At last I’ve found them. The books that can be read after Gnomeville.

As those who have been following my blog or buying my comics know, my comics start from a vocabulary of zero French but an English speaking background. Episode 1 introduces twelve very frequent words (with over 300 words of text); Episode 2 adds the remaining eight of the top twenty words occurring in French newspapers (while giving over 700 words of text to read); Episode 3 adds nine more frequent words (with 1200 words of text) and Episode 4 (yet to be released) adds ten more (in 1800 words of text). This makes a total of 39 frequently occurring words. In addition, the comic uses many French-English cognates to make entertaining stories.

While I’m sure that the books I’ve found don’t restrict themselves to frequent words, they do start with a very small vocabulary and include repetition to allow the vocabulary to be acquired easily. The book with the smallest, at 55 words, in an illustrated text of 2100 words, is Edi l’éléphant. From there you can go to Les abeilles exploratrice at 88 words, then Émeraude, le bébé tortue, at 90 words. From there you can go to Brandon Brown dit la verité (95), Brandon Brown veut un chien (104), Brandon Brown à la conquête de Québec (165), and Obsession dangereuse (200). Some of the “Novice Mid” books have smaller vocabularies than these but use past tense.