Sequart Reprints: Passionella

This article was originally published at sequart.com in 2006.
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There’s a case to be made that Jules Feiffer was the first prototype of the underground/alternative cartoonist. A comics lifer, he started out as Will Eisner’s assistant on The Spirit and eventually wrote a number of Denny Colt stories. Like Eisner, he shared the feeling that comics were capable of being so much more than merely crude entertainment for sub-literates. The difference was that Eisner abandoned comics for a number of years to design illustrated training manuals for the army before he returned to comics in 1978, whereas Feiffer persisted and invented his own market.

While Eisner would later go on to write for a bookstore market, his art was always more accomplished and sophisticated than his writing. With Feiffer, it was quite the opposite. Though his art is lively and expressive, his minimalist & sketchy style was completely unlike what people expected from comics at the time. His drawings were just the frame from which he hung biting, nasty and incisive satire of modern life and politics. If Harvey Kurtzman wrote satire for kids in the pages of MAD, Feiffer did it for adults in the pages of his primary employer, the Village Voice. In the book’s introduction, Gary Groth mentions William Steig (among others) as influences for Feiffer. Given the tone of his stories, the sheer bluntness and exaggeration of line, another influence would seem to be James Thurber. Thurber was perhaps the most influential humorist of the first half of the 20^th century, and it can be argued that Feiffer was the most influential in the second half. Both men were writers who drew, who loved the impact that their art provided when paired with their text.

This hardback collection (another beneficiary of the Peanuts dividend) collects a number of strips and stories from various magazines and an earlier book collection. Feiffer has dabbled in all sorts of media and has written a number of plays. “Superman” is both a strip and a play. The strip involves Supes getting deconstructed by a woman and winding up with an office job and a house in the suburbs. The play takes the concept a little further, but both have the memorable plea “But you will admit that I’m better than average?” “The Cutting Edgists” is a pointed attack on satirists of the day that he viewed as engaging in little more than harmless, self-congratulatory commentary that was not a real critique of society. It’s a dangerous exercise for a satirist to attack other satirists, but the play lands a number of direct hits.

Of the comics in this collection, the most interesting are the title strip, “The Lonely Machine” and “The Relationship”. The latter is a classic Feiffer silent strip: two lovers, sitting hunched over and despairing, with their backs to each other. When the man accidentally kills a flower and despairs even further, the woman feels his pain and there is a brief rapprochement. The feeling fades, as the two inevitably return to their initial solipsism. There is no real empathy here, just two people wrapped up in themselves. That self-centeredness is further examined in “The Lonely Machine”, a witty indictment of the “Playboy philosophy” about a man rejected by the world who builds a machine to love him and for him to dominate. Feiffer would do Michel Foucault proud in his analysis of relationships in the modern world as nothing more than power struggles. Any real attempt at feeling and empathy is discouraged by a philosophy that emphasizes materialism and false connections.

“Passionella” is a slightly more light-hearted tale of a plain chimney-sweep named Ella who wants nothing more than to be a movie star. Her fairy godmother (manifesting through a TV screen, of course) makes her beautiful and gives her a deluxe breast enhancement, and soon she becomes Passionella. Of course, the only problem is that she’s only beautiful during the evening, and must run off before the Late Late Show ends and she turns back into plain ol’ Ella.

Ella is lonely, however. When she turns to her Fairy Godmother, she is told “My field is strictly public relations. You’ll have to handle your own emotional problems”. She meets the perfect man, disaffected movie star Flip Charming. As Ella is obviously a Marilyn Monroe stand-in, so is Flip a James Dean clone. He encourages her to try acting in real roles, and so she talks her studio into a gritty, “realistic” film about a chimneysweep, which she acts in as Ella. When she winds up marrying Flip, she finds out that he has a secret too. The story is a clever attack on Hollywood that still manages to have a very sweet and funny ending.

The danger of collecting satire is its natural expiration date. Indeed, the weaker pieces in the book are those that address a particular time and place. Luckily, Feiffer’s commentary for the most part remains remarkably fresh. Alienation, jingoism and materialism never seem to go out of style.

