Kid Lit: Martz, Sowa/Kotomycko, Wilson

Let's take a look at a few books for kids that have come my way recently:

Evie And The Truth About Witches, by John Martz (Koyama Press). This is an illustrated picture book by Martz. Its small size belies the sharpness of its wit, the gentleness of its big plot swerve, and the shock of its ending. Unlike the other books in this article, the tightness of the plot is absolutely crucial to its success. As it says on the back, "Evie wanted to be scared." To that end, she went to a bookstore, where she found a book called "The Truth About Witches". She was told that no matter what, do not read the last page of the book aloud. The book was about the usual witch stories: how they are horrible and cruel and want to eat children.

Martz' page detail is fiendishly clever and thorough. When she reads the book, a witch appears and takes her away to a far-away land. The witch compels her to move to a house where she's told the other witches are very hungry. Evie thinks she's done for until the witches reveal that the book was propaganda, and that witches are kind. She proves it with a wonderful montage of parties, playtime in the park, gardening and lavish feasts. Everyone is kind to her that she wants to be a witch, too, and there's a cute segment where the first witch we meet gives her her hat. Then comes the end twist (which I won't reveal), which works so incredibly well because of Martz' masterful use of misdirection. He pulls the reader one way (witches are evil, beware the book!), then pulls them in another direction (witches are delightful!), then ends the book with a specific reference to the book. This is a great kids' book for those who might want a conceptual scare.

That Night A Monster, by Marzena Sowa & Berenika Kotomycko (Odod Books). You have to hand it to Tom Kaczynski. He resolutely resists formula in his publishing decisions, especially with regard to his kid lit imprint, Odod Books. This book by two Polish artists (a writer-artist duo) is genuinely bizarre, surprising and hilarious. Of the three books featured in this column, this is the one my daughter enjoyed the most, both because of the pacing and the strange mystery surrounding the book. It's that pacing and weirdness that carries the day, because there's no real plot; it's just an episodic day in the life of a family. Except that young Tommy walks into his parent's bedroom to wake them and sees that his mother has been replaced by a big fern. The genius of this book is that makes no distinction between Tommy's imagination and his anxieties, seeing them as part of the whole package.

Despite the promise of action in this book, most of that is left in the imagination of the child as he thinks of worst-case scenarios. When the fern explains that his mom is still there under all that foliage, that kicks off the magical-realism aspects of the story. The fern is not a metaphor or a dream; the fern is a fern. Tommy's mom had gone to a party where her friends messed with her hair and she (presumably) got drunk. It certainly gives the term "potted" a new meaning! The end, when his mom gets a cactus-inspired hairstyle is one of many quirky moments in the book. My daughter loved this book, howling with laughter at the silly parts and tensing up with suspense at its initial mysteries. The elaborate, painted designs of Kotomycka are essential in crafting this fully-realized world that's both mundane and strange, along with figures that are stripped down but highly expressive. This is a "sticky" book, meaning that even though the plot is a mere trifle, it lingers in the memory.

Ghost Queen, by Britt Wilson (Koyama Press). Wilson's work is bigger, broader and louder than the other books on this list. It's a family magic book, where the children of a witch and their anthropomorphic frog friend have to confront the legacy of an ancient menace. Wilson's comics for Koyama always have a supernatural element, but their essence is really that of a family caper. It's the classic trope of kids being given responsibility, kids then blowing that responsibility and creating a huge mess, and then the kids ultimately figuring things out and cleaning things up at the eleventh hour. Books like this feature the kids trying to crack a kind of code in order to clean up, and the action and pacing is cranked way up to give the book a sense of manic energy. The actual characterizations are thin, and in this book, they are specifically meant to match the characters we meet from the past in the prologue. The titular villain is less a character than a plot contrivance designed to cause as much chaos as possible.

