Recent children's books that may (or may not) be of interest

Legendary cartoonist Jules Feiffer has provided the illustrations for a new children’s picture book, which he made with his daughter and occasional collaborator Kate Feiffer. It’s called Which Puppy? (Simon and Schuster), and deals with President Barack Obama’s election night promise to his girls that he would get them a puppy.

You may have heard of it already. A couple of weeks ago, USA Today gave it a front page write-up along with another kids book on the subject, First Dog, and Stephen Colbert mentioned it on his show when unveiling his own children’s book, You Spent 10 Trillion Dollars in a Day Just Buy a Goddam Dog Already.

Both Feiffers have made children’s books before, both together and apart. I scooped up as many as I could find from my library the other day after reading this one, and the one that seems most relevant is probably Henry, The Dog with No Tail, which, in addition to being written by Kate and illustrated by Jules, also dealt with dogs.

Which Puppy? begins on election night, with a view of Obama from behind, making his announcement:
From there it follows the news from the animals’ perspective. It gets passed on from animal to animal until “it seemed like everyone wanted to be that puppy.”

And not just puppies and dogs. A guinea pig named Sam wants in on the action, a turtle named Marple plans to take up barking lessons, a kitten named Keisha started pretending to be a puppy, and so on.

Eventually, “thousands of puppies, hundreds of reporters, and more kittens, skunks, turtles, raccoons, guinea pigs and rabbits than can be counted on two hands gathered together.” Wait, that’s only ten. That’s not that many.

Well, they gather together and argue about various methods of determining which will be the Obamas’ new puppy, and after some contests and a drawing, a big fat dog says that “ancient custom dictates that a true presidential puppy must have two rings around one paw, a heart on its face, an eye that winks, and a tail that tells time.”

No one animal fits that criteria, but they found one puppy with the rings, another with the wink and face-heart, and Sam the guinea pig’s tail could tell time. So the trio set off for the white house, only to discover that the Obamas already had a puppy:
(Not pictured: The actual puppy, as apparently Feiffer was drawing long before it was actually announced)

Bummed out, they turn to leave, but “the two girls who had just moved into the White House,” visible only from the knees down, ask them to come back and play. “We have a puppy who needs new friends.”

As a story, I found it rather meandering and uninteresting, but then, it’s recommended for kids ages four to eight, and I’m actually four times eight-years-old. The main reason I looked into the book was to see the ender Feiffer’s work.

And there’s plenty of it here. Using brush, ink and watercolor markers, he designs and draws dozens of loosely-assembled, somewhat scribbly dogs that look like they could be wiped off the page with a god scrubbing, they’re so delicately outlined and wet with watercolors-looking.

Human figures are kept to a minimum—those are the two instances in which he draws Obama himself above—and the focus remains on the dogs and other animals throughout.

I’m hesitant to recommend it, but it’s definitely worth a look from Feiffer fans.


In other recently released children’s book news, a couple of books I’ve talked about before here have gotten sequels. Melanie Watt’s Scaredy Squirrel returns in Scaredy Squirrel at Night (Kids Can Press), which fits snugly into the highly repetitive but still somehow kind of enjoyable formula of the first thiree.

As you’ll recall, Scaredy is a squirrel that seems to suffer from a variety of crippling mental illnesses, particularly agoraphobia and other anxiety-related disorders. In the course of each book, he conquers his phobia and makes a small step toward recovery. Only to have a different behavioral problem in the next book. Poor Scaredy!

This time, I’m unable to pinpoint the exact disorder, but it’s another fear/anxiety-based one:

Scaredy Squirrel never sleeps. He'd rather stay awake than risk having a bad dream in the middle of the night.

There’s a list of a few of the creatures he’s afraid might appear in a bad dream, and they are all extremely cute:
Although the fairies and unicorn look a little rough; I’m kinda scared of those spindly-armed, buck-toothed, ball-headed fairies Watt draws too.

There are, of course, side effects to Scaredy’s sleepless nights, including energy loss, moodiness and hallucinations. Once again, Scaredy suffers from a real-life problems, and it is ruining his day-to-day life. God these books are sad.

One night Scaredy, a Libra, sees in his horoscope that, “At midnight all your dreams will come true.” Fearing this means ghosts, vampire bats and dragons will team up with fairies and unicorns to come get him, Scaredy plans to face them a series of strange tools and plans (distracting the fairies with cupcakes, afan to blow away ghosts, molasses to slow down the unicorn, et cetera).

