Tag Archives: kids comics

Chip Kidd and Peanuts and Kids

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Over at Comics Comics Tim Hodler dislikes the use of cropping in art books devoted to comics.

This probably demonstrates my ignorance, but I don’t like this trend of cutting up images, like an old movie pan ‘n scanned for VHS. (The same thing was done in Blake Bell’s Ditko bio and Chip Kidd’s Peanuts book, among others.) It’s an especially unwelcome practice in a “The Art of ______” book. I want to see ______’s art! I want to see how the artist composed the image, and I don’t really care if it looks good or bad. (Pretty much everything Jaime draws looks good, any way.) That is in fact a big part of my interest in such a book: tracking the artist’s development.

It’s unsettling to agree with Tim…but I agree with Tim. I have a fair number of fine art books in the house, and you know, I don’t see any of them doing this crap. If you have a book about constructivist art posters, say, they show you the whole damn poster, because they figure that’s what you’re there for. Books about Japanese prints show you the lovely Japanese prints. Sometimes they crop to show you close-up details, but it’s a far cry from the aggressive layouts you see in a lot of comics productions.

And you know what? I don’t actually know the names of the designers of any of those art books I own — almost as if everyone involved thought the artist in question was more important than the designer.

Anyway, there’s a long comments thread at Comics Comics, and designer Jacob Covey disagrees strongly with Tim. You can read Jacob’s whole impassioned comment at the link, but there were a couple of revealing remarks. First:

A lot of people bought that book [that is, the Chipp Kidd Peanuts book] precisely because of the design decisions and a lot of those people had a light shined onto the genius of Schulz. (In no small part because it gave some of his “edge” back after decades of sappy marketing.)

Got that? People bought it for Chip Kidd, who introduced a whole new audience to that unknown outsider artist, Charles Schulz. Because, you know, nobody had actually ever heard of Schulz until Kidd unearthed him and made him safe for hipsters (an idea which, among other things, is an insult to hipsters, most of whom are, like everyone else, perfectly capable of loving Schulz without having him spoon fed to them by a indifferently talented curatorial vulture.)

I did agree with this by Covey, though I don’t think it points quite in the direction he seems to think it does.

And, remember, this was a daily strip for the masses. It’s not the property of comics people. Schulz belongs to everybody and there’s a lot of ways to read him.

Schulz does belong to everyone. And you know who he especially belongs to? Kids. The thing I like least about the Chip Kidd Peanuts collection is that, with all the pictures of tschotzkes and all the cropping and all the strips produced at minute sizes, it’s very difficult to read the book to my son. I gave it a try or two because the boy is so obsessed with Peanuts at the moment — but the whole endeavor was an exercise in eye strain and frustration. Eventually I just put the collection back up on the shelf and vowed to stick with the also-overdesigned-but-at-least-user-friendly fanta complete collections.

Basically, if you create a Peanuts book that parents can’t easily read to their kids, I think I’m justified in saying you’ve failed. And I further think I’m justified in suggesting that you’re a pretentious fuck who deserves a swift kick in the pants.

Kids Comics Roundtable: The British invasion

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The formative literature of my early years was a stack of cheaply printed comics with newsprint covers and goofy names that are puzzling to most Americans, myself included:  The Beano, The Dandy, The Topper, The Beezer, Whizzer and Chips, Buster, Cor! Back in the 1960s and 1970s, these comics were churned out by the barrelful by the British publishers D.C. Thomson, Fleetway, and IPC. Most are gone now, but The Beano and The Dandy are still around, and some of the original characters endure as well.

I was happy about writing about these little-known comics until I read this. Apparently this particular genre of comics haven’t changed much since 1967.  No cell phones! No video games! Hippie jokes! Way to rain on my nostalgia, dude! And the coup de grace:

Without a strong creator allowed to take charge and update the property with a new, modern vision, The Beano follows the same basic model as Archie Comics in the U.S.: the characters are just familiar four-color chess pieces to be moved around in the service of familiar jokes that lead to groans instead of laughs.

Feh! What’s wrong with that? Kids’ comics don’t have to be great literature. Sometimes they can be something dumb and funny that you read while sprawled across your bed eating candy.

Most of the characters in British comics were defined by a single trait carried to an extreme. Keyhole Kate spied on people through keyholes. Billy Whizz was really fast. Greedy Pigg was a gluttonous teacher who would go to extreme lengths to get something to eat. Chalky drew chalk objects that became real. Desperate Dan was an overgrown cowboy, a hilarious caricature of the British notion of Americans; he wore a vestigial gun, which he never drew, dined on cow pies (an enormous pie with a cow’s tail dangling out the side), and broke everything he touched because he didn’t know his own strength. It seems like all the creativity in these comics went into dreaming up the characters; once that was done, they went through their paces every week.

That didn’t bother me. Most of the stories were only a page or two long, and reading them was more like a short visit with a wacky friend than a trip through an actual storyline. I don’t remember individual stories, but I remember the characters very vividly. They are dancing around in my head as I am writing this. 

British comics of that era were much edgier than their American counterparts, more Garbage Can Kids than Little Dot. The art was exaggerated, and the kids were horrible brats. Bully Beef and Chips was about a sadistic big kid who beat up a nerdy littler kid every week, and every week, the nerdy little kid got some clever revenge. Roger the Dodger, Minnie the Minx, and Beryl the Peril were bratty kids who tortured their parents and usually ended up on the wrong end of a slipper in the last panel. The Bash Street Kids contributed the useful and expressive phrase “pungent pong” (horrible smell) to my family’s lexicon. No one experienced deep thoughts or learned lifelong lessons in these comics, and that’s how we liked it.

Later on, I would get bored and move on to stories with more complexity, including the British girls’ comics Bunty and Judy and Mandy and Diana. But when I was six, a copy of The Beano, a bag of chocolates, and the absence of nagging adults was the recipe for pure bliss.

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Update by Noah: For those who are wondering, Brigid has very kindly agreed to participate in our kids comics roundtable this week. She is too polite to mention all her other internet writing, so I will do it for her. She writes a column called Unbound at Robot 6; a fabulous manga link blog called (appropriately) Mangablog a kids comics linkblog at School Library Journal and goodness knows what else. So go read her other missives, and make her feel at home while she’s here, all right?