31 Days of Short Reviews #5: Lilli Carre' and Thereza Rowe

The hardcover comics aimed at new readers from Toon Books have always uniformly done two things well. First, the design has always been impeccable, making each book its own little unique art object. They're simply beautiful to look at. Second, they are rock-solid in terms of comics storytelling fundamentals. The two most recent books from Francoise Mouly's publishing collaboration with Candlewick Press, Hearts and Tippy and the Night Parade, are no exception. Each book is visually distinctive in its own way. Hearts, which was created by Thereza Rowe, features characters put together with cut paper on the page. It's an elegant and beautiful approach that compensates for the slight stiffness of its figures with a propulsive, exciting story. Like a film beginning its narrative with credits rolling over it, so does Hearts set up its book-long chase sequence with protagonist Penelope the fox having her heart broken when her friend leaves on a rocketship. The book consists of her losing her broken heart and chasing a variety of characters who briefly wind up with it, including dolphins, birds, a paper airplane, and a king and queen. This is a Level 1 Toon Book, so it's aimed at emerging readers, and thus the dialogue is quite simple and limited. That makes Rowe's spectacular and varied use of color in particular a crucial part of the storytelling. Indeed, having Rowe do a book injects a bit of the NoBrow aesthetic into the Toon Books line: clear, bright and colorful.

Lilli Carre's background in animation was obviously of great help to her in creating her first book for children. If Hearts was a race, then Carre's Tippy and the Night Parade is a slow and gentle procession, one that keeps looping around on itself. Like Hearts, the narrative for Tippy begins on the inside front cover, when we seed an odd procession of animals strolling across the page, until we see a bird sleeping on someone's head. It turns out to be the titular Tippy, whose room is a mess and filled with an odd assortment of animals and plants. Tippy remembers nothing but going to sleep, and then kicks the narrative into gear by imagining what she might have done: take a walk on the dock, get lost in the mist, hop across lily pads, fall in a big hole, go through a cactus patch, etc. Along the way, a variety of creatures start following her, until we wind up back at her house and precisely the same situation that started the book. Carre's use of dark blues for night is one of her trademarks; few cartoonists create a night as evocative and mysterious as hers. In this book, night is a welcoming blanket of wonder, albeit one that Tippy doesn't experience consciously. The fact that she's doing something a bit "bad" but doesn't remember the hows or whys is undoubtedly appealing to children. Once again, the simplicity of the narrative, pushing readers along a straight line that is actually more of a curve, makes it easy for them to understand what's going on and connect words to images. Toon Books is building a truly impressive library of books, as the savvy Mouly cultivates her connections in the worlds of children's literature, illustration and alternative comics to find the best possible candidates to create memorable books.

Shaggy Mouse Story: Little Mouse Gets Ready

Reviewed is the newest entry from the young readers Toon Books line, Jeff Smith's LITTLE MOUSE GETS READY.

Jeff Smith and Francoise Mouly's Toon Book line are a pretty obvious match for each other. Smith's fantasy series BONE, while not explicitly aimed at children, still drew a huge audience from the younger set despite some pretty intense moments. Amazingly, the book took on a second life when Smith decided to reprint it in color through Scholastic Books. BONE worked because it lulled readers into thinking it was going to be a whimsical, quirky story along the lines of Walt Kelly's POGO; indeed, both Smith's line and the patois of his characters were very much in the spirit of Kelly's work. After thoroughly establishing all of the foibles of his characters, Smith then veered off into a Tolkeinesque fantasy quest story that had the relentless action flow of a Carl Barks story. One gets the sense when reading Smith that there's a very careful and deliberate amount of thought that goes into every storytelling decision. What makes his comics successful is that his deliberate style still manages to retain a great deal of spontaneity on the page. His line is as loose and expressive as his composition is deliberate and controlled.



That really tends to play itself out when Smith is dealing with humor. Given that his storytelling style veers from humorous to serious on a dime, I was curious to see what would happen when he took on a story specifically aimed at first-time readers. What makes LITTLE MOUSE GETS READY so clever is that it's both a shaggy dog story in that a lot of build-up is subverted for a punchline that essentially negates the rest of the story. At the same time, the build-up itself is both charming and didactic. The story, such as it is, unfolds thusly: a child mouse gets ready to visit the barn with his mother. First, he must get dressed. He soliloquizes as he puts on each article of clothing, struggling with dressing himself like any child at that age might. Finally, his mother comes by and delivers a plop-take inducing punchline ("Mice don't wear clothes"). It's not so much a story like Geoffrey Hayes, Jay Lynch or Eleanor Davis told in their Toon Book editions than a blow-by-blow delineation of a struggle its readers can identify with. Smith simply can't resist blowing up the educational aspects of the book with a gag that he works hard to depict. At the same time, it's not quite as simplistic as Art Spiegelman or Agnes Rosenstiehl's books, whose vocabulary was clearly aimed at new readers.



Smith's book is somewhere in-between, with a slightly more advanced vocabulary paired with a simplistic structure. The way the book's central joke is constructed might lend itself to enjoyment on multiple occasions for kids in the way a game of peek-a-boo never gets tired. That's because Smith also changes his visual style in order to sell the joke. As noted earlier, Smith is known for his command of panel-to-panel action flow, sweeping a reader along even when other information was lacking. He's also known for his charming and simple character design, which is certainly at work here. LITTLE MOUSE GETS READY was unusual for Smith in that most of the book's pages are static. Little Mouse isn't moving a whole lot, and Smith chooses to really let the book breathe with just one or two panels on every page. The relatively boring action on each page is countered by the pleasing character design and expressiveness, especially in the eyes. When the gag is delivered, the reader is treated to a two-page spread as Little Mouse bounds away from the eyes of his mother and his audience. LITTLE MOUSE GETS READY gives the young reader a nice punchline but doesn't really play to Smith's strengths. I'd love to see future Toon Books efforts by him that are a bit more traditional in terms of narrative and play more toward his skills as a dynamic storyteller. Still, it's nice to see Smith do something very much unlike what he's best known for.

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.