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Kids Comics Roundtable: it’s all good

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Kids’ comics were a giant part of my childhood, and I don’t mean respectable European ones like Moomin or Asterix or Tintin. No, it was pure American corporate-owned, tie-in-toy, sugar-cereal shilling garbage like Mad Balls, Ewoks, Masters of the Universe, Planet Terry, Top Dog, Care Bears, Strawberry Shortcake, (there were three of us girls, but my brother was the oldest, so it was mostly non-girly stuff. Of course, gender norming even then wasn’t as defensively aggressive as it is now, so there were girly bits to most of the boy comics; I totally imprinted on the girl ewok (Kneesa?) with the pretty pink hood, and somewhat less so on She-Ra and her gang) god I don’t know what else, ALF comics for awhile (did you even know there were ALF comics?). Along with some older standards like Archie and Katy Keene.

What it was was, my parents were hippies, relative to our community, and the biggest gulf between us Libickis and our peers was our lack of television. My father had been somewhat into comics in his youth (I know he owned at least some sixties Spider-Man and Fantastic Four, besides the hidden stash of Crumb comix), and they both wanted to encourage us to read and apparently figured that the comic-book equivalents of those 80s Saturday morning cartoons had enough benefits in with the consumerist brain-rot. So I could still share in the advertising jingles sung by kids in my class, even though I only knew the words and not the tunes (and if that isn’t a metaphor for the introvert nerd’s life….).

I dunno exactly what my point is. Maybe that my siblings and I did basically learn to read on comics (we had picture books read to us, and chapter books read to us, but never comics that I recall), and the comics we learned to read on were pure extruded Comic Product, and they did exactly what my parents hoped they would: made all of us lifelong readers, writers, and draw-ers (everybody got over the latter except for me, but everybody drew for pleasure longer than most of our peers). So worry not, parents and librarians. Sometimes crap can do the job just as well as art.

There are even some elements from the comics, whose writers and artists I’ll probably never know by name, that still stay with me: Top Dog taught me about inflation (in one issue, the bad guy’s evil plan is to drop helicoptersful of money onto a city, thus wrecking its economy) and Planet Terry was your generic ‘80s orphan searching the galaxy for his lost-to-memory parents, except his twist was he didn’t have their picture, just their glass picture frame, empty and inscribed to him. I still find that both clever and poignant.

My most treasured learning-to-read memory is out of Planet Terry. I had the hang of phonics down, but I didn’t yet understand a lot of the conventions of English writing. Planet Terry was a pretty overwrought kid, being an orphan and all, and he was having a particularly bad time of it one issue when he is forced to accept that his arch-nemesis is his father, and goes live with him and have a proper filial relationship.

He tries, but when the cognitive dissonance becomes too great, he cries, “B-but, D-dad!” I hadn’t yet come across the rule about how dashes between letters indicate stuttering, so I read this as, “bee butt, dee dad!”

That was my and my best friend’s favourite joke for the next five years. Kids, they’re easy to please.

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?

Kids Comics Roundtable: Ask Not What You Can Do For Your Inner-Brat

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2352_400x600John F. Kennedy was an irresponsible warmongering douchebag, who proved objectively that he was more immature and reckless than Khruschev, which is saying something. Fuck him, and fuck the relentless nostalgia for his thoroughly pedestrian cold-war intellect and administration.

And, hey, while we’re at it, fuck Darwyn Cooke’s overrated, tedious cold-war nostalgia exercise, “New Frontier.” I own this because a friend went to a comics store, and she was looking for a comic for her five-year old. And Darwyn Cooke’s art is pretty and cartoony, right, so she said, um, maybe this? And the comic store owner said, “Hey, this would be great! Gratuitous death, lots and lots of characters most of whom aren’t even properly introduced, incomprehensible plot largely composed of fan scruff, apocalyptic imagery at the end — your kid’ll love it!” So,anyway, my friend looked at it a bit more closely when she got home and cursed the comics store owner and gave it to me.

