TOON Books' first set (Craig Responds)

I don't have much to add to Charles' post, especially since I share his mixed feelings towards both the Little Lit anthologies and the TOON series. I suspect, though, that kids might be more enthusiastic about these books than us crabby old adults are.

Take my kids, for instance. In 1997, when my son Nate was less than six months old, I bought Art Spiegelman's Open Me, I'm a Dog (1997), a children's book that in retrospect seems like a practice run for Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly's "Raw Junior" direction. I found (and still find) Open Me cute but unsatisfying. Spiegelman's painted art in Open Me is considerably less accomplished than his pen and ink work, and the dog-is-the-book situation, while clever, pales in comparison to the deeper self-reflexivity in kids' books like Chris Van Allsburg's Bad Day at Riverbend (1995) or David Wiesner's The Three Pigs (2001). (Eleven years ago, I hadn't read Van Allsburg or Wiesner yet, so I evaluated Open Me in light of Spiegelman's career; like Spiegelman's illustrations for a new edition of Joseph Moncure March's The Wild Party [1994], Open Me felt like a pretty anemic follow-up to Maus II [1992].) A couple of years later, though, I read Open Me out loud to my post-toddler son, and he loved it. For about five or six months, we read it together at least once every day, and occasionally I'd see him dragging the book around by the leash or sucking furiously on its corners. He loved that book so much he sucked the crap out of it. For Nate, Open Me was his first encounter with metafiction, with a narrative breaking through the fourth wall, and he found it magical.

A similar kind of magic happened when my daughter Mercer, who's seven years old, recently got her hands on the TOON books.

"Can I look at these?" she asked, and then proceeded to read them--first silently, to herself, and then out loud to the rest of our family. (Nate, now eleven, ignored her, partially because he's sure that everything his little sister says can be ignored, and partially because he thought the TOON books were "too babyish.") Mercer's recitations went on for several days, to the point where I was ready to slice off my ears rather than hear about Silly Lilly's trip to the beach again.

Mercer's affection for the TOON books revealed to me that early reading experiences are as much about mastering the reading process as about more "sophisticated" pleasures like suspense and characterization. Mercer loves these books because they're perfectly attuned to her reading level, and as such allow her to show off what a good reader she is. The quality of the books has little or nothing to do with it her pleasure in them, though I'm not saying that the TOON books are poorly done. They're actually quite beautiful. I share Charles' appreciation of Frank Cammuso's undulating brush line and cartooning chops in Otto's Orange Day, and I find Geoffrey Hayes' art in Benny and Penny exceedingly pretty--as Charles says, Hayes' style is playful and influenced by Russell Hoban here. Look at just how damn cute this page from Benny is:

Benny and Penny is a textbook example of how people at different ages can be affected differently by the same text. Older kids read Benny as a light-hearted comedy of sibling friction; comix hipsters like Charles and I know that Geoffrey Hayes is brother to underground primitivist and drug casualty Rory Hayes, and Benny acquires added poignancy in the shadow of Rory's tragic story. For Mercer, though, the most exciting thing about the TOON books were that she could read them well. The "gap between being 'read to' and reading for oneself" has been bridged.

The TOON books also functioned for her as introductory primers to the comics form. Mouly and "Raw Jr." promote Silly Lilly as "a first comic for our earliest readers," and the book appropriately sticks to a rudimentary layout, with only one or two panels per page:

I chose this page because it very lightly contradicts Charles' claim that Silly Lilly is dull, poker-faced, too Bushmillerian. Every time she reads this page, Mercer laughs because Teddy is angry that Lilly's slugged him with the snowball; Lilly is capable of being impish, and those moments of mischief, however muted, seem to perk up the book for its pre-school audience.

Quiet playfulness and clear storytelling like this make Silly Lilly a good place for a kid to start his or her comics reading. Mercer buzzed through Lilly without problems, but stumbled a bit in her initial readings of Benny and Otto, because of their slightly more advanced vocabulary and slightly more adventurous page layouts. Silly Lilly is Kindergarden, Benny and Penny and Otto's Orange Day are first grade, and Mercer seems happy reading them until she's was ready to graduate to grade two (Carl Barks? Archie? Bone?). Perhaps Charles and I are disappointed because we're forgetting that the TOON books, while not major (or even minor) advances on the comics medium, still manage to deliver novelty to young readers. Maybe the success of the TOON line should be measured by how well it actually teaches kids to follow panel flow--Mercer's a pro now--and by how clearly it presents ideas about siblings, the seasons and the spectrum in easily-digestible comics form. The TOON books might just be fresh and magical to young readers, and maybe I've just aged out of Spiegelman and Mouly's demographic. But if the test of a quality children's book is its ability to address and entertain both kids and adults, the TOON books failed with me.

I'll probably buy the next batch, though. As Charles says, the TOON line has a lot of potential to realize, and I personally can't wait for a kid's book drawn by Dean Haspiel. I'm also happy to buy books that my daughter will love...at least for a little while, until she thinks they're too babyish.

Comments

[Ben Towle]

Dean Haspiel? Meh, I say. I'm waiting on the Eleanor Davis TOON book!

[CharlesWHatfield]

Thoughtful riposte, Craig!

Glad to hear anecdotal evidence that the TOON Books do indeed work with younger readers. I haven't shared them with any very young readers yet (my sons are 19 and 16), but your story about Mercer makes me think maybe I was too hard on the books, or at least on "Silly Lilly." Certainly your story shows that that book can work as a I-can-do-it-myself early reader. I think you're on to something when you suggest that the novelty and accessibility of the form, rather than questions of suspense or characterization, may be what ends up drawing very young readers to these books.

It's curious to me that, despite my teaching and scholarship in children's literature, I came to the TOON Books with expectations having more to do with the auteurist appreciation of alternative comics than with children's books. I suppose I expected the TOON Books to be a haven for auteurs who want to make spirited, independent, one-of-a-kind comics for young readers. This is what the "RAW Junior" label led me to expect. Instead they seem very much like a "line," on par with Seuss et al.'s "Beginner Book" series: consistent format, uniform trade dress, reassuring logo, very clear branding, etc. The TOON setup is like that, but with a higher price point (Seuss' Beginner Books, in board and hardcover editions, tend to run between five and nine bucks these days, though of course some of his books cost much more).

I guess I was hoping for something more provocative and less, as Mouly says, "controlled." However, I'm not sure I have the same expectations for children's picture books in general, which I understand to be, typically, an adult-centered if not outright didactic genre. Odd that I should resist the same tendency in comics. (A diligent reader could probably find a number of contradictions in my review.)

It's too early for me to recant my review. Let's talk again when the next set of TOON Books comes out. :)

[CharlesWHatfield]

Hey, it was let known at BEA this past weekend that Jeff Smith is slated to do a TOON Book as well. I wonder what THAT will be like!

And, yeah, the Davis one is on my radar. :)

[Chris Mautner]

Very nice round-up guys (and thanks for the link Charles).

I received the new fall Toon Books in the mail a few weeks ago and hope to have a review up sometime soon (probably for Blog@). I'll offer a spoiler though and say I thought the Davis book was the best of the bunch.