Instead of the various monsters, however, Scaredy is visited by a bunch of raccoons and other nocturnal creatures, including some super-cute bugs which I just now noticed and which I wish I would have scanned, on account of their cuteness.

Relying on his usual defense mechanism, Scaredy plays dead, and laying down with his eyes closed while exhausted, he falls asleep, making it through the night without suffering a bad dream an learning sleeping all night is awesome.

If you’ve read one of these books, if you read them all, but this one does have some better, cuter character designs then some of the previous ones, plus a cover with a glow-in-the-dark element that’s pretty cool. See Scaredy’s tooth smile on the cover up there? It glows.


Finally, Sara Varon of Robot Dreams fame just released Chicken and Cat Clean Up (Scholastic), the sequel to her excellent graphic novel-that-looks-like-and-was-sold-as-a-children’s-picture-book book Chicken and Cat.

I wrote a bit about Chicken and Cat Clean Up over at Blog@ already (you can read my review of it here), so I won’t repeat all of that here.

All I wanted to add was how weird Varon’s New York City is, particularly in the way it’s peopled with anthropomorphic animals, humans and normal animals, something that often takes me a little getting used to (It really freaked me out when I first started seeing Dragon Ball cartoons, for example, and I still haven’t come to terms with the fact that Goofy is Mickey Mouse’s friend while Pluto is his pet…and that Pluto is to Mickey as dogs are to humans in terms of size proportions).

It sits fine with me personally, but I’m not sure I could have dealt with it as a little kid.

Check it out. Here’s Cat waking up in bed, with what I assume is a teddy bear:
That is a teddy bear, right? A toy stuffed animal? And not just, like, a dead baby bear cub? Because that would be horrible. (I like the cover of the book Cat’s reading; is that Moby Dick, do you think?)

Once Cat joins Chicken in the kitchen for a breakfast of orange juice, doughnuts and coffee, Cat looks in the paper for a pet to buy:
A house cat wants to buy a pet? A pet with a pet?! The sheep looks like it may also be anthropomorphicized like Cat, but the fish and horse are to Cat as hey would be to a human being. Also, a cat with a fish for a pet? Wouldn't the cat just eat the fish?

This is the part that really bugged me:

Ha ha! Bugged! It's funny because look, there is a lady bug right there! Note that the bug and the mouse are roughly the same size. Is it a tiny mouse or a gigantic lady bug? It's weird and gross is what it is.

Cat catches the mouse, and turns him over to the police, as he's wanted for being a thief and a liar:
Lying is a crime in New York now? Wow, they really did crack down on crime! Now, note the fact that the mouse is an intelligent, clothes-wearing, anthropomorphic mouse, but he's nowhere near the size of Cat. In fact, he is to Cat as a regular mouse would be to a regular cat. But, fucking things up even further, there's a human being in the police station, and the person is not significantly larger than Cat or Chicken.

Finally, with the reward Cat received for catching the mouse, a pet is finally bought:
And the one animal owns another animal as its pet.

So weird...

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: An Elseworlds story I'd love to read

"Happily, I did not learn of the Superman versus Captain Marvel law suit until years later. It would have done me no good to discover two of my idols, staunch believers in direct action, bent over, hands cupped to lips, whispering in the ears of their lawyers. No one should have to grow up that fast.

"The Superman people said that Captain Marvel was a direct steal. The Captain Marvel people said what do you mean; sheer coincidence; isn’t there room for the small businessman; we don’t know what you're talking about. It went on that way for years, but the outcome was clear form the start. Captain Marvel fought hard but he was a paper tiger. One wondered whether he was beginning to drink. He was losing his lean, Fred MacMurray look, fleshing out fast in the face, in the gut, in the hips, moving onward and outward to Jack Oakie."

—Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: An unusual metaphor applied to The Spirit

"The Spirit could even suffer defeat in the end: be outfoxed by a woman foe—stand there, his tongue making a dent in his cheek—charming in his boyish, Dennis O’Keeffe way—a comment on the ultimate ineffectuality of even super-heroes. But, of course, once a hero turns that vulnerable he loses interest to both author and readers. The Spirit, through the years, became a figurehead, the chairman of the board, presiding over eight pages of other people’s stories. An inessential do-gooder, doing a walk-on on page eight, to tie up loose strings. A masked Mary Worth."

—Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes

Namor vs. New York

As I mentioned at the top of the week, one of the things that most excited me about finding an old copy of Jules Feiffer's Great Comic Book Heroes was that it contained stories featuring Golden Age heroes whose original exploits I've never had the opportunity to read much of.

Heroes like Namor, the Sub-Mariner.

I really like Namor, in part because he's just such a horrible superhero. His look is improbable—a mostly naked man with pointy ears and cute little wings on his ankle—and he's powerful, violent, arrogant and prone to shouting really funny things out loud, like "Imperius Rex!"

But at his core, he's basically an incredible asshole.

And that's probably why I like reading comics about him. I mean, yes, obviously, he's a fun and funny character, one with a great degree of camp about him and the potential to fight just about any other Marvel he shares a panel with, but unlike a lot of fictional characters, he's the sort one would loathe being around in real life. Which makes reading about him in pretend-life kind of attractive; you get to hang out this total asshole jerk guy without ever being on the receiving end of his pomposity. Or his punches.

In the modern Marvel Universe, Namor's anti-social as all hell, always trying to steal Reed Richards' wife or punching people out for touching him, but he's downright mild-mannered compared to how he used to be in the Golden Age. Which means as awesome as Namor is now, he used to be even awesomer (Awesome enough to be referred to as "awesomer" instead of "more awesome").

Feiffer's book includes a ten-page Namor story by Bill Everett which seems to be entitled "Prince Namor, the Sub-Mariner," but might as well be called "Namor Just Totally Wrecks New York Until We Run Out of Pages."

Perhaps because Namor didn't get as much attention as Superman, Batman, Sheena and The Spirit during the essay portion of the book, or perhaps because the story doesn't exactly make Namor look at all like a superhero, there's an asterisk after the character's name, and a few sentences from Feiffer explaining the character.

"If Wonder Woman hated men, The Sub Mariner went her one better," Feiffer wrote. "He hated everybody...Luckily the war came along, and he switched from beating up Americans to Nazis. Untl then, he was well on his way to becoming the Black Muslim of the comic books."

I actually spent a few days thinking of exactly what Feiffer meant by that —remember, this is a 1965 book Feiffer's writing!—and I'm guessing it's a joke comparing Namor's Atlantean quest to conquer the surface world (or at least ocassionally beat it up) to the Nation of Islam's desire to form a country for black folks within the continental United States. I don't think their goals line-up very well though. In the first panel of this story, for example, a green-skinned fishman wearing a robe and crown is sitting on a throne underwater, and Namor tells him, "I shall return to New York City and destroy the entire continent, using the metropolis as my central base!" I'm not real up on the Nation, but I'm pretty confident that destroying North America is not one of their goals.

Anyway, enough politics—let's watch as Namor visits New York!

The fish king guy likes what he heard from Prince Namor, and offers him entire naval fleet. Namor thanks him but decides to pass; "This is a selfish grudge, and there's no reason yet to make an international situation of it." So he's just going to conquer New York by himself.

He surfaces in front of the Statue of Liberty, and starts talking to himself about what it symboizes: "Huh! They'll not know what liberty means when I'm through with them. I'll conquer this nation and enslave all it's people. I'll be emperor of America, and make these people pay for what they have done to me!"

I don't know what they've done to him, but it must be pretty bad, since she breaks the jaw of the first poor bastard he sees.

This establishes a pattern for the next eight pages; Namor just runs around going all King Kong on the city, and insulting the intelligence of the weaklings who try to stop him. He flies up to the statue, and "throws out terrified tourists, mercilessly," deciding that it will be his castle. (And that's "throws out" as in "picks up over his head and throws out the window into the sea," not merely "asks to leave" or whatever.)

When the "stupid policemen" of the harbor patrol head out after him, he rips the rudder off their boat, and then pushes their ship directly into the path of a giant ocean liner, which smashes it to bits.

When he makes it to land, New York's finest try gas, nets and fisticuffs:


In the mayor's office, hizzoner and an aide discuss asking the governor to call out the national guard, which leads to one of the most terrifying panels I've ever seen:
Gah! Can you imagine turning around and seeing that outside your window? Particularly a couple stories up? He looks like Peter Pan mixed with Satan there.

The mayor calls Namor a crook and a bum, and the scion of Atlantis responds thusly:

Then it's off to destroy a commuter train, probably full of commuters:

In the first panel, note the jaded New Yorker who walks right by Namor and doesn't even seem to notice that the guy who just passed him looks like a big elf with ankle-wings in a bathing suit: What a town!