Fundraising for SAW (Sequential Arts Workshop)

I can't think of a better comics-related cause than to donate money through an Indiegogo campaign to the Sequential Arts Workshop (SAW) in Gainesville, FL. SAW is the brainchild of the great Tom Hart for an affordable school for comics education. He keeps tuition low for this purpose, and depends on donations and support from the comics community to help fund his fledgling school. I've seen the work of a few of the early students, and there are certainly some promising talents. The donation incentives are pretty amazing, so please consider a donation, great or small.

Kid Lit: Upside Down and The Shark King

Let's take a look at some other recent books for kids:

Upside Down: A Vampire Tale, by Jess Smart Smiley (Top Shelf). This is a charming, simply-rendered comic that combines fable and adventure in a story that has some real stakes. There's a strong James Kochalka influence at work here as Harold the young vampire hangs out with some real bats who enjoy pooping on humans. Whimsy goes hand in hand with danger as an evil witch seeks out an immortality potion, Harold worries about being alienated from his family after he loses his fangs at the dentist's office, and there are multiple situations where the odds seem against Harold's survival. This is a comic that's both relentlessly silly and eccentric; there's nothing cookie-cutter about Smiley's design sense, character design or plot choices. That said, the plot is remarkably straightforward in terms of its structure, including burying plot clues early on in the story, various fake-outs, and actual character arc-work. I sensed Chris Staros' hand in perhaps tightening up some of those plot elements, but Top Shelf left Smiley plenty of room to be as weird as he wanted to be, including using an especially lurid and gross color of green throughout the story. This book is a solid debut for Smiley, whose ability to walk the line between winking at genre material and constructing a compelling narrative bodes well for his future.

The Shark King, by R. Kikuo Johnson (Toon Books).  Johnson is an excellent illustrator who normally works in a naturalistic style. For this book, he softened that style up without losing any of his distinctively bold storytelling flair. Johnson, a native of Hawai'i, spins a tale of local myth Nanaue, the son of the Shark King. Bear in mind that this story is aimed at six and seven year-olds, yet there's nothing about it that talks down to readers. The soft approach he uses for his character design gives his characters a fuzzy and inviting appearance, even when disturbing things are occurring. For example, the jaws growing out of young Nanaue's back almost look cute when they snap at people, even if they are actually monstrous. The simplicity of the character design is offset by the complexity of the page composition, as it's filled with panels of differing sizes, tilting splash pages, inset panels, panels cascading after each other, panels without borders and other devices that take a young reader on a journey. Johnson is so good at providing intuitive clues in how to follow a page that even the more advanced of his page designs isn't hard to follow because of the absolute clarity of his character-dominated storytelling. The fact that the story (like most myths) does not end on an unambiguously happy note is another nice touch, one that hopefully will get young readers thinking. Johnson really excelled at this type of storytelling, and I hope he plumbs the depths of Hawai'ian folklore to tell more stores.

Sequart Reprints: Kid Lit

This review was originally published at sequart.com in 2008.
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Children's literature has frequently employed the use of illustrations to entertain their audiences, especially younger kids. Recently, with the increasingly rising wave of comics appearing in bookstores and their overall success, there's a new trend that sees authors better known for their prose dipping into the world of comics. In some cases, that process is an organic one; in others, it feels more like a kind of marketing move. There's a sense of "how do we get kids to read our books" and someone hitting on the idea of "I know, we'll use comics!" as the solution. In this article, we'll examine two new books that take a slightly different spin on this tactic, as they intersperse illustrated text with comics.

The Fog Mound 3: Simon's Dream (Simon & Schuster), by Susan Schade & Jon Buller, is aimed at readers 8-12 years old. It's a testament to the skill of its authors and the overall charm of the project that I was quickly able to understand the story despite not having read the first two books and get wrapped up in its delightful characters. The book alternates between comics and illustrated text on a chapter-by-chapter basis, but even the non-comics chapters are designed so well that that its illustrations flow in and out of the text quite smoothly. The whole process feels organic, as though the needs of the story dictated the transition rather than an arbitrary set of starts and stops dictated by the structure of the book.