And I read it because I’m the core demographic, right? I even know who the Challengers of the Unknown are, and I sort of know who the Losers are because they got killed off right at the beginning of Crisis on Infinite Earths just like they get killed off right at the beginning of this. And I know that super-heroes were black-listed in the 50s because it happened in Watchman and in Wild Cards and in Dark Knight, except that wasn’t in the 50s I guess, and also in Golden Age which was an Elseworlds series I never read, but some critic said that New Frontier is like a total revamp of the Elseworlds concept, like you’ll never look at Elseworlds the same again. This time you’ll look at it with the new, fresh, innocent eyes of an Alzheimer afflicted vulture hungrily eying its own decaying scrotum. Oh, wait, that is in fact how you looked at it before. But, no, this is different, see because there’s a timeline, so that Darwyn Cooke introduces each character exactly when they appeared in real life. So, like, the Flash first appeared in 1956, so that’s when he shows up in the comic! And the Martian Manhunter first appeared in…well, whenever he first appeared…and that’s when he shows up too! It’s like going back into the past and pretending that the kids who read the comics back then were as mature and smart as the aging, paunchy, con-goers of today!

I also liked that Cooke chose to make the central character Hal Jordan, who is a young, strapping fighter pilot with daddy issues. Even though he joined the army he doesn’t like to kill, but that doesn’t make him a pacifist, no, no, no…it just means he knows the Korean War is wrong, though he never explains why, exactly, because that doesn’t matter…what matters is that he totally proves his bravery and comes of age and fills his daddy’s shoes and does it while being only slightly more bland than Tom Cruise. And, hey, there’s Batman being all hyper-competent and grim and the Flash running and thinking about Iris just like in Crisis on Infinite Earths and Superman giving a noble speech and J’ohnn J’ohnnz discovering the innate goodness of humanity buried deep in the psyche of some random special-ops asshole, who has a heart of gold, causing you to say, hey look! There’s gold in that there asshole! I guess you’ve just got to keep digging. And there’s also gold in some asshole called Flagg, who gets killed along with his requisite attendant supportive female. And there are a billion cameo appearances by a billion unexplained DC walk-ons, because the best part of fan-fic isn’t exploring relationships or putting your own twist on a character, but just making a checklist so that you can say, ayup, I mentioned every single one of those characters, by gosh. Oh yeah, and there’s a villain called the Center, who is an eldritch evil disguised as a community youth building. So, hey, what more do you want? The doofy, unpretentious heroes of your grandpappy’s youth have been transmuted into the doofy, pretentious heroes of your own middle-age. Sing hosannas and whip out the Eisners; everything young is senescent again.

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You can see the rest of this roundtable on kids comics here.

Update: And more on New Frontier here.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Jules Feiffer’s Clifford

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You’ll find four of the strips below. Clifford was Feiffer’s first strip, and he did it for Will Eisner’s studio; the series ran on the back page of the Spirit section. Wikipedia says Feiffer was born in 1929, and I vaguely recall Clifford as running from 1949 to 1950, so Feiffer was the age of a college student when he did the strip. Fantagraphics collected the whole run as the first volume of its Collected Feiffer.

The previous Kids Comics Roundtable installment (Noah on telling kids what to like) was here, and you can see a roundup of my previous Golden Age scans here.
If you want to see these a bit larger, click on them and then click in the new screen where it says “Full Size.” It’s good enough to read them by. 
Jan. 22, 1950         
Clifford 4



Feb. 5, 1950

Clifford 2

Feb. 19, 1950
Clifford 1

March 5, 1950

Clifford 3

Kids Comics Roundtable: You Do So Like Green Eggs and Ham

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Cerucee just posted about her difficulty figuring out what books kids will like. She notes:

as a selfish adult reader, what I’m constantly looking for is glimmers of adulthood in those books–complex plotting, elegant art, darkness, sophistication–and I get excited when I see them, so excited that I sometimes forget that what makes a book a good grown-up book isn’t necessarily right in a kids’ book. The first service of children’s comics is not adult readers like me, but to children.

