TOON Books has recently released its inaugural set of three titles, to much applause. This represents a signal moment in the emergence of children's comics as an upscale genre. (Q: In what possible way could it make sense to say that children's comics are a "new" genre? Here's my answer. Bear in mind that the answer is specific to publishing in the USA.)
No publishing initiative in children's comics has been more warmly anticipated than TOON, an imprint spearheaded by the great though still under-recognized Françoise Mouly (of New Yorker and RAW Magazine fame) with the editorial input of Mouly's husband and longtime artistic/publishing partner Art Spiegelman. TOON has had a smart and concerted press roll-out over the past several months (dig here, and here), leading to the release last month of its inaugural books, which were so eagerly expected that all three went back to press even before their initial release date. The roll-out continues: at this past weekend's comics-besotted BookExpo America, Mouly reportedly participated in two panels on children's comics, one aimed at booksellers ("Building a Graphic Novel Section for Kids and Teens") and one on the topic of comics as harbingers of "The New Literacy."
(Bill Kartalopoulos's splendid Kids' Comics blog has been part of the official buildup. Bookmark it!)
TOON Books is billed as a part of the Little Lit Library, making it a de facto sequel to Mouly and Spiegelman et al.'s multivolume Little Lit series of comics, graphics, and games for young readers.
For the record, I thought the Little Lit books were a mixed bag, uneasily divided between sentimentality and puckish subversion and for the most part lacking thematic focus. (However, the softcover omnibus Big Fat Little Lit, shown above, is an excellent bargain.) TOON Books aim younger; the brief for the imprint is to make books "for children ages four and up." Mouly told interview Chris Mautner that the idea is to aim at that "hinge" age when children are "too big for picture books" but not yet fluent enough to plow through, say, a Harry Potter novel:
the point where the child is learning to read, where the vocabulary would be looked at and controlled and the story would be appropriate for a six year old.
[...] When you actually have kids you realize there aren’t that many books published for that moment because kids are not into books. They don’t know how to read. They’re a little too big to be read to so there’s a kind of giving up on this...
The idea, then, would be to bridge the gap between being "read to" and reading for oneself.
TOON's three inaugural releases are Geoffrey Hayes' Benny and Penny in Just Pretend, a backyard-pastoral fable about older brother Benny's testy interaction with his bubbly younger sister Penny, who interferes with his make-believe (the two are depicted as cartoon mice); Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch's Otto's Orange Day, a energetic suburban farce about young Otto (another funny animal, this time a cat), who uses a genie's wish to color the whole world orange, with predictably King Midas-like results; and Agnès Rosenstiehl's Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons, a series of spare comic vignettes starring Lilly (an Anglicized version of Rosenstiehl's Mimi Cracra, heroine of her own long-lived French book series). I think these too are a mixed bag -- though frankly it's hard to evaluate them, because they represent so much hope for the future. They aren't simply books, but rather the start of a project in which the degree of investment, intellectual as well as economic, is considerable: a project having to do with the putative "new literacy" and with hopes for the future of children's comics. A lot is riding on these books. Of course we'll have to see more of the TOON lineup to know how those hopes for the future are to be fulfilled.
On the face of it, the first TOON Books are conservative aesthetically, if not in other senses. On looking at them, my wife Michele declared that they look like Little Golden Books, and I can see that: the uniformity of dress, the distinctive spine of the books (dotted with tiny versions of the Little Lit icon), and the smart repetition of design elements all speak to the knowing, guiding hand of Mouly and co-designer Jonathan Bennett.
There's a consistency to the packaging that recalls the Little Golden Books imprint, though with a signal difference: Little Golden Books were deliberately cheap (25 cents apiece at the time of their launch in 1942) in order to compete with other enticements in pop culture, among them, ironically, comics books. They were at home in department stores and supermarkets. TOON Books are more handsomely produced, even as they subliminally trade on the nostalgia for such comfortable, affordable things.
The uniformity of packaging sends a message that, to me, seems at odds with the upscale nature of the books. Of course they are all beautifully made, and a designing craftiness is evident on the level of packaging, over and above the intelligent construction of the individual books. Mouly's design sense is very much in evidence. But even as this consistency lends credibility to the TOON Books project as such, it also brings a dampening sense of conformity to the enterprise; the creativity of individual books seems to have been overshadowed by the business of creating the imprint.
