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 Except that young Tommy walks into his parent's bedroom to wake them and sees that his mother has been replaced by a big fern.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: Ryan Dodgson, John Martz

Laurels of Xenon, by Ryan Dodgson. Though the title suggests some kind of sci-fi story, this is a book of meditative color drawings. The artist notes in a preface that they were done away from a city setting and were purposeful meditations on "memory, consciousness, depression and anxiety". I engaged each page of colorforms and quickly saw that that way the shapes were arranged (indeed, the fact that they were arranged in a particular way to create cohesive shapes) and in particular the ways in which the colors interacted had a powerful emotional effect. Like a Mark Rothko painting, the colors don't necessarily have a one-to-one correspondence with particular emotions, nor do the shapes and forms have reified meanings. The shapes are frequently unbalanced but still represent a harmonically defined structure. The way the the lines of color work together in parallel and slip in and out of each other in some of the pieces feels like a smoothly-working pattern at work, a beneficent system of some kind. More rigid shapes feel more oppressive somehow, especially when they don't all interact with each other. It paid off to look at each piece as a whole and then break it down shape by shape. Using this kind of hermeneutic approach had a powerful emotional effect for reasons I can't quite articulate, beyond the actual aesthetic experience itself. It had something to do with the ways in which the colors interacted, forming some kind of feedback loop that mixed grief and joy in equal measures. What makes the most sense to say about these pieces is that they all seem to be tools created by the artist for his own use, and in so doing he left their utility, beauty and function up to each individual reader.

Burt's Way Home, by John Martz. Martz is great at writing children's books that don't insult the intelligence of their readers, he's proficient at creating funny gags, and he's always good with a twist. This sweet and sad story is a cleverly framed and humane look at unthinkable loss. It follows young Burt, an anthropomorphic bird who's lost both of his parents to an accident, as he's sent to live with an anthropomorphic mouse named Lydia. Burt processes their deaths by believing with all his heart that he and his parents were in fact actually time-travelling aliens, and that he had to find a way to get home. His process of trying to find ways to get home and "rebuild" his technology reminded me a bit of what Lewis Trondheim did in Astronauts of the Future, only in that case the fantasy turned out to be incontrovertibly true. While Martz does leave a tiny bit of hope in this story, the truth can be found in the narrative from Lydia's point of view: that she can't imagine Burt's pain, she wishes she could help, and she would do anything to comfort him. In the book's climax, what's important is that Burt expresses some of his emotions to Lydia and understands for the first time what home means to him now. What makes the book so heartbreaking and emotionally authentic is the detail Martz spends on Burt's plan, as he cannibalizes a bunch of household electronic appliances in order to make his gadget. Every aspect of Burt's plan is carried out in his own spoken narrative with word balloons, whereas Lydia's narrative is printed on the face following each image, indicating a level of distance and perspective she has about what's going on. Martz's combination of clever storytelling and empathy for his characters makes his comics consistently winning.

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.

John Martz and the Art of the Robot Gag

Let's look at a smattering of publications from Canadian cartoonist John Martz.

Machine Gum #2 and #3. These comics contain Martz's many, many robot-related gag comics. When Martz wants to work out an idea, he does it with his robots. Some of these strips are less gags than simple visual exercises exploring transformation, evolution, joy, despair, decay and anxiety. There's a lot of classic cartooning in Martz's work (it's clear that he's read a lot of New Yorker cartoonists), not to mention Lewis Trondheim's more stripped-down work. It's also a chance for Martz to play a horrible, merciless god to his pitiful, restless robots; in one strip, the robot literally prays and gets zapped by a lightning bolt from above. Martz also gets to the the physical qualities of line and ink in these comics, exploding his figures and often abstracting them. Really, these comics are a form of play--serious play, but play and exploration nonetheless. They're a way of telling stories or expressing emotions in as few lines as possible with a figure that will be instantly recognizable to the reader. Some are delightful, some are baffling, some are disgusting, but all of them exercise different aspects of Martz's imagination and toolbox.

Heaven All Day. This attractive Xeric Grant winner is a sort of graduate project for his robot experimentation projects. There are two parallel narratives: one involves an amateur scientist who's a glorified garbage-counter in his day job, and a down-on-his-luck robot in a world where robots are common but are considered to be second-class citizens. Little by little, we learn the man is building some kind of device out of robot scraps, and the downtrodden robot has a moment of hope followed by a brutal dismemberment at the hands of a cop. However, the one tiny part of the robot that remained wound up in the hands of the scientist, who created a device that looked like either a weapon or a portal or both; the implication at the end of the story is that change was imminent. It was interesting to see the kind of robot abuse from Machine Gum transferred to this comic and given an entirely different emotional context. Here, the beatings are poignant as well as kind of funny, especially because the reader is given little context as to what's happening on this world and why. The blue wash adds to the vague sense of melancholy in what is otherwise a cartoonish work.