That’s a reasonable enough stance, certainly…but it’s not one I share. I mean, I’m happy enough to tell other adults what they should read and why; I don’t know why it should be different for children. I don’t always agree with my son about what’s worthwhile, but I don’t always agree with my wife, either. (Steve Earle…blech.)

The truth is, I think a lot of the things Cerusee points to: complex plotting, elegant art, darkness, sophistication — can easily be things that kids like too — especially if you’re talking young adults. Many of the great young adult series, in fact, are extremely dark and complicated. Tolkein, C.S. Lewis, Ursula K. Le Guin, Madeleine L’Engle…and for that matter Dokebi Bride, which I was just rereading. They’re all aimed at tweens, or even younger, I’m pretty sure. The Harry Potter books, for that matter, are quite complicated and plenty dark.

Obviously, when you’re dealing with 5 year olds (as I am) you don’t want anything too scary. But still, I think there’s often quite a bit of overlap in taste…and I guess, moreover, I don’t see why I shouldn’t have an opinion. The point of children’s literature isn’t solely to entertain children. I have to read the stuff, after all; that makes me part of the intended audience, surely. The best products for children often keep in mind that there’s an adult audience as well — not too many kdis are going to get Alistair Cookie, but it’s thrown in on Sesame Street because they know that there are a lot of folks out there who *will* get it. And lord knows, if you’re home with the kid all day, it’s not selfish — or, at least, it’s very reasonably selfish — to want to be able to interact with the entertainment without being hideously bored or irritated.

Besides, it’s not like all adults hate all kids books. I like a lot of what my son does — Sesame Street is great, obviously (though he’s a little beyond that now.) So were the Teletubbies, actually — pretty visuals, tripped out plots, what’s not to like? And of course there’s Peanuts, which is probably about the best comic ever, for kids or adults. And there’s Dr. Seuss and Pee Wee’s Playhouse, and on and on.

Cerusee says she tends to like adult books for their adult qualities. There are definitely things that kids aren’t going to like that much — explicit sex, explicit gore, complicated dialogue that references stuff they don’t know about. But the things that are fun in children’s literature are often things adults can and often do like too…imaginative goofiness, slapstick, fart jokes, cute animals, pretty art, entertaining wordplay. In short, I don’t think there is or has to be an aesthetic barrier between children’s comics and adult comics. Let there be commerce between them, as some adult said.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Hazardous Travel

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Back when I was a bookseller, and for the last two or three library positions I’ve worked at, I’ve had to recommend comics titles for kids–in two cases, I was not working anywhere near public services or collection development, but I was asked for recommendations as soon as I mentioned that I read comics, as comics are hot in libraries, but comics-reading librarians are still in short supply. Embarrassingly, though, youth titles are my weakest area; I just don’t read that many of them, and when I do, I’m not reading them in mind of their suitability for youth.

One of my sisters has a Master’s in Children’s Literature, and secondhand exposure to her education has led to a lot of overthinking on my part when I’m trying to recommend kids comics. So I always feel a little under-equipped dealing with them, because as a selfish adult reader, what I’m constantly looking for is glimmers of adulthood in those books–complex plotting, elegant art, darkness, sophistication–and I get excited when I see them, so excited that I sometimes forget that what makes a book a good grown-up book isn’t necessarily right in a kids’ book. The first service of children’s comics is not adult readers like me, but to children.

As obvious as that is, people miss it a lot. Children’s TV shows like Barney and Teletubbies frequently draw mockery for their simplicity and their innocence–qualities that are perfectly appropriate in material created for toddlers. Works that mix the more innocuous elements of adult appeal in with appeal to children can pull double duty–Calvin and Hobbes was pretty successful at mixing the childlike imagination with adult observations, creating a comic that could be sincerely enjoyed on several levels–but I do wonder whether that actually makes them any better as works for children. (I’d guess that a great portion of C&H’s enduring popularity with my generation is due to the fact that the adult perspective mixed into the child’s adventure gives nostalgic adult re-readers something to enjoy beyond the nostalgia itself.)