In that sense, this book has some Dr. Seuss qualities in terms of its exponentially stacking series of calamities, fake-out solutions and funny twists. More than anything, there's that shared anarchic energy, where the story feels like it's about to go completely off the rails into total lunacy. The big, loopy, rubbery character designs match that energy and give it a safe harbor for younger readers. Even the ghost queen herself is big and squishy; it's still a threat, but it's a cute one. My nine-year-old daughter read it and enjoyed it, but it didn't capture her imagination beyond that in the way that Luke Pearson's Hilda books or Lewis Trondheim's Monster books do. That would be assessment as well: pleasant enough to read but not especially memorable. Everything goes by so fast that it's hard to hook on to anything, even when there are a couple of small character moments.

Koyama For Kids: John Martz & Britt Wilson

Annie Koyama continues to expand her reach into the children's comics arm of the market, and her two publishing choices have entirely different approaches: one is built on gags, and the other is built on propulsive action. John Martz is a gag technician. He has an astonishingly fine-tuned sense of how a drawing can convey humor in as few lines as possible. He's quite skilled at coming up with simple but memorable character designs created to be as flexible as possible. While I've enjoyed much of his other gag work (mostly in Team Society League), his kid's book A Cat Named Tim And Other Stories may well be his best comic. Each gag is well-designed, easy to understand and packs a genuine laugh. I tested the book on my five-year-old daughter to see if she could follow it (she's just learning to read), and the way that Martz continually subverted audiences expectations led to laugh after laugh.

While she enjoyed the adventure comic starring Doug the Duck and his mouse friend, the lack of a specific punchline made it of less interest to her. I found the strip to be flawlessly executed in terms of page composition and the characters had a charming Lewis Trondheim-esque quality to them, but it was less about the gag than it was the journey. On the other hand a basketball gag involving Tim the cat and a trampoline used a simple subversion of expectation and finished with an over-the-top sight gag that had her rolling. Similarly, a gag involving a chemistry experiment and transformations into other characters and different sizes delighted her so much that she demanded multiple readings of these two pages. Martz's cartooning rhythm is so steady that even an inexperienced reader could pick up on how to follow it.

My favorite character was easily Connie the bunny girl, which I felt was one of the best-designed characters I've ever seen in a kid's book. The bunny ears, huge eyes, triangle dress with a plaid pattern and straight hair are so compact, even I could produce a reasonable facsimile of the character. With a character both funny and cute, Martz had room to do some strips that didn't have specific gags (like a day in the life featuring Connie that had a sort of Rube Goldberg quality in terms of all the machines that did things for her) but also put her in more jokey situations, like trying to fish. The book's real masterpiece gag is the last one, featuring Mr and Mrs Hamhock, two pigs waiting for a bus. Using the familiar trope of seasons passing as they waited, Martz carefully let the reader fall into his trap of expecting that passage of time to trigger the joke and then pulls the rug out from under the reader and throws two separate punchlines at the reader. Once again, Martz's mastery of rhythm on the comics page was key in making his constructs effective.

Britt Wilson is less interested in the interlocking nature of static images to create a gag than she is in creating a fluid chain of increasingly frenetic events to create wave after crazy wave of situation-based humor. Her Cat Dad: King of the Goblins, starts off with certain absurd givens that fuel much of the book's humor without needing to provide much explanation. The book follows a family of four and a friend of the kids. Of course, the mom has turned the dad into a cat, and the kids' friend is a talking frog. Using a frantic and elastic character design style reminiscent of Kyle Baker, Wilson's bright colors pop at the reader as much as her linework does. The book follows the disappearance of their dad into a linen closet that's the gateway to the kingdom of the Goblins, who have named Dad as their new leader.

The kids endeavor to get him back in a series of chase sequences, narrow escapes and generalized peril. There's no real sense of danger, however, as Wilson is careful to make even the Goblins look sort of cute, even if they are trying to menace them. Eyes bulge, bodies stretch and distort as they go into motion and are propelled both by the environment and their own energy, yanking the reader along with them. Once the adventure starts, the book's pacing is breathless. That said, the brightness of the colors and Wilson's rendering skills give the book a flamboyant decorative quality that nonetheless doesn't interfere with the book's pacing. The reader is encouraged to stop and take a look around, but not for too long. One unstated aspect of the book that I found pleasant was that this is a family of color (possibly multiracial), a factoid that had no bearing on the story but was still unusual enough in such books to stand out.

