Comics For Kids; Toon Books, Adventures In Cartooning, Anna & Froga

The latest batch of comics for kids definitely skews toward the alt-comics neck of the woods this time around, with several new releases from Toon Books, a new volume in the Adventures in Cartooning series and an English translation of a book by Anouk Ricard.

The Toon Books line is an interesting success story, given that editor and publisher Francoise Mouly was initially unable to sell her idea of comics for very young readers to a single big publisher.  Fast-forward a few years, and the line has sold a lot of books and won several awards, and is now an imprint of a larger publisher. Mouly still retains control, but she's started to farm some of the work out ever so slightly to her daughter Nadja, who was a "guest editor" on a couple of the recent books. Mouly has expanded her initial vision for the line, concretizing the notion that some of the books are aimed at pre-K kids and others are for more slightly advanced readers. As such, a couple of the books here are longer and more challenging than any of the prior volumes, but Mouly is also careful not to abandon established formulae, like the beloved Benny & Penny books of Geoffrey Hayes.

Let's start with Hayes. His latest Benny & Penny book is called Lights Out!, and it's once again an evocatively drawn story about two siblings at bedtime.Hayes has an incredible knack for portraying their relationship with great affection yet still understanding the ways in which children squabble and generally enjoy making each other miserable at times. Here, the mischievous Benny can't settle down at bedtime, annoying his sister in every way imaginable, until he has to go get his all-important pirate hat from the playhouse outside. Throughout the series, Hayes has loved folding back a story's conflict onto the aggressor (usually Benny), putting them in the sort of situation that they taunted the other about. Once again, Hayes masterfully balances his background as a traditional illustrator of children's books with making this work as a comic, including finding ways to lead the reader's eyes across the page as simply as possible. At the same time, he provides a wave of eye pops, as characters bleed off-panel or tiny bugs pop up in the same place. For the youngest of readers, these are perfect story and art objects.

Frank Viva (an illustrator for the New Yorker) takes a completely different approach in A Trip To The Bottom of the World. Drawn in Illustrator, this book is much colder and starker than Hayes' work, filled with a confluence of basic shapes and colors that pop off the page.This book is actually based on Viva's own experience on an Antarctic research vessel, as the things that the explorer's mouse sees are things Viva spotted. The plot (with the mouse constantly wanting to go back home, until the trip is over) is fairly boilerplate for this kind of thing, but it's Viva's visuals that make this one worth a look.

Mouly switches things up once again with David Nytra's pen-and-ink comic The Secret of the Stone Frog. It's more than a little influenced by Lewis Carroll (and of course the illustrator John Tenniel) by way of Winsor McCay, as a girl and her younger brother try to find their way home in a mysterious forest, aided by the immobile but loquacious titular frogs. This 80-page book is  the longest of the Toon Book entries and is billed as the first Toon graphic novel, and as such it's obviously aimed at a six or seven year old as an early "big" book for them. The book is beautiful to look at and carries the line's usual sterling production values, even if it does feel derivative.

The gem of Toon's fall batch is Rutu Modan's Maya Makes A Mess. It's a pure visual joy and has some of Modan's best-ever cartooning. It's about a messy little girl with bad table manners who is called to eat with the Queen, and her uncouth nature (done because it's more fun to eat with your hands) has a surprising effect on the Queen and her court. Modan's line is crisp and clear, and her already highly-developed color sense makes every page a treat, without going into too much pyrotechnics. There's also a running gag at the bottom of the page that appears to simply be a visual flourish at first, but is revealed to simply be a time-release joke. I love that this book does not desire to teach any sort of lesson about good manners but rather is all about pursuing a joke to its logical end.

The Center for Cartoon Studies team of James Sturm, Andrew Arnold and Alexis Frederick-Frost return for their third book in the Adventures In Cartooning series, this time with the every-sturdy Christmas Special. This book really does have "stocking stuffer" written all over it, as it's by far the least interactive of the three books. The first one taught cartooning basics and the second volume was pretty much a cartooning workbook, but the Special is mostly just an extended series of (effective) gags and rhymes about Santa struggling to deal with giving gifts in the digital age. All the reader gets to do is write a comic strip for Santa about something cheerful, and they are then encouraged to send it to CCS ("Halfway to the North Pole") for Santa's benefit. It's a clever idea, and I'm curious to see what kind of responses they will wind up getting. The book takes a while to warm up, but once the cartooning elf summons forth the cartooning knight of the first two books, the gags start flying and the visual storytelling of the trio starts popping. I'm still not quite sure what the division of labor is like on these books, but it does seem like I sense Frederick-Frost's hand most strongly. I'm not sure where this series goes next; does it try to teach a more advanced lesson, or will it stick with concept books like this one? I'm hoping for the former (at least another challenging activity book), but I'm guessing the latter would be an easier sell.