Design-wise, all three books use spot graphics consistently: on the spines, back covers, authors' pages, etc. Further, the covers to all three prominently feature the characters' names (large, embossed, and shiny), implying the possibility of further titles with the same characters. Also, the covers, and I have to believe this is intentional, feature elements native to comics: panels and word balloons:
This design conceit sends an implicit message: yes, these books are comics. In addition, each book is identified as a "TOON Book by so-and-so," a byline solidifying both their identity as comics and their participation in the larger imprint. What we have here is a line identity -- in marketing-speak, a visual continuity that would cross over easily from website to print ads to in-store displays to individual books.
Marketing considerations aside, the individual books are conservative in both style and narrative approach. Hayes' Benny and Penny, with its soft, delicately-drawn cartoon mice, recalls Russell Hoban's old "Frances the Badger" picture books, or, if you like, Garth Williams' animal-themed picture books: Baby Farm Animals, etc. (who can forget Williams' gorgeous pastoral image-making for E.B. White and Laura Ingalls Wilder?). Offsetting this softness is Hayes' pepped-up design sense: no two page layouts are the same, and various graphic devices, including tilted and overlapping panels, metapanels, borderless images, and bleeds, infuse the story with energy (click the thumbnail for a better view):
Nothing revolutionary here, but Hayes at least seems to have run with the idea of doing comics, creating a look removed from that of the early readers for which he is best known. (Hayes has contributed several books to "Step into Reading," a leveled series of illustrated readers geared for preschool to Grade 4; Hayes' entries typically fall into Grades 1-3.) The best thing about Benny and Penny, though, is that it has the greatest emotional resonance of the three books: there is believable friction between the mice siblings, leading to a climactic outburst, followed by feelings of remorse and loneliness, then by reconciliation. There is some autobiographical depth-sounding here, since Benny vs. Penny recalls Hayes' own childhood with his younger brother Rory (the frantic, too-short-lived underground comix auteur).
Cammuso & Lynch's Otto's Orange Day (its title recalling Sandberg & Sandberg's 1967 picture book Nicholas' Red Day) boasts the most high-spirited cartooning of the three, with lively linework helping along the bumptious, high-energy title character and his revved-up story. The drawing and the setting both evoke Calvin and Hobbes. The story's Midas moral is pretty obvious, but the elasticity of the cartooning, and the variety of expressions conjured, give the book a comic lilt lacking in the other two (click that thumbnail!):
This is the one that feels most like a "comic book." Like Hayes, Cammuso and Lynch use varied layouts and graphic devices to breathe life into the story; unlike Hayes, though, they stick closer to a traditional comic-book grid, consistently filling the white space from margin to margin with panels and visual information. Also, the book's super-bright coloring (much of it Creamsicle-orange) fairly shouts "comics."
The third book, Rosenstiehl's Silly Lilly, puzzles me. Its blank-faced simplicity is mystifying; though it's easier to read than a cereal box, its total effect is somehow one of inscrutability, as in, Exactly whom is this for, and why? Consisting, in essence, of five comic strips, each a micronarrative exhibiting no more development than a Sunday strip, Silly Lilly belongs to the realm of the basic concept book, though it seems to be trying to evoke a joyful, effervescent preschooler that beginning readers can identify with. Each of the Lilly strips boasts a kind of Ernie Bushmiller-like flatness, both graphically and in terms of affect; unfortunately, the book doesn't quite have Bushmiller's deadpan surrealism. It's simply flat and, from my POV, under-done.
No less a critic than Leonard Marcus (writing for Publishers Weekly) has praised Lilly as a "little marvel of distilled storytelling" whose "rigorously pared-down [imagery] draws us directly into Lilly’s emotional world." I wonder at this, as Rosenstiehl's choice of a static, unchanging POV and focal distance, while probably conducive to early independent reading, seems to me to keep us far away from the character, forcing us into a perspective of amused (adult) detachment. Lilly is cute, enticing; she beckons to us by not beckoning us, that is, by seeming to carry on in her unselfconscious way. Yet the drawing is intentionally flattened out, with no more depth of field than late Peanuts: backgrounds consist of horizon lines, a bit of grass, and, in one instance, a single Christmas tree. The bare text, too, generally lacks the capacity to bring the character to vivid life. Here is my favorite moment from the book (click!):
Huh. The author's page in the back of the book refers to Rosenstiehl's "deceptively simple" approach, but, again, I have to wonder at what depths are supposed to be implied by this simple surface. Some conception of childhood is involved: the back cover praises Rosenstiehl for "deftly captur[ing] a young child's sense of wonder." I'm skeptical. Not to be curmudgeonly, but the flatness of the approach seems to me to invite a rather adult construction of childhood "simplicity." It's for grownups, then? The book's paratexts, which clearly are not addressed to children, implicitly acknowledge that the book is to be purchased and presented by adults (and that may be the signal difference between "children's comics" and comics that children happen to select and read for themselves).