One of my favorite recommendations as a core YA manga title is Hikaru no Go, but I must confess that I like it as much as I do because it’s so solidly crafted, not because it taps into my latent childish imagination. And honestly, craft and skill weren’t all that high on my list of priorities when I looked for books as a kid–I certainly reacted to, say, the lively, funny, expressive quality of Berkeley Breathed’s cartooning in Bloom County, but I didn’t register the level of skill required to produce it until much, much later. It impresses me now on an intellectual level I just didn’t have when my brain was still a work in progress. I’ve had some good luck suggesting gorgeously made children’s comics to children and their parents, but I’ve also had some serious failures–the universal rejection of Jeff Smith’s Bone by the YA graphic novel club I used to co-host springs to mind–and I have had to learn to swallow it, and not push my adult aesthetic sensibilities on child readers.

(Incidentally, I love Bone, with all its whimsy and frolicking fun, but I wouldn’t love it as much if not for the way that the unsettling nightmares and the darkness permeate the thing. However, though the interplay of light humor and of horror in Bone is one of the highlights for me now, I think I would have been less enthusiastic as a child; I had a much lower appreciation for the sense of creeping terror when I was ten years old. Other ten-year-olds might certainly feel otherwise.)

In the vein of adult sensibilities, I really enjoyed these Thought Balloonist essays on a set of TOON books—Charles Hatfield’s essay here, and Craig Fischer’s response–not least for Fischer’s comment that despite his and Hatfield’s lack of ardor for them, “I suspect….that kids might be more enthusiastic about these books than us crabby old adults are.” But the key bit I am thinking of is in one of Hatfield’s observations on Silly Lilly, which had been praised for its deceptive simplicity: “Not to be curmudgeonly, but the flatness of the approach seems to me to invite a rather adult construction of childhood ‘simplicity.'”

I gather that’s not an uncommon pitfall in writing for children–that is, talking down to children when trying to invoke a child’s point of view. I had a similar thought while reading Guibert and Sfar’s very precious Sardine in Outer Space–there seemed to be too much winking and nodding about the formula of a child’s adventure story for the book to sincerely be a child’s adventure story. But, as my sister pointed out to me, affected childishness doesn’t necessarily stop children from enjoying a book. She cited Peter Pan to me as a classic example: it’s a condescending meta-commentary about children’s imaginations, winking at adult readers, but simultaneously it’s a very successful children’s story with demonstrable staying power and a significant hold on our cultural imagination.

Ultimately, when it comes to actually trying to match up kids to kids’ comics, I try to take my cue from what other children appear to actually enjoy, as we modern librarian-types do. I don’t trust my natural judgment in this area–at the end of the day, I like adult comics, and I like them for their adult qualities–but I’m not interested enough to cultivate the real critical perspective on the field that would better equip me to navigate children’s publishing. Blah.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Get Away, Fuzzy

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A year and a half ago, I wrote a review of a Get Fuzzy anthology for the Comics Journal. Somehow, though, it got lost in the ether that is email, and so it never got published. Thus rejected, it has come here to the blog to find a home.

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I’m Ready For My Movie Contract
Darby Conley
Andrews McMeel Publishing
128 pages/B&W
$10.95/softcover
978-0-7407-6922-1

Darby Conley’s Get Fuzzy is, as the strip itself mentions several times, an almost indecently faithful Garfield clone. As in Garfield, there’s a mean, domineering cat (Bucky); a dumb, sweet dog (Satchel); and a nerdy, vaguely artsy owner (Rob.) And also as in Garfield, the animals are sentient, but not quite adult — sort of a cross between pets and small children. Rob even carries Bucky around in a Baby Bjorn.

There are a couple of differences from Jim Davis’ franchise. First, Bucky’s a Siamese, which (for a Siamese owner such as myself) is automatic bonus points. And, perhaps more importantly, Conley has dispensed with most of the ossified Garfield gags. Bucky isn’t fat, he doesn’t care about Mondays, and he doesn’t eat lasagna. Instead, he yearns to consume monkeys, engages in credit card fraud, and is terrified of beavers. Or, as he puts it, “They curse all that is good! They curse all that is wholesome! I tell you, beavers are evil!”