It makes sense that Ben Jones blurbed the translation of Anouk Ricard's Anna & Froga: Want a Gumball? That's because her figures look a lot like Jones' own weird, crude and ugly drawings. Like Jones, however, those figures have an enormous amount of personality and power on the page, thanks in part to what looks like a lively application of magic marker. I've never seen a book that had so many ugly drawings on it that made me want to stare at it for hours. Part of that is Ricard's judicious use of negative space on every page, saving the reader from being overwhelmed by the drawings and the colors. Indeed, the use of white made it easy for anyone to follow the characters across the page and zero in on the gags at hand. As interesting as the art is in this book, it's Ricard's skill as a humorist that makes this book endlessly readable. The title characters, plus dog friend Bubu and cat friend Ron form a kind of Seinfeld gang that milks a lot of humor from awkwardness, vanity, self-deception and a healthy sense of mutual aggravation. On some pages, Ricard goes from her crudely-drawn comic strip to beautifully painted full page strips that comment on the previous story. One of the best things about this book is Ricard's storytelling rhythm. With each story running about three or four pages, that allows Ricard to pack a lot of gags into this forty page book. She ramps up the awkwardness in each strip until the climax of the final punchline, gives the reader a palate cleanser with her paintings, and then repeats the process ten times. The result is a highly meaty forty pages, though I found myself wanting more by the end. This is a truly outstanding book for kids, one they will be able to follow with ease as well as appreciate the jokes, which generally wind up with a chase scene, things being thrown, or something gross or cruel happening to one of the characters. I hope this sells well enough for Drawn & Quarterly to publish many more volumes.

Sequart Reprints: Toon Books

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2007.
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Former RAW co-editor Francoise Mouly is heading up a new line of comics primers aimed squarely at 4-6 year olds, which is such a brilliant idea that one wonders why it hasn't been done before. Mouly co-edited the Little Lit series, which I reviewed here. That brought in both respected alt and underground comics creators, often collaborating with illustrators or children's authors. The Toon Book line is a much more focused attempt at creating comics for children, both in terms of design and content, and the results are intriguing.

First, the books (co-designed by Mome cartoonist Jonathan Bennett) have the look, feel and shape of classic children's books. They are slim, small hardcovers that any child could pick up and hold. Picking them up reminded me of the first time I read a Dr Seuss book when I was a child. However, there is no mistaking these for illustrated novels--they are comics, told in the language of comics, through and through. We get tipped off to that right away on the cover of each book, because they both depict action and have word balloons. In the most RC Harvey sense of the definition of comics, each of these books carefully combines word and image on every page and requires a reader to understand how they combine to form an experience that is very different from looking at words or pictures alone. They're also very deliberately propulsive in terms of the action on the page, emphasizing panel-to-panel transition and the way that motion can be depicted on the page.

Let's begin with Silly Lilly and the Four Seasons, by French children's book author Agnes Rosenstiehl. This is the book I'd first introduce to the youngest readers, perhaps as young as two or three. The concepts and action in this book are simple: Lilly experiences the seasons through a series of activities: playing in the park in spring with her teddy, looking for things in the ocean in the summer, picking apples in the fall, making snowballs in the winter and flying on a swing back in the next spring. The images here are simple and Rosenstiehl's line is warm. That warmth will immediately draw in young readers who are used to similar imagery in books they've seen up to that point in their lives. The panel-to-panel transitions here as Lilly throws a snowball or gets on a swing are simple to understand and will spur on a child's understanding of how movement can be portrayed on the page.

Geoffrey Hayes' Benny & Penny in Just Pretend is the most impressive of the three initial books in the line. Hayes, the older brother of highly innovative (but sadly deceased) underground artist Rory Hayes, is another children's book author. In his case, he carried a lifelong love of comics into his chosen career, so his understanding of the nuances of how to compose a page is quite remarkable. Moreover, his skill in depicting gesture and expression in his characters really brings them to life. The story is about an older brother and younger sister (Benny & Penny) and his reluctance to let her play with him.