Faced with Silly Lilly's deliberate flatness, we might fall back on a pedagogical rather than aesthetic rationale for the book, but here too Lilly seems a misfire: as far as I can tell, the book is not particularly attentive to language, lacking the consistency of a basal reader or the steady consonant-vowel-consonant formula of a Seussian "beginner book." It also lacks Seuss's way of transforming the academic functionalism of basal vocabulary into giddy poetry. The book's predictable structure surely has some pedagogical value, in that repetitive structures (echoing the repetition of verbal motifs in folktales, à la "The Three Little Pigs") are an excellent way of eliciting participation from young readers. But there's no source of suspense here, no drive.
Alone among the three books, Lilly is labeled "a first comic for brand-new readers." I can't decide whether it's forward- or backward-thinking. From my POV, the book doesn't seem to know whether it's intended as a shared read-aloud or as a solo, read-alone challenge. In fact this problem seems to hover over all three books: Whom are they for? Under what circumstances do we imagine young people reading them? Are they intended for solo reading, as the advance PR suggests? If so, they cover a huge range, from the complex, shifting layouts of Otto and Benny and Penny to the studied regularity, the willed lack of dynamism, in Lilly. Or are they intended for shared reading aloud, what Ellen Handler Spitz, in Inside Picture Books, calls conversational reading? If so, perhaps we should see them as scripts for adult-child interaction, with different readers taking different character roles? Actually, Lilly offers only one role, that of Lilly (there are no other speaking and indeed no other "human" characters), whereas the dialogue in the other two is considerably more complex. Is Lilly therefore the best or the worst of the three, in terms of demonstrating to young readers what comics can do?
Does Lilly reveal an assumption underlying all the TOON Books, that comics for young readers must forgo some of the formal possibilities of comics so as to create something that is entry-level user-friendly? (Something that does for comics what Teletubbies does for TV?) By that measure, Lilly would be the most successful of these books. But it's also the most vacant.
Ouch. I hate to snipe at these books. After all, I'm keenly interested in the subject of children's comics, and so in a sense I'm invested in the success of the TOON Books project. I also respect the editorial intelligence and graphic elegance of any Françoise Mouly project. Yet these first three TOON books, handsome though they are, strike me as an unsatisfying, neither-fish-nor-fowl compromise that values willed simplicity (the putative "readability" of a very young child's book) over the more antic inventiveness that comics are capable of supporting. I liked Otto and Benny and Penny well enough, but they struck me as too pat and too obviously shaped by good intentions.
While reading all three of these books I was forced, frankly, to confront some assumptions behind my own view of comics: that they are generally for solo, self-selected reading rather than conversational reading; that they necessarily skew "older" than beginner books because of their extreme fragmentation; and that they tend to work better as fugitive reading than as part of a "step-into" reading program. In short, I admit it, I associate comics with individual discovery -- with free voluntary reading, essentially a loner's activity, rather than a mode of reading shaped by an adult's hovering solicitude. The TOON Books have set out, apparently, to challenge this assumption, by providing comics that may be meant both as scripts for conversational reading and as early I-can-read-it-myself books. But it's not clear to me that they can succeed on both terms. The book most likely to be read solo by a very young reader, Silly Lilly, struck me as under-developed and having a facile, self-satisfied air. Graphically, the other two books are improvements -- they struck me as aimed for a much older reader -- but, still, their moralizing is obvious and blunt, so much so that they seem more adult-centered than child-centered. And in that sense they seem to smother the very quality of comics that spoke to me so powerfully as a child: their liberatory, escapist quality.
The game-like indulgences of Little Lit, which clearly presupposed an independent reader, were more to my liking. Of the three, Otto gets closest to this insouciant, carefree quality, and so I like it best.
I may be wrong about this, but it seems to me that there's something in the cultural script of comic book readers that resists the kind of "controlled" reading implied in the TOON Books. I wonder how future TOON releases will construct the child reader and whether we can expect a greater range of (imagined) audiences and a greater range of approaches from them. For books coming from "RAW Junior," they're surprisingly undaring.
I read two of the first three - the Cammuso shipped very late to comics stores - and I've got to agree with Chas. line "For books coming from "RAW Junior," they're surprisingly undaring." Cammuso I have higher hopes for - he was doing a nice series of fairy tale murder mysteries recently that I picked up from him regularly at SPX. Is he still doing those?
Posted by: Mike Rhode | June 06, 2008 at 07:37 PM