Yearly Archives: 2009

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.

From Palin’s bathroom mirror to the Weekly Standard’s cover

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The problem wasn’t so much Palin as it was Alaska. She had become too big for her home state.


That’s one way of putting it. Put in the right pronouns and you can imagine Palin speaking to her bathroom mirror: “It’s not my fault! It’s … Alaska’s. They’re all jealous.” But the quote is from Matthew Continetti’s piece in the Weekly Standard giving the troops the rundown on why their hero fled. The article is a case of third-person narcissism: the writer’s engaging in borderline personality disorder on behalf of another party.

The reasons given for Palin’s quitting are 1) nobody would govern with her, 2) people say mean things about her, and 3) she’s already done everything any governor could hope to do in office. Point 1 is blamed on the national Democratic Party, which supposedly bosses around the legislators in individual states (wish it could get Congress in line). For point 2 it’s treated as a given that every charge against Palin has been refuted. Point 3 is voiced by Palin herself: “I know that we’ve accomplished more in our two years in office than most governors could hope to accomplish in two terms. And that’s because I hired the right people.”  So it’s okay for her to quit because she’s just way, way better than any ordinary governor. And you know it’s true because she says so.

Of course she also said once that she was a pitbull. Continetti sidles gently up to the sad fact that this claim was a charade:

The accusations affected Palin emotionally. A rare and necessary talent for a great politician is the capacity to ignore or laugh off the critics’ most vicious assaults. FDR had it. So did Reagan. When Palin spoke at the 2008 Republican convention, it seemed as though she had it, too. Her commanding performance gave the impression that the previous week’s falsehoods, exaggerations, myths, insults, and smears did not matter to her. Not one bit.

This doesn’t seem to be the case anymore, however. Over time, the attacks on Palin–on her character, intellect, appearance, femininity, and family–clearly got to her. 


But he can’t let go of the idea that, somehow, she really is tough. Palin “knows how to win a political knife-fight,” he says after paragraphs spent lamenting that the poor lady had to deal with mean legislators and harsh words. In fact the whole “knife-fight” passage is interesting for its incoherence:

… she is a newcomer to the national arena. The bulk of her career has been at the local and state level, where the stakes and the tempers are low compared with the rock ’em, sock ’em dramas that play out inside the Beltway and on the cable channels and blogs. “Everyone else in ’08 had been in the game for decades,” John Coale said. “They all had been there. This was somebody playing for the first time.” For Palin, the hostility directed at her was novel and shocking. Because she prides herself on her unconventionality, and because she knows how to win a political knife-fight, she decided to fight back.


 So, for one thing, it turns out that Palin really was too inexperienced for the big time, even though the Standard and its buddies had been saying the opposite all along. For another, we’re told that Alaska is quite a tranquil place politically, although the rest of the piece says the state has become ungovernable because of the nasty vendettas against the governor.

A last point: in the fall we were told about Palin’s vital executive experience. Now we find out it really doesn’t matter who commands the Alaska National Guard. The point of a governor turns out to be entirely legislative: if the governor has passed, or claims to have passed, all the laws she had in mind, then there’s nothing left for her to do but twiddle her thumbs. It’s not like there are any floods for her to deal with or a state administration that needs to be run properly.

In America, we elect our executives to fixed terms on the understanding that they have day-to-day duties to fulfill and that these duties remain no matter what the legislature is up to. That would especially be the case in Alaska, where the legislature meets for a few weeks but the governor is on duty all year round. Unless she finds something better to do.

“The job had become demanding and unpleasant,” Continetti writes. Is there any other politician anywhere who would get a sympathetic hearing for that argument? Not that she could get such a hearing from just anybody. Alaska may not understand Sarah Palin, but the Weekly Standard does.

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.

This just in: Nicole Wallace is a jerk

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The “pals around with terrorists” line came straight from the McCain high command, according to reporters Dan Balz and Haynes Johnson. Marc Ambinder summarizes:

an e-mail from campaign adviser Nicolle Wallace [was] sent to Palin on the morning of October 4rd, with an attached New York Times article about Obama’s relationship with Ayers.
Turns out that the McCain campaign was a week away from running an ad linking Obama to Ayers. The e-mail from Wallace, according to Balz and Johnson, reads as follows: “Governor and Team: rick [Davis], Steve [Schmidt] and I suggest the following attack from the new york times. If you are comfortable, please deliver the attack as written. Please do not make any changes to the below without approval from steve or myself because precision is crucial in our ability to introduce this.” 
McCain HQ had suggested the following line: “This is not a man who sees American as you and I do — as the greatest force for good in the world. This is someone who sees America as imperfect enough to pal around with terrorists who targeted their own country.”