The characters are anthropomorphic mice, yet their expressiveness is so very lively. The way Hayes composes his page is playful and engaging, but it also perfectly introduces children to the formal elements of comics. Panels tilt to indicate motion, particularly exciting scenes spill out of panels, certain scenes without panels carry their own emotional resonance, and the use of circular panels instead of squares draws the eye in differently as well. The warmth of his line and the gentleness of his pastel palette makes this book another perfect transition point for young readers, especially for the recommended 4-5 year olds who are ready for a more complex narrative. There's a sweetness to this story that is still true to the conflicts that siblings can have. Still, it's Hayes' gorgeous, lively line that makes this my favorite of the three books, especially with regard to eyes and facial expressions.

Otto's Orange Day, drawn by political cartoonist Frank Cammuso and written by underground legend Jay Lynch, is a book I'd probably recommend to slightly older readers. The art is much slicker than in the other two books and the coloring (by design) is much more forceful. It will appeal to children who like watching a lot of modern animation in terms of its character design, coloring and story action. It's about a young anthropomorphic cat who loves the color orange. He is given a genie-inhabited magic lamp and gets his wish granted to have everything in the world turned orange. When that results in chaos (traffic accidents, orange lamb chops, etc), he tricks the genie into changing colors--but then he changes everything into blue. They have to trick him one more time into making the world normal again (thanks to the magic of pizza). This isn't really a book I'd give to a child who hasn't experienced comics before, but as I noted earlier, it's certainly one I'd give to one who loves animation and wants to experience the the equivalent on the written page. The most appealing aspects of this comic are the gags that Lynch comes up with, which isn't surprising considering that I always considered him to be the funniest of the underground artists.

The Toon Books line is one of the best-conceived comics series I've seen from a book publisher. The selection of creators, the design, the understanding of its audience and the niche it's filling in the world of comics all seem scrupulously well-studied and considered. Most importantly, the actual books seem perfect for the intended audience and an ideal way to get kids to understand how to read comics and get them to seek out more as they grow older. Mouly acts as an aesthetic guidepost here, imprinting her own sense of aesthetics and design on the series while bringing out the best in each of the artists she chooses to work with. I'm eager to see the books in the fall release cycle by Eleanor Davis, Art Spiegelman and the team of Jay Lynch & Dean Haspiel. As RAW determined to bring comics kicking and screaming into fulfilling its promise as something other than adolescent pap, the Toon Book line from RAW Junior is setting out to inculcate a lifetime of loving comics for generations that are increasingly removed from its influence.

Comics For Kids: A Survey Of New Material

A truism in the world of publishing is that comics for kids are one of the few growth areas available.  Whether they're aimed at new readers, readers on their way to developing a lifelong passion for reading, or for the fabled "all-ages" audience that also encompasses adults, there seem to be more publishers who have a real sense of what they're doing in creating comics. 

Let's begin with Francoise Mouly's remarkable Toon Books line.  When she started this imprint, she actually tried to shop her idea (comics aimed at emerging readers from ages two through five in hardcover form), she was rejected across the line because every publisher didn't quite know what to make of her end product.  She saw it through herself and made it an offshoot of RAW Junior, and the results have been quite successful.  In addition to winning several industry awards, the Toon Books have also become staples at libraries.  One of the slight modifications she's made is indicate the specific reading level for each book with an easy numerical code.  One indicates the youngest readers (kindergarten and first grade), and the content focuses in on a single character or two doing specific things while using a limited vocabulary.  Two is the middle level (first and second grade), with multiple protagonists interacting with each other, a larger vocabulary and a story arc.  Three is aimed roughly at second and third graders, as characters interact with the larger world around them, the books are divided into chapters and the vocabulary tops 1000 words.  Mouly has done a nice job of getting cartoonists to write these children's books, but she's also excelled at getting children's book authors to write these comics.

