HELLO

Friendship can truly be out of this world.

A pale-faced, antennaed intergalactic explorer zooms through space in a red and blue rocket. Landing in the countryside on Earth, the visitor first discovers a colorful, welcoming world. But in town, the color disappears, and gray adult humans stride past one another, staring at their handheld devices. Only the explorer is still shown in color, staring up in bewilderment and lost in the sea of gray. Ignored, the explorer sits alone until an Asian-presenting human child offers a red crayon and paper. Together they draw pictures and fold them into paper airplanes that fly through the air, until the human’s becomes stuck in a tree. The explorer uses a gadget first to rescue the airplane and again when the child’s ice cream falls off its cone. When the explorer receives a message on the gadget and gets back into the rocket, the two friends say goodbye. Once home, however, the explorer misses the friend left behind on Earth and sends a star-studded message of greeting—the only word in the book. Vivid illustrations are often multipaneled, like a graphic novel, and vary in perspective for storytelling and cinematic effect. The presumably adult explorer and human child are similarly short and sturdily built, lending them a pleasing visual consonance.

Although wordless, this deftly expresses our simple need to build connections that can endure across a galaxy.