The story is set in the future, as a talking chipmunk named Thelonious is trying to protect the Fog Mound, a sort of paradise for the intelligent animals that live on earth after all of the humans mysteriously disappeared. The book is a classic episodic quest, as Thelonious and his friends (including a tiny human scientist named Bill that they brought out of a deep freeze) seek their goal.  The team of Schade and Buller manage to create real excitement and wonder as they introduce wolfmen, flying sofas and an explanation of how the world ended. The book introduces a number of green themes (humanity winds up getting wiped out thanks to pollution) without overwhelming the reader or getting too pedantic. The reason the book works so well is that the plot and central mysteries, while engaging, are less important than the vividly designed characters.

On the other hand, popular fantasy novelist G.P. Taylor's series launcher for his Dopple Ganger Chronicles, The First Escape, is a mishmash of good intentions gone wrong. The taglines on the back of the book in praise of his work, "Hotter than Potter" and "The new C.S. Lewis" give away his intent here: a rollicking fish-out-of-water adventure with overtones of faith. The story follows troublemaking orphan teens Saskia and Sadie Dopple and how they were separated, along with their friend Erik Ganger. The story feels very familiar: like Harry Potter, the lead characters are orphans, though the orphanage they grew up in makes the story feel more like Charles Dickens than J.K. Rowling. The Dopple twins are bratty and bossy, and one senses that during the course of the series they will find ways to mature. Taylor skillfully manipulates his larger-than-life characters (including a demented stage magician, shrewish adoptive mother, and assorted greedy thugs) through the story, creating excitement and suspense.

There are two significant problems with this book. First, the characters feel mostly two-dimensional, more caricatures than fleshed-out creations. This is especially true of Erik Ganger, who is remarkably underdeveloped even though he's supposed to be one of the lead protagonists. The more thorny issue is that of its graphic design. The book careens from illustrated text to comics with little rhyme or reason, often in the middle of a chapter. It's jarring and hurts the book's continuity. There's also a highly annoying design choice, wherein the text periodically gets much bigger or stylized in the middle of the page. Obviously meant to be clever and eye-catching, it's instead distracting and silly. The book's press materials note that they were trying for a "manga-style" visual style, and the result is a mess. It's obvious that Taylor was not comfortable writing for comics, leaving most of the work to the artists with his text. However, the storytelling of Daniel Boultwood is bland at best and incoherent at worst, frequently bringing the story to a screeching halt when it should be ramping up. While I'm certainly no expert on manga, the art here feels like a bad combination of manga-like art and modern fantasy illustration, and it's not a mix that worked well. Beyond the fact that the art lacks storytelling clarity, Boultwood has problems with page-to-page and panel-to-panel transitions. That resulted in a lot of the images looking inert on the page. That was especially problematic because these sequences were supposed to be the most exciting in the book; instead, the chase scenes fell flat.

It's clear that this series is designed to be a big best-seller and it has the feel of being put together by committee to maximize its sales impact. Of course, there's nothing wrong with wanting to sell lots of copies, but the appeal of this book is blighted by its attempt to reach the widest audience possible. Of course, I could be wrong and teens could snap it up like candy, but I'm not sure this book will appeal to its stated demographic of 10-14 year-olds. If Taylor is trying to reach a larger audience by using comics as a sort of bait, I think this idea will backfire because the book lacks the elegance in design of popular manga series. On the other hand, The Fog Mound and its whimsical art will immerse its audience in the world it creates, one where the difference between text and comics is a line that no longer matters.

The Beauty of Decay: Dockwood

Jon McNaught's design-heavy comics that employ simply-drawn characters and an extensive use of a beautiful but muted palette certainly brings Chris Ware to mind as an obvious comparison. However, I'd argue that their surface similarities are less important than the fact that they both share a dark sense of humor that's not afraid to be broad in unlikely situations. Both also have an eye for nature's beauty as an almost heart-breakingly sad phenomenon at times, in the way that beautiful things can be almost painful to watch. McNaught's Dockwood is explicitly about the season of autumn: the season of beautiful decay. It's a slow process of fading beauty, moving day by day until the leaves have fallen off the trees.