The most recent batch includes three such books, including an author new to the Toon Books line in Philippe Coudray.  His book, Benjamin Bear in Fuzzy Thinking, marks the first book of gag comics for kids that Ton Books has published.  It's a legitimately funny book of single-page gags, with four panels to a page.  It's a perfect primer in how to teach kids humor whose punchline takes an unexpected detour from its premise.  Every single joke is a sight gag, making it perfect for kids.  It's an unexpected pleasure to read a children's book where no lessons are to be taught or examples followed other than making the cognitive leap of understanding a certain form of humor.  On the other hand, Geoffrey Hayes contributes a new character, Patrick in A Teddy Bear's Picnic And Other Stories.  Hayes is a remarkable craftsman with years of illustration experience, but his true love was always the comics he would make as a child with his brother Rory.  Done in colored pencil, this book has a warmth and organic feel unmatched by other children's books.  There's an incredible sense of comfort to be found in these pages, even as Hayes playfully and skillfully leads the young reader through a fairly complex set of panels on each page.  He can't help but have images sticking out of panels, having panels disappear altogether, and having other panels act as decorative devices.  For the youngest of readers, Agnes Rosenstiehl returns with Silly Lilly in What Will I Be Today?  The titular character tries out all sorts of professions, from musician to city planner to vampire (!), with amusing variations on each job for the young girl.  Rather than the fluid panel-to-panel transitions of Hayes, Rosenstiehl employs a deliberately posed technique in each panel, allowing a young reader to see how Lilly is moving from panel to panel very slowly.  It's a clever technique that introduces the idea of the passage of time from panel to panel to young readers.  None of these books are cheap (about $13 for 34 pages), but the production design is top-notch.  The Hayes books and the Coudray books are definite keepers for anyone, but if I were buying these for a child, I might check some of them out of a library first to see what they liked best.

A book done in much the same format as the Toon Books is Aron Nels Steinke's The Super-Duper Dog Park.  I wasn't keen on his first book for kids, Neptune, given that it violated the "show, don't tell" rule.  It kept talking about how wacky things were instead of really making things wacky.  With his new book, Steinke (once again working with Blue Apple Books "Balloon Toons" line--they published his second book for kids, The Super Crazy Cat Dance) gets straight to the telling from the very beginning.  An important rule for keeping kids involved in your book is to provide a propulsive sense of momentum and to keep it going, which is what Carl Barks was so good at in his Disney comics.  Here, Steinke tells the reader that a bunch of people are going to a dog park, he follows their car to the park, and then everyone plays in the souped-up dog park until it's time to go.  Using a clear and simple line, he devotes each page to a different part of the park, including a section where dogs make music.  There are lots of eye pops and sumptuous background details, but the characters themselves are kept simple.  There are amusing bits but no real jokes, per se--Steinke seems to be aiming at delighting and amusing rather than trying to make his audience laugh out loud. Steinke is not in the same class as the Toon Books creators, but it's clear that he's making strides in determining his strengths.

First Second aims a lot of their books at young readers, but Nursery Rhyme Comics is their youngest-skewing book to date.  Edited by Leonard Marcus, the book features a murderer's row of cartoonists and illustrators putting their spin on classic nursery rhymes.  Some create entirely new dialogue and narratives to go with the rhyme, like James Sturm's back-talking "Jack Be Nimble".  Lucy Knisley took the rather dreadful rhyme in "There Was An Old Woman Who Lived In a Shoe", turning a story about a woman whipping her children before bed into a rock 'n roll babysitter who forms a band called The Whips with the children she tends to .  Craig Thompson's "The Owl and the Pussycat" is drop-dead gorgeous, turning this poem into a true romantic fantasy.  Raina Telgemeier makes sure that "Georgie Porgie" gets his for making the girls cry, in her own gentle way.  Jordan Crane really shows off his chops as someone familiar with doing books for kids with his version of "Old Mother Hubbard" that shows off a new dimension to his work: as a bigfoot cartoonist.  Jaime Hernandez' "Jack and Jill" displays his facility for drawing children.  There really aren't many duds here, but the work of the natural cartoonists is better than that of the illustrators, at least in terms of trying to interpret the work in a new way.  The biggest surprise is recent CCS grad Mo Oh, whose "Hush, Little Baby" is superb.  It's funny, playful, visually dynamic and genuinely touching.  I'd be excited to see her do a longer work of this kind.