Catching Up With Conundrum

Let's look at a few more recent publications from the fine Canadian publisher Conundrum.

The Blaring House, by Claire Seringhaus.This is a book of densely-detailed (think early Drew Friedman), naturalistic and completely absurd gags and borderline dada drawings. As back-cover blurber Joe Ollmann notes, there's bits of Edward Gorey and Terry Gilliam to be found in these drawings, though unlike those artists there's no attempt at a sequential narrative. Ollmann's more on target in comparing Seringhaus to Glen Baxter, both in terms of the drawing style (that stiff, old-fashioned illustration approach that Michael Kupperman also employs so well) and the single-panel design of her gags. Unlike Baxter, Seringhaus frequently goes much farther into absurdity, with images that lack a coherent punchline and are simply, profoundly odd. One can sense that these are the sort of drawings that the artist felt compelled to draw strictly for her own amusement--ideas that more-or-less escaped from her brain and out through her pen. Her naturalistic style makes these images sort of the mirror image of Sam Henderson, an artist who frequently uses similiar sorts of genuinely strange anti-humor, only with deliberately crude (but clear drawings). The antiquated feel of Seringhaus' drawing style combined with captions that sometimes comment on the image nonsensically and sometimes directly sell the gag (just like Henderson) creates a reading experience that makes each subsequent image funnier. There's an additive effect where one eventually begins to enter Seringhaus' headspace, and that is an odd feeling indeed.

Britt Wilson's Greatest Book On Earth, by Britt Wilson. This is a collection of funny and frequently delightfully filthy vignettes. Wilson is a talented draftsman who makes an easy transition between naturalistic and iconic styles of art with great ease, often mixing the two. Her cartoonier work reminds me a bit of Kyle Baker. While she draws funny pictures with great ease, her actual gag construction is a little shaky at times. Some of her comics feel like inside jokes while others sometimes have jumbled storytelling. Her Viking comics in particular sometimes felt like the reader needed to be familiar with the original source material to really understand what was going on. Still, the strip where she and a friend had to negotiate a peril-filled park on the way to celebrating Canada Day (one of my strips in this book involving scat and/or fart humor) and the story where her boyfriend falls into a hole and has to fight dinosaurs have an incredibly manic energy that's highlighted by her rubbery, expressive line. Wilson's sheer enthusiasm for drawing is such that she's sometimes a little too all over the place; a little tightening-up of the gags here and there would serve to give her work a more lasting impact.

Unspent Love, by Shannon Gerard. This is a lovely comics-as-poetry collection that's a series of vignettes that are related in an emotional sense though not a narrative one. The book's subtitle is "Things I Wish I Told You", and that's the unifying theme in this series of ruminations accompanied by pen-and-ink drawings. Gerard employs a clear, crisp and distinct line in depicting her figures moving across the page. These are not comics per se, in that they don't depict time moving forward in a conventional sense. Rather, they are more like small bursts of visual memories, like flipping through a set of snapshots from a memorable day. Gerard is a spare, evocative poet, hitting heavily on details that ground her emotions in what feel like real events. Whether or not the events in the book are autobiographical is less important than how real the sentiments feel, and so very many of them are heartbreaking. They tend to break down into drawings of men, drawings of women or drawings of both. The text sometimes directly comments on the images, and at other times is juxtaposed in opposition to it. One such strip involves happy scenes from a young couple's wedding, set against text that talks about how and why the marriage dissolved. Mostly, Unspent Love is a catalog of 20/20 hindsight and regrets ameliorated by way of confession and retrospective praise. It's a testament to both the power and fragility of love.