When complaining about what a diva Palin was, McCain’s people would cite the very line the campaign had given her. They claimed she had “gone rogue” and delivered the line all on her own. Well no, looks like that wasn’t the case. (Assuming the email is genuine. Ambinder’s post doesn’t say where the fellows got ahold of it.)
Does this mean that Palin isn’t a diva and whack job? I doubt it. She has a trail of bitter ex-allies from Wasilla to Juneau to wherever Republican high command is now bunkered. My guess is that the McCain people 1) wanted to keep their distance from an especially nasty attack, and 2) wanted another stone to throw at the Gal.
The “pals” revelation brings up the same lesson taught by the great post-“pitbull” letdown: never trust a story sourced to Republican political operatives.

Yeah, lipstick, and also pit bulls are kind of tough

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The first time I heard the lipstick-pitbull line? Well, I remember reading this a couple of days before Sarah Palin’s big convention speech. William Kristol wrote it, of course:


McCain aides whose judgment I trust are impressed by Sarah Palin. One was particularly amused by this exchange: A nervous young McCain staffer took it upon himself to explain to Palin the facts of life in a national campaign, the intense scrutiny she’d be under from the media, the viciousness of the assault that she’d be facing, etc.:

Palin: “Thanks for the warning. By the way, do you know what they say the difference is between a hockey mom and a Pit Bull?”

McCain aide: “No, Governor.”

Palin: “A hockey mom wears lipstick.”


Oh, that nervous young staffer. I like Palin’s amused, unruffled air in deflecting him. I also like the idea that anyone would trust William Kristol’s assessment of who is trustworthy. And the idea that we would think Palin came up with the lipstick line. And the idea that this conversation ever took place.

We all know how the line went over. Now, from the big Times article on why the governor decided to quit:

Late last week, as her sport utility vehicle made its way through the town of McGrath, Ms. Palin said in an interview that the seeds of her resignation had been planted the morning Mr. McCain named her as his vice-presidential choice.

“It began when we started really looking at the conditions that had so drastically changed on Aug. 29,” she said. “The hordes of opposition researchers came up here digging for dirt for political reasons, making crap up.”


Well gee, Princess! You should have listened to that nervous young aide! Though, admittedly, his probable nonexistence could have gotten in the way. But, all right then, listen to Janet Kincaid of Palmer, Alaska. I don’t know if she’s involved in politics, but she seems to have glommed onto a fact of political life that everyone in the country knows except Sarah Palin:

“In politics, you’ve got to just let it roll or it will eat you alive.”


Good point. By the way, I don’t concede that anyone has made up anything derogatory about Gov. Palin. All the inventing seems to have been intended to build her up. For an example, see the start of this post.

The press loves cliches and taglines and obvious irony, so I’m kind of surprised that we don’t hear about the pit bull line now that Palin has turned tail. Even the liberal bloggers haven’t harped on it much, from what I’ve seen. So I’ll say this: some fucking pit bull.

She wasn’t much of a governor either. I don’t mean just that her policies were bad or that she proved inept. I mean that she progressively forgot that she was supposed to be governing:

Amid all the turmoil, Ms. Palin’s enthusiasm for the job itself seemed to be waning, her office appointment books from January 2007 through this May indicate. Since her return from the national campaign her days have typically started later and ended earlier, and the number of meetings with local legislators and mayors has declined.

That 70% percent of Republicans say they’d be likely to vote for Palin in a presidential race shows that the GOP has become a system for generating and then swallowing bullshit. It’s bad enough that the schmucks think that being tough beats or encompasses all other virtues, like intelligence and competence. But they insist on thinking Palin is tough when she has demonstrated that she isn’t. She has broken before the very test that, way back at the beginning of her national career,  was supposed to prove what superior iron she was made of. 