One of the biggest publishers for children is Scholastic, the company that publishes the Harry Potter books in America.  They usually know what they're doing, although they did turn down Toon Books.  They jumped into comics by publishing collected, colorized editions of Jeff Smith's Bone, then went on to publish Raina Telgemeier's smash hit Smile.  They sent me something odd in a comic booklet of Scooby Doo! A Merry Scary Holiday, by Lee Howard and Alcadia Scn.  This is a straightforward adaptation of an old Scooby-Doo cartoon, a property whose durability is puzzling thanks to the hokey plots and dated 70s quasi-stoner "humor".  There's something weirdly comforting about the stale formula that little kids today seem to like, in so much as it allows the funny talking dog to run around.  This is a faithful enough adaptation, but without the cartoon's sole redeeming quality (the chase scenes that were genuinely fun), it's mostly a bore.  There's a weirdly sentimental ending tacked on as well.

On the other hand, Scholastic struck gold again with the Amulet series, by the driving force behind the Flight anthologies, Kazu Kabuishi. The last couple of volumes have been New York Times bestsellers. It's a tribute to his skill as a storyteller that a new reader can dive right into the fourth volume (I'd only read the third volume but remembered very little from it) and very quickly pick up on the conflicts and character interactions.  Kabuishi makes a couple of interesting storytelling choices in these books.  His character designs are simple and cartoonish, but the backgrounds are done in sumptuous, breathtaking color.  He's gotten better at both as he's developed as an artist, always keeping his characters as the focus of the reader's eye but letting them drink in the lush backgrounds and action sequences when appropriate.  As with most of the material in Flight, the story itself is predictable and formulaic, though he keeps things moving at a quick pace.  It's very much a variation on the Harry Potter story: young person receives a power they're not prepared for, then is thrust into a situation where they have to rise to the occasion to save their family and friends.  There are betrayals and an impossibly powerful enemy, and comic relief characters that come in from time to time.  It moves like clockwork, but it all feels a bit cold and precise to me.

Perhaps that's why I enjoyed their newest offering, Pandemonium, by Chris Woodring and Cassandra Diaz.  There's the usual fantasy political intrigue, magic spells and whatnot (and author Woodring takes it seriously), but there's a jokey quality to the proceedings in this book that give it a level of charm that the deadly-serious Amulet books lack.  The story of Seifer Tombchewer, a boy kidnapped in order to take the place of a missing prince he happens to greatly resemble, is a familiar one.  He's a fish out of water put into a series of dangerous (but frequently funny) situations, and his ability to navigate them (and attract help) surprises even him.  Diaz' art is strongly manga-influenced, dovetailing nicely with the book's more playful aspects.  Woodring tosses in the usual plot twists and hints at future revelations in other volumes, but the book works because the reader gets to know Seifer and his friend Carcassa (the names in the book alone are worth the price of admission).  About the only problem is that Diaz's facility for clearly delineating fight scenes is weak, and the moody color scheme does her no favors in that regard.  I had to read a few pages several times just to figure out precisely what happened during action sequences, which is not a good sign.  Given how much the rest of the book worked, it's a forgivable offense.

Finally, there's the category of the all-ages book.  Fantagraphics' translation of The Littlest Pirate King, by David B and Pierre Mac Orlan.  This edition is done in full European album size, allowing David B's art to really pop off the page.  This is the rather grim story of the Flying Dutchman and his damned crew, cursed to never be given their final rest even as they try to destroy their ship.  Then they come across a baby and raise him as one of their own, planning to kill him when he reached age ten.  Instead, the boy's presence brought the crew of skeletons joy as he ran around the ship, and he wanted nothing more than to be dead so as to be like the rest of his "family".  The crew starts to feel regret at keeping him on board, and so drops him off on land--not realizing that they deposited him on an iceberg, dooming him to a lonely death.  It's a horrific ending as many fairy tales are, one made all the sadder by the possibility of happiness that both crew and boy felt earlier in the book.

From Drawn & Quarterly comes Jinchalo, by Matthew Forsythe.  Forsythe's debut, Ojingogo, effortlessly combined whimsy and menace, and Jinchalo takes that a step further.  The mostly wordless story is heavily influenced by certain manga tropes in terms of character design, but the storytelling is distinctly Western.  It concerns a young girl with a voracious appetite who is charged to go out and get some food for her family.  She meets an anthropomorphic bird with a magic egg, bumps into him, and winds up with his egg.  From there, the girl embarks on a series of bizarre, almost hallucinatory adventures.  At one point, she steps out of the story and drags the artist into things, demanding he fix a particular image.  She winds up traveling into her own future before coming back down to earth with food, but her father gives her a big surprise.  This book is charming, cute and horrific in turns and simultaneously, creating scenarios that any child could follow and both laugh and wince at.  Forsythe's cartooning is excellent throughout, creating images that are familiar in form but entirely his in the way he moves them across the page.  This is a book that will delight, amuse and confound any close reader.