The double entendre makes that a good bit funnier than it’s meant to be, of course. Similarly, the high point of the book is a misprinted sequence in which Satchel mouths an empty speech bubble, Rob says, “On the same monkey,” and then we get a close up of some sort of bizarre test pattern with an Indian chief’s head in the middle. The nicest thing about these bloopers is that they’re really not all that far removed from the spirit of the strip as a whole. Conley must have done a lot of weed at some point; Satchel and Bucky’s confused almost-clever-but-then-totally-boneheaded patter is quintessential stoner humor. “Rob: T. rexes don’t even exist anymore!” “Bucky: Exactly. Therefore, a beaver is a million-billion times more dangerous than a T-rex.” Satchel: “You just blew my mind.” I mean, that could almost be lifted from A Scanner Darkly.

Conley’s art is pretty decent for the comics page — he has serious troubles with perspective, and I find his grayscale effects irritating, but his character designs are cute and winning rather than Dilbert or Pearls Before Swine-ugly. He’s helped somewhat by the fact that he rarely attempts physical or slapstick humor — instead, the jokes are mostly bad puns and zoned-out verbal goofiness. In his heart, I think Conley really is more fourth-rate Peanuts than second-rate Garfield. And yes, that’s a compliment.
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So as I said, this was written at the end of 2007 or thereabouts. Since then, my son went through a very intense Get Fuzzy phase. This involved reading our three Get Fuzzy collections over and over (and over) again. At the same time, he was obsessed with Garfield, which we read over and over. We also got to hear the strips repeated back to us without any context or description (so you get a strip which sounds something like: “I’m going to steal Jon’s chicken. Hey where did that vine come from! Isn’t that funny!”)

So a couple of points here. First, after this intense exposure, I think that I was right that Get Fuzzy is not really a knock-off of Garfield — and maybe wrong that it is a knock-off of Peanuts. In its running gags and its rhythms, its really maybe closer to Bloom County in a lot of ways. (Which is fine with me; I like Bloom County. But it’s important to make these distinctions.)

Second, reading these strips aloud (and other comics) has really, really made me appreciate story books. Not that I have anything against comic strips qua comic strips…or, okay, maybe I do, but that’s not the point I’m making here. The point I am making here is that reading comics aloud kind of sucks. When I read a regular story book, I’m often able to pretty much zone out; I can just read along without paying much attention to what I’m doing because…well, it’s a narrative, it only goes one direction, you don’t really have to think about it that hard. Getting downtime like this is really crucial when you’re a parent, and I greatly appreciate it.

With comics, it’s a lot harder to do that. You have to pay more attention to where the text goes in the first place, and in the second you have to make sure the small child is following along, since he’s got to be able to figure out who says what. Admittedly, after the millionth repetition, he pretty much knows who’s saying what…but after the millionth repetition you’re ready to go insane anyway, so the benefit is not as great as it might seem.

On the plus side, though, comics seem to be really good for teaching reading. The constant interplay between text and pictures, and the aforementioned need to follow which text goes where, has really helped my kid parse a lot of words. The first word that he read out of context without any prompting from me, in fact, was “Garfield” (we were in the car and he said, “That sign says Garfield!” I said, what? and started looking around for an advertising poster — but he was actually reading the street sign for Gafield Boulevard, which we were driving on.) He also taught himself to read sound effects like “Crash!” and “Zip!” because he sees them so often on the page.

So…less restful, but better reading comprehension. A few minutes of peace vs. a lifetime of learning. Yep, I’d make the same decision; a few minutes of peace, every time. But if I have to be irritated, I guess it’s good that he’s learning to read. Because then he can go off with a book by himself eventually and leave me alone.

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And here’s the first post in the roundtable.

Cerusee’s follow-up post is here.