarchs is a new kind of graphic novel adventure-one that invites readers to take an intimate look at the natural world and the secrets hidden within. The book's entire narrative occupies real locations all marked panel-by-panel with coordinates and a compass heading. Curious readers could follow the characters' travel routes, see the same landscapes, and study the same plants and animals that exist in these places-a secluded butterfly grove on the California coast, or a hot-springs in the high desert. Through both comic narrative and journal entries, readers can learn the basics of star navigation, how to tie useful knots, how to forage for food, and other survival skills applicable in the natural world.

Creator Jonathan Case acquired the fact-based portion of Little Monarchs through intensive research and several expeditions to study monarchs across the western United States. Scientific support also came from the Xerces Society, the world leaders in monarch preservation in the United States and abroad.