Cityscapes and Backyard Adventures: The Latest from Toon Books

Rob reviews the newest releases from Toon Books: LUKE ON THE LOOSE, by Harry Bliss; and BENNY & PENNY in THE BIG NO-NO!, by Geoffrey Hayes.

The Francoise Mouly-edited Toon Books are among the best edited and conceived books in all of comics (regardless of genre). It's hard to think of a better introduction to the art form than these books, which cleverly disguise their pedagogic nature in the form of their stories. At their heart, these books are Comics 101 courses, carefully breaking down and isolating what makes comics successful and how to make this plain to anyone. Take the covers, for example. Great care is taken to indicate that this isn't simply another illustrated picture book, but rather something far more immersive. The word balloon attached to a character on the cover screams "comics!" and makes a new reader pause to try to figure out how word and image are interacting. Above the main illustration on the cover are a couple of panels depicting action, whetting the reader's appetite for the book's content and again letting them know that this is something different from what they're used to.


The latest books are once again from artists not known for sequential storytelling. Geoffrey Hayes, who checks in with his second Benny & Penny book, THE BIG NO-NO!, is best known for illustrating his own children's books. Harry Bliss is an illustrator who also does cartoons for the New Yorker. Both artists are longtime comics fans being given an opportunity to do stories in the style of comics that inspired them.


Hayes once again manages to combine his delicate, feathery line with unusual page & panel composition along with an unerring sense of propulsiveness. The way he obviously manages to tap into his relationship growing up with his brother, deceased underground cartoonist Rory Hayes, gives the story a sense of verisimilitude that any children with siblings will instantly recognize. This story finds the pair going over the fence into the yard of a new neighbor in quest of Benny's missing pail. The sight gags and gentle humor of the story is fueled by the mutual love and mutual sense of aggravation that the brother and sister share for each other. They give each other a hard time one minute and are concerned for their welfare the next. Hayes' lush style will be instantly familiar to any child reading a comic for the first time, especially in the way he draws anthropomorphic animals as his characters. He uses that familiarity to go to town on the page, leading the reader's eye around the page at a near-whiplash pace. He even leads the eye entirely out of panels and into gutters, like the mysterious footprints of their new next-door neighbor.



After I finished reading Bliss' LUKE ON THE LOOSE, I immediately thought "This is an entry-level Will Elder comic". Reading his bio, he notes that he grew up loving Will Elder, so it was no surprise to see all sorts of eye pops and background gags in addition to the manic main storyline. This story is also a love letter to New York city, in all its diverse glory. It's about a little boy named Luke who squirms away from his father in Central Park in order to chase pigeons, and his tireless chase leads him halfway across the city, causing chaos in his wake.



This book is completely different in approach than THE BIG NO-NO!, yet both books have a certain flowing, kinetic quality to them. Bliss's line is much thinner and his use of color much flatter than Hayes, whose comics have a lot of decorative drawings that help draw the reader along the page. Bliss instead packs layers of gags Elder-style on each page, often inserting famous comics characters into his scenes or having animals provide commentary. The way he uses animals in particular is very funny, as when a dog leaps into his owner's arms and hugs him like a person.

While both books have a lot of action, THE BIG NO-NO! is a softer and gentler tale while LUKE ON THE LOOSE ramps up the action and the stakes on each page. I love the way the latter depicts New York as being simultaneously perilous and packed with potential adventure, yet still full of caring individuals. The former book nails sibling interaction and vividly creates a world that any young reader will relish visiting. Both books are remarkable in how well constructed they are, given that neither artist is greatly experienced crafting long-form comics. The design of the books (simple and elegant) and the steady editorial hand of Mouly no doubt made it easy for these artists to adapt to a new form. The long-term effect of Toon Books won't be felt for quite some time, though one hopes it will encourage a new generation to read comics and continue to read comics throughout their lives.