Today, we’re taking part in another wonderful blog tour to benefit one of the excellent new titles from First Second Books. On tap is Maris Wicks’s Human Body Theater, a spellbinding nonfiction graphic novel that takes readers on a tour of the human body.

Follow your master of ceremonies through Human Body Theater, where you’ll get a theatrical revue of each and every biological system of the human body. Starting out as a skeleton, our tour guide puts on a new layer of her costume (her body) with each “act.” By turns goofy and intensely informative, Human Body Theater is incredibly entertaining.

We last caught up with Maris Wicks (and this book) during a previous blog tour in which she was interviewed by Jorge Aguirre and Rafael Rosado for Children’s Book Week. If you’ve got a few minutes, go take a look. It sheds some light on her background and motivation and how the book came to be.

Please be sure to check out each of the stops on the Human Body Theater blog tour. Each stop features a different part of the body, along with some information from Maris. It’s a blog tour of body parts! The complete list is here.

EYE

If you are reading this, you are doing so with your eyes! Similar to our nose needing to make mucus to keep from drying out, our eyes have to do the same, and they do it in a pretty spectacular way: eye salad dressing. Ok, it’s sort of like that…there all three very thin layers of different liquid that cover the eye: a tear layer, a mucus layer, and a lipid (fatty) layer. These three layers keep one another in check; if there wasn’t a fatty layer, tears would just spill out of our eyes. If there wasn’t a tear layer, our eyes would gunk up and stick together. When we blink, our eyelids coat the eye in all of these…eye juices. However, when we sleep, these eye juices collect in the corner of our eyes and dry out, becoming what we affectionately refer to as “sleep, sleepies, sleepers, gunk, sand, eye boogers, etc.” Next time you wake up in the morning and wipe the sleep from your eyes, thank your eye’s salad dressing for keeping your peepers well-oiled.