McNaught's book is all about process, slow movement and decay. The ways in which people deal with this as opposed to animals is carefully highlighted. At the start of the book, McNaught makes fun of the way he knows he's going to manipulate the reader by starting the day with a driver stopping in front of a billboard that has a beautiful woman on it that says "Summer Deals", and literally papering it over with an image that says "Autumn Bargains". Capitalism and advertising cease for no season, but I loved how McNaught literally plops a big sign that says "Autumn" into his narrative as a way of introducing his narrative.

The first story, "Elmview", follows the day of a kitchen porter at an nursing home. His day is based on ritual, timing and methodical execution of his tasks while trying to distract himself from his day through radio or TV (either or both are on throughout the book signifying that sense of trying to escape from the moment). That distraction i made clear by McNaught in how he alternates his panels between a commercial and a very brief conversation. A nursing home is an obvious setting for a story about decay, but McNaught distinguishes himself by depicting how each of the residents faces mortality in a different way: resigned and happy, constantly angry, deafly oblivious while puffing away on a cigarette. It's not a coincidence that the angry man yells at the cacophonous starlings outside his window as they prepare to migrate for the season; their departure is another sign that a season is ending. Eating is another frequently used motif, especially comparing how the people eat to how the animals find their own sustenance. McNaught loves to draw out small movements that are not significant to the plot but are relevant to his themes, but avoids getting bogged down by cramming as many as 30 panels on a page.

The second story, "Sunset Ridge", feels a teenage boy going about his evening paper route starting after school. Chronologically, it picks up where "Elmview" leaves off, as the boy is obviously an outsider with most of his peers, with the exception of a geeky chatterbox who soon leaves him to his route. The boy is unnerved when a woman appears at her door when he delivers her paper and gives him candy. It's not until he gets back home that the story's theme becomes evident: it's about the steady erosion of his childhood. Violent sequences from the video game he's borrowed from his friend are cut with  objects from his room, things that show he's very much still a boy even if his childhood is slowly fading away. There's a hilarious sequence at the end of this story where his video game character stops to admire the sunset in the game after a mission and watch the birds. Of course, the birds turnout to have fangs and there's little time for his character to waste, as the computer reminds him. It's a funny way of driving home those points about autumn's inevitability in an artificial environment. This is McNaught's first major release, and he certainly lives up to his considerable potential. Unsurprisingly, the production values from NoBroware first-rate, and McNaught's obviously dry sense of humor punctuates his beautiful, methodical storytelling.

Sequart Reprints: Kid Lit

This article as originally published at sequart.com in 2006.
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The three comics I'm reviewing in this space are all for children, but the contexts for each are radically different. Kevin Pyle's Blindspot is a lush, imaginative graphic novel aimed at kids 9 and up. Sardine In Outer Space 2 is a collection of stories featuring the wacky adventures of Sardine, a young girl who happens to be a space pirate. The latest Nick Mag Presents is an all-comics special aimed squarely at Nickelodeon's target audience, roughly kids 10 and under.

Going in reverse order, the new Nick Mag can be found on any magazine rack. While it features comics versions of their most popular cartoon characters (Spongebob Squarepants & Fairly OddParents), it also features an array of strips from some of alt-comics' most interesting artists. Comics editors Chris Duffy & Dave Roman (the latter a cartoonist in his own right) have been providing a steady outlet for cartoonists for quite some time. It's odd to see someone like Johnny Ryan in here, considering that most of his regular work is so filthy, but his strips still work because kids like fart jokes more than anyone. It's a particular delight to see folks like Jason Shiga do his thing in here. Shiga loves embedding comics in choose-your-own-adventure frameworks, and so it was a natural for him to do a maze where he's trying to get the Fairly OddParents to grant him wishes to get a girl to fall in love with him. Even better is an algorithm he designed later in the book to determine your perfect mate--with the determining factors being things like "lots of hair vs the color green".