Come to think of it, her downfall wasn’t even pressure at the national level. The ethics complaints that she says drove her from office were all filed by locals. Forget the big time — Palin can’t hack politics in Alaska, a state with fewer people than Barack Obama’s old state Senate district.

What a fucking loser. Sarah Palin is a pair of breasts, a pair of cheekbones, a pair of glasses, and a winsome mouth that delivered a speech somebody had handed her. Republicans have given up on political life and switched to a fantasy life, and for those purposes she works just fine. She never was a pit bull, just a party doll.

Kids Comics Roundtable: Mini-Marvels

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Everyone knows that what kids these days crave is a heaping helping of continuity in-jokes. Obscure, off-hand references to Bendis-birthed secret societies, Gwen Stacy’s death, or multi-hued Hulks — lord knows, five year olds love that kind of stuff, right?

The answer, oddly enough is — yeah, they do, at least in this case. Chris Giarrusso’s Mini-Marvels volumes prove that an inventive artist can make even the worst ideas work. Where most other Marvel all ages titles (the Marvel Adventures books or Franklin Richards) studiously avoid the continuity quagmire, Giarrusso and his collaborators happily frolic in the quaggiest bits. Uatu pops up for a gratuitous single-panel gag (“Wha? Me change a diaper? Dude I don’t even want to watch!” See, that’s funny because Uatu is called the watcher, and he spends all his time watching so…oh, never mind.) A whole short story is devoted to the fact that Thor was replaced with a clone (which is funny I think because there was a Thor-clone in the Civil Wars mini-series?) And so forth. Mini-Marvels is, in a lot of ways, the great grandnephew of Fred Hembeck. It’s affectionate, insider parody, delighting in meta-geek mockery of geekishness. It’s a kid-friendly version of Marvel Zombies — just another example of the self-cannibalizing decadence that has consumed the super-hero genre.

Except, as it turns out, when you make your decadence kid-friendly, it kind of stops looking like decadence. Super-hero zombies are a mannered affectation for the jaded palate. Super-heroes as big-headed, manga-looking kids though — that makes the characters more accessible, not less. I mean, awww, look, little Venom has a single square tooth sticking out of his mouth! That’s just adorable.

I think mini-Venom is probably my son’s favorite character in the book, as it happens, and he really highlights Giarrusso’s talent for finding the Marvel heroes and villains core appeal, cutting out the icky bits, and serving up an all ages version that is superior to the original in almost every way. Giarrusso’s Venom isn’t a slavering, violent, scary monster for teens and up. Rather, he’s a slavering, largely harmless monster who keeps repeating “I want to eat your brains!” Over and over. And let me tell you, my son loved it. Half a day and all he said was “I want to eat your brains!”

But despite its bad influence, I still like Mini-Marvels. I like the way Giarrusso and his collaborators are able to take a single goofy fan-scruff notion (“Why doesn’t Iron Man make suits of armor for all the Avengers?) and spin them out into absurdly escalating nonsense (Spider-Man’s armor doesn’t have jet boots, because, Iron Man explains, spiders can’t fly. But, Spider-Man points out, in some irritation, people can’t fly either. “They do when they’re wearing one of my suits of armor!” Iron Man replies.) I like how the books mix in simple, intuitive plots (Wolverine goes to buy a box of cereal) with the multi-part Civil War parody/tributes. I like that Reed Richards’ hair is still greying even though he’s, like 10, and I like the fact that there’s an extra-bonus Avenger named Elephant Steve and that Peter Parker wears his costume all the time, even at breakfast in his house, but that Aunt May still doesn’t realize that he’s Spider-Man. And most of all I like that though all of this stuff is based on what is presumably a life-long obsession with Marvel continuity, you don’t actually have to know anything about the continuity itself to find it funny. Hawkeye climbing a magic beanstalk and finding Galactus at the top of it is amusing whether or not you know who Galactus is; Elephant Steve is funny even if you don’t know he’s not really supposed to be an Avenger. Giarrusso has done the seemingly impossible; he’s created an alternate world where initiates and newcomers alike can appreciate the Byzantine monstrosity that is the Marvel Universe. In fact, if you didn’t know better, reading these books might even convince you that super-heroes were created for kids in the first place.

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This is the first post in a roundtable on kids comics, which will be running throughout this week. second post here.