Gold Star. This was my favorite of Martz's comics. It's sharper and meaner than his other works, and the intricate structure has quite a payoff. It's about a nebbishy artist of some kind coming to an Oscars-like ceremony in Hollywood and how his casual indifference to the well-being of others as well as his astounding naivete winds up having disastrous consequence. The left-handed side of each spread is a single-panel gag with text at the bottom, and they are flashbacks. The right-handed side of each page is a four-panel grid in the present at the awards ceremony, where the main character (Bunny Buckler, an anthropomorphic rabbit) wins the award and gives a rambling, bizarre acceptance speech. As the flashbacks flip by, we learn that Bunny was seduced by the LA party scene, got massively hung over, and frantically had to call down to the front desk in order to have an iron sent up.There's one hilarious page where the frantic Bunny is on stage, guzzling down an entire glass of water before he's capable of speaking. The nasty punchline of this strip is the result of meticulous, clockwork planning and clever callbacks, delivering a bit of horrifying hubris to the main character and relentlessly punishing the bell hop who was inadvertently abused by Bunny. Reading these comics felt like Martz slowly building his comedic and drawing chops from the ground up, finding out what worked on the page and what didn't, until he was confident enough to unleash a comic as intricately designed as Gold Star. While he's a good gag artist, his real talent is in long form humor, mixing poignant emotion with vicious punchlines. 

Catching Up With Koyama

Let's catch up with some slender new releases from one of my favorite publishers, Koyama Press.

The Big Team Society League Book Of Answers, by John Martz, Aaron Costain, Zach Worton and Steve Wolfhard (aka Team Society League). This is 44 pages worth of a relentless assault of filthy, hilarious scatological jokes. While the inside covers detail the names of the many, simply-drawn characters that appear in this dialogue-free book, that's a fake-out. The characters are ciphers in the tradition of Lewis Trondheim's Mister I and Mister O. That Trondheim influence can be felt strongly in the way the artists go to work at sublimely-crafted fart jokes like some master artisans of flatulence. The reason why this comic works so well is that the artists don't end their gags with a fart joke--they begin their gags with something gross and then go to great lengths to not only top that grossness, they wrap it around a nicely-crafted joke. While the drawing is kept simple, it's actually quite skilled. There's one joke where the main character cuts out his own bowels, stuffs a pizza inside so as to make him a pizza-like character for a kids' birthday party, and then starts bleeding as he stumbles out in front of a group of terrified kids. There's a recurring character who's an anthropomorphic hot dog whose "meat" keeps coming undone and falling on people. There's one strip that subverts every other--a character sucks down gallons worth of gasoline, lights a match, smokes a cigarette, and then walks away with nothing bad happening to him even as the reader is eager to see how it end. Stabbings, incineration, various things being shoved in and emerging out of asses, and general mayhem rule the day in these comics, and there's a sense of glee on these pages as the four jamming artists try to one-up each other. It's a genuine treat.

Eat More Bikes, by Nathan Bulmer. This is another slender book of gags, this time more of the absurd and conceptual variety. Bulmer's line is lean and scratchy; he gives it some solidity by using grey-scaling. I've long enjoyed Bulmer's weekly strip over at tcj.com (in Tucker Stone's column), and his work actually gets funnier as you read more strips and come to understand his comedic rhythm. Like the Team Society League, he starts off with an inherently funny premise (Sheriff Duck, muscles in the shape of the Empire State Building, Children's Song Conspiracy Theories, etc) and then quickly escalates the humor in that situation (the best was having a mini King Kong climb the bicep tower and get shot down). Bulmer's other approach is to start with an utterly mundane premise (a party on a roof, a male stripper, an interview), quickly subvert reader expectations (often with violence) and then cap it with a perfect punchline. What's amazing is that Bulmer drew this entire 36 page comic in just a month--he's a relentless joke machine with a solid sense of craft.

Sunday In The Park With Boys, by Jane Mai.  This is a harrowing, unsparing account of one young woman's experience with anxiety, depression and sheer existential terror. Mai's rendering style ranges from a simplistic, cartoony line (almost like a manga character, complete with a sailor suit) to an intense, almost unbearable naturalism that oozes pain. If there's a credo to this comic, it's "I wish you could understand". Mai tries to get across what it's like to feel the way that she does on a regular basis. She often sees the world as inhabited by horrifying, multisegmented insectoid creatures. She frequently feels them on her own head, suffocating her, isolating her, causing her to become more and more desperate. The phrase she uses, "I wish I wasn't such an asshole" is the cry of depressives everywhere who feel like they don't deserve to be loved. The most devastating part of the book, and really the part that recapitulates Mai's many attempts at understanding herself, comes when she tries to describe how she feels when she's depressed.  She says it's like being in water, "complacent and happy" but "boring". Then you start to drown "and it gets harder to bounce back and stay afloat each time"; for a young person starting to get older, this is precisely what happens. What's interesting about this comic is Mai's use of whimsical storytelling devices that try to give her pep talks: her dog, a mermaid, a mirror, an eyepatch. It's like the entire book is really a dialogue between her depressive self and what is known in therapy as one's "wise mind"--the rational part of one's brain that knows how to help, if only the depressive self would listen. Mai's wise mind is just especially cleverly rendered in so many different ways, even as the specter of the all-controlling insect is such a dominant presence. The book ends on a hopeful note that is as much self-suggestion as it is an honest conclusion for this stunning piece of someone trying to get better in public through art. She and Lance Ward are my new favorite autobio cartoonists for the way they mix humor and unsparing self-examination.