That's just one example of a strip that doesn't feel at all watered-down, even if it's not exactly what the artist would do with their own work. Brian Ralph's gorgeous "Twiggy Stumps" strip, about a boy trying to find a place to stay during the winter, has exactly the same look and feel as his Cave-In or Climbing Out strips. He's not the only ex-Highwater Books cartoonist in this issue. Jordan Crane (with the nom-de-plume Jane D'Rancor) did a strip called "Shortcut", which is in a style very similar to his recent children's book The Clouds Above. Underground legend Justin Green offers a strip about humanitarian ways to kill flies, done in the same washed-out style as his regular comics. The imagination and wit that pervades the personal work of the indy cartoonists here makes the issue a pleasure to read as an adult. I especially liked the humor in Craig Thompson's comics here; he had one page with four completely separate strips, all of which impact the other somehow. Ellen Forney's comic on how to make your own autobio strip is enormously clever, as is her smaller strip that ran along the bottom of several pages.

The best thing this issue does is give a nice outlet for gag strip experts and humorists. Along with Ryan, there's the highly-underrated Karen Sneider, Sam Henderson (with his regular "Scene But Not Heard" strip), Mark Martin, Evan Dorkin & Sara Dyer, Terry LaBan, Gahan Wilson and Michael Kupperman. The latter 's strip, "The Worst Comic Book Villains That Never Existed" could have been out of an issue of his Tales Designed to Thrizzle comic, including characters like Doctor Buckethead, Pants-On-His-Head-Man (the archenemy of Underpants-On-His-Head-Man), and the Crayoniacs. I've long felt that there was a need for a comics anthology that had nothing but humor strips in it, and Nick Mag is the closest thing we have to that at the moment. I honestly can't thing of a better way of getting kids to love comics than this magazine: it's appealing to both genders, it's funny, it's attractive to look at (they don't skimp on production values), there's a variety of styles & stories, and it can be enjoyed without having to understand a lot of backstory.

Sardine is what I would call minor work from two excellent cartoonists, Joann Sfar and Emmanuel Guibert. . Sfar in particular is a huge favorite of mine. This collection of strips is aimed squarely at kids (even the flap on the front cover says "No Grown-Ups Allowed! (Unless they're pirates or space adventurers)"). In these stories, Sardine the space pirate travels with Captain Yellow Shoulder and Little Louie, having all sorts of adventures. They're in constant combat with the villainous Supermuscleman and mad scientist Doc Krok, always foiling their schemes. Each story is 10 pages long, just long enough to establish a conflict and resolution.

What makes the stories fun are the absurd set-ups: a comet covered in carpet, with a ruler that tries to force its visitors to buy some; a planet filled with flies that put bad dance tunes into its victims ears, the kind you can't get out of your head; a giant with video cameras inside its body; a lonely worm that creates a spaceship in a bid to make friends that only scares them off instead. When the stories move away from the oafish Supermuscleman (who gets outsmarted by Sardine so easily that he doesn't make for much of a villain), they're much funnier and weirder. For example, Sardine and Louie are able to save their friends in a flea circus from that video giant by going inside his body and playing soccer--that's because "wherever there's soccer, there's cameras".

The comics are more amusing than laugh-out-loud funny. They're in the tradition of a Carl Barks, mixing adventure and silliness. The real highlight of these stories is Sfar's loose, vibrant style. While the character designs are simple and iconic, he still manages to pack an enormous amount of detail in a given panel. This makes his pages easy to follow (some of them have only two panels) but rewarding to look at. The use of color is another major component of the overall visual impact; they're kept bright, basic and even a bit garish. These stories occur in a fantastic world, and their non-naturalistic look and feel adds to the effect.

The main criticism I'd have of this collection is that there's a certain repetitiveness to the stories. Every story details some adventure or misadventure of Sardine and her friends, often against the same set of opponents. I wouldn't go so far as to say that it's formulaic, but there's a sense of diminishing returns the further one gets into the book, even if each individual story is enjoyable on its own. From a child's standpoint, this probably isn't a big deal--if they like the stories to begin with. Unlike the Nick Mag, with its wide range of styles, this Sardine volume is best given to children who are already inclined to enjoy this sort of story.

The audience for Blindspot is entirely different, and not just because of the 9-and-over target group. This is a coming-of-age story about a boy named Dean, who retreats into army fantasies as a way of dealing with the alienation he feels in relating with other kids, his family's constant moving around, and the difficulty he has in dealing with authority. The irony is that he chose war and army scenarios as a symbol of rugged freedom, when the military is the ultimate form of regimentation. The key is that his understanding of war is what he reads in comic books, and these fantasies inform his playtime with his friends. Eventually, a frightening encounter with a homeless man snaps him out of his war fantasies.

What makes the book more than a routine exploration of pre-adolescent problems is the masterful use of color. Pyle employed single-color palettes during every real-life sequence, but his use of color was non-naturalistic. He used green (army soldier green) during every sequence where Dean and his friends were playing army in the forest, and used it once again towards the end to reflect a significant change for Dean. He used a light lilac to depict winter, but more importantly, a time of reflection and an attempt at understanding. An aqua-green represented times of crisis in school, or a sequence where he had to go to a child psychologist. Light blue represented both night and the sense of elation that turned into panic when he was faced with a homeless man angry at him and his friends for destroying his hovel--but really wanting someone to unload the story of his own life's misery on. Brown seemed to represent the times when Dean was most grounded in reality. Sometimes this was because of family difficulties, and other times because he was finally able to exult a bit in enjoying himself as a kid in the here and now. There are other shades for other encounters as well, but these were the ones that stood out.

The stand-out stylization that Pyle used came when Dean was deep in his army fantasies in his friends. The art would shift from the simple palette to one resembling old war comics--flat and four-colored, looking a bit like Joe Kubert or Dick Ayers 60's war comics. It was no accident that these sequences (meshing the kids' "play" dialogue into something resembling the dialogue from such comics) had color that was comparatively more vibrant, but in no sense was it meant to be realistic. In a later scene where Dean is at the psychologist's office, he slips into fantasy mode, with the page drawn like Dean's a soldier being interrogated. As Dean relaxes and realizes that there's no threat here, the fantasy fades and we him going back to a more realistic view of the situation.

Dean felt trapped as a child, and the forest where he played represented freedom. The life of a soldier as he saw it in the forest was the ultimate form of liberation: living on your own wits and toughness, righting wrongs, performing tasks that meant something. Being punished for doing poorly in school didn't mean anything to him. What slowly started to change him was seeing images of the Holocaust in a library book; the images of dead bodies started to interfere even with his war fantasies. While that shifted his fantasies, it didn't change his desire for solitude and self-determination. That didn't change until the homeless man (who boasted about his freedom) revealed the devastating details of his miserable life. Dean was finally able to leave that fantasy behind after that as his parents rescued him from the forest and he came to see them, and his life, in a very different light. He understood that there was a thin line between freedom and alienation, and how easy it was to cross that line.

The whole sequence with the homeless man is heralded by a typically clever use of color. Right before that, Dean was out with his friends, having fun on Halloween. He was just a normal kid, and it felt good. This was highlighted by the use of brown in this scene. After he says goodbye to his friends, we suddenly shift to light blue, with only a slight red-brown in the sky as the sun sets. It's the only time in the book that colors are mixed on a non-fantasy page, and here we see the warm feelings represented by brown start to fade into the ominous blue of the night, panel by panel. It's a transition significant enough to make up the bulk of the book's cover.

The understanding that Dean's change in his self was apparent when we see him playing baseball and the color is back to that army-green. Chasing a long fly ball, Dean is faced with his fantasy forest again, probably for the first time. He's finally come to terms with what it represented to him, and he was literally able to turn his back to it and move on. This point is hammered home in the book's final sequence, where Dean's family has moved again. In brown tones, he meets some new kids and befriends them, telling them that army play is "kid's stuff". It's perhaps a bit too obvious a cue after so much subtlety in this book, the only wrong turn in a comic filled with so many right choices.

Blindspot rewards multiple readings as one begins to absorb and understand Pyle's use of color and the subtle shifts in the story's tone as a result. Rite-of-passage fiction is a genre that's been mined quite deeply, but Pyle's sensitivity, skill and cleverness make this book a uniquely rewarding experience. I would recommend it in particular to junior high school students, especially boys.

Kid Lit: Enfant Books From Drawn & Quarterly

One critique of some of the Drawn & Quarterly reprints and repackaging of classic children's comics from John Stanley, Tove Jansson, etc is that they were neither fish nor fowl. They weren't presented in such a way that satisfied collectors obsessed with preserving details of the original publications, but they also weren't quite kid-friendly either. Young children like to be able to hold, carry and manipulate their own books, and the large collections made this difficult. The format of Francoise Mouly's superb Toon Books line has revolutionized comics for kids, merging the practical but pleasing format of the best of kid lit with some excellent comics aimed precisely at its target age levels. In Drawn & Quarterly's new Enfant line, they've addressed some of these issues and have a new format to fit some classic (if obscure to American audiences) comics.

The short comics stories of Astrid Lindgren's Pippi Longstocking are done in roughly Dr. Seuss dimensions and format: a hardcover that's around 10" x 7". The comics were drawn by original series illustrator Ingrid Vang Nyman, and the stories are wonderfully anarchic. The Pippi books are still quite popular in their depiction of The Strongest Girl in the World, and these comics capture Pippi's essential charm as an adventurer who lives outside the law. She's a sort of one-girl Marx Brothers troupe in that she can baffle the authorities through mangling language like Chico, employ a series of rigorous physical gags like Harpo and frustrate & outsmart the well-heeled through fractured logic like Groucho. Pippi is a walking adventure who subverts every typical environment she happens to wander into, be it the circus or school. There's a delightful crudeness to Vang Nyman's line, a flatness and almost naive quality to her line that brings tremendous energy to the proceedings. Pippi's disdain for authority has an almost acidic quality coming from Lindgren; it reminds me a lot of John Stanley's take on Little Lulu.

D&Q continues to market the Tove Jansson Moomin comics with a new format. They initially published those comics in big hardcover editions--ideal for adults, but less so for littler hands. To address this, they're releasing a series of 6.5" x 8.5" editions that cover a single story. The two sent to me were MoominValley Turns Jungle and Moomin's Winter Follies. These are perfect storytelling objects. Even with no knowledge of the cast, Jansson is able to quickly catch a reader up to speed in introducing the world of the Moomins. Jansson's line is wonderfully smooth and clear and her character design is impeccable. The simplicity of her figures is set against the naturalistic structures and lushly-depicted nature scenes, adding depth and atmosphere to her stories. There's a deep, almost vicious satirical streak in her stories that's aimed at adults but can be understood by children as well. Winter Follies is all about gender relations and the ways in which women are sometimes attracted by men who are disinterested in them. It's also a commentary on men and the ways in which they need to prove their masculinity. At the same time, it's also a brutal satire of the Olympics and the mania that surrounds it, as the Moomins decide not to hibernate during winter and instead try to enjoy winter's beauty. When they are hijacked into participating in sports events by the aptly-named Mr Brisk, the book alternates between satirical digs and convoluted sight gags.

Jungle starts with a drought that turns into a jungle thanks to some magic seeds and a nighttime downpour. The story satirizes those that don the title of expert, as plants come to life and zoo animals are "invited" to come live there by a troublemaker. Jansson was an expert at slowly and systematically raising the stakes over the course of a narrative, repeating themes and then subverting them. The animals all initially set out to eat the Moomins until fate sees them all saved in turn, making them loyal. The real danger for the Moomins turns out to be the zookeepers, who declare them to be hippopotamuses and threaten to have them carried off to the zoo. Luckily, the arbitrariness of classification saves them, as two scientists arguing over whether something was an animal or plant the whole way through the book wind up convincing the zoo. Jansson makes sure to add a healthy dose of adventure to the book along with humor, making it appealing on a number of levels. Hopefully, this line will be a financial success, because I'd love to see more books like this.