Let's see, Statue of Liberty, the harbor patrol, the mayor, a train...what next? Ah, the Empire State Building!

He flies up, rips the top off it, and throws it. At a baby.

He's on his way back to his castle, the Statue of Liberty, when he spots pretty blonde Betty Dean, and is powerless to ignore her. Blondes are Namor's kryptonite. She asks him to stop tearing shit up, and let New York live in peace, warning him that The Human Torch (whose name Feiffer mentions in his essay is kind of ridiculous, since the Torch is a robot, not a human) is now a part of the police force. Namor laughs at the thought of the Torch's "little flame," and then dives in the water, because that's the end of the story.

The end.

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: On boy companions, and the gayness of the Dynamic Duo

Here's what Jules Feiffer had to say about sidekicks in The Great Comic Book Heroes:

"I couldn’t stand boy companions. If the theory behind Robin the Boy Wonder, Roy the Superboy, The Sandman's Sandy, The Shield's Rusty, The Human Torch's Toro, The Green Arrow's Speedy was to give young readers a character with whom to identify if failed dismally in my case. The super grownups were the ones I identified with. They were versions of me in the future. There was still time to prepare. But Robin the Boy Wonder was my own age. One need only look at him to see he could fight better, swing from a rope better, play ball better, eat better, and live better—for while I lived in the east Bronx, Robin lived in a mansion, and while I was trying, somehow, to please my mother—and getting it all wrong—Robin was rescuing Batman and getting the gold medals…

"He was obviously an 'A' student, the center of every circle, the one picked for greatness in the crowd—God, how I hated him. You can imagine how pleased I was when, years later, I heard he was a fag… "

Feiffer was kidding, of course. He goes on to bring up Frederic Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent, quoting an oft-quoted passage about how Batman and Robin's lifestyle was "like a wish dream of two homosexuals living together."

Feiffer doesn't agree, despite the fact that the young Feiffer had no real love for Robin. Wrote Feiffer: “Batman and Robin were no more or less queer than were their youngish readers, many of whom palled around together, didn’t trust girls, played games that had lots of bodily contact, and from similar surface evidence were more or less queer."

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: On disliking Wonder Woman

"My problem with Wonder Woman was that I could never get myself to believe she was that good. For if she was as strong as they said, why wasn’t she tougher looking? Why wasn’t she bigger? Why was she so flat-chested? And why did I always feel that, whatever her vaunted Amazon power, she wouldn’t have lasted a round with Sheena, Queen of the Jungle?

"No, Wonder Woman seemed like too much of a put-up job, a fixed comic strip—a product of group thinking rather than the individual inspiration that created Superman. It was obvious from the start that a bunch of men got together in a smoke-filled room and brain-stormed themselves a Super Lady....I see now that my objection is just the opposite of Wertham's: Wonder Woman wasn't dykey enough."

—Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: An unusual metaphor applied to Superman and Captain Marvel

“The most savage reprisals in comic books were, just as in the revolutions, saved not for one’s enemies but for one’s own kind. If, for a moment, Superman may be described as the Lenin of super-heroes, Captain Marvel must be his Trotsky. Ideologically of the same bent, who could have predicted that within months the two would be at each other’s throats—or that, in time, Captain Marvel would present the only serious threat to the power of the man without whom he could not have existed?”

—Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: On Captain Marvel

“Villains ranged from mad scientist Dr. Sivana (the best in the business), who uncannily resembled Donald Duck, to Mr. Mind, a worm who talked and wore glasses, to Tawky Tawny, a tiger who talked and wore a business suit. A Disney land of happy violence. The Captain himself came out dumber than the average super-hero—or perhaps less was expected of him. A friendly fullback of a fellow with apple cheeks and dimples, he could be imagined being a buddy rather than a hero, an overgrown boy who chased villains as if they were squirrels.”

—Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes

Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week: On the Superman love triangle

“Love is really the pursuit of a desired object, not pursuit by it. Once you’ve caught the object there is no longer any reason to love it, to have it hanging around. There must be other desireable objects out there, somewhere…What Kent wanted was just that which Superman didn’t want to be bothered with. Kent wanted Lois, Superman didn’t—thus marking the difference between a sissy and a man. A sissy wanted girls who scorned him; a man scorned girls who wanted him. Our cultural opposite of the man who didn’t make out with women has never been the man who did—but rather the man who could if he wanted to, but still didn’t. The ideal of masculine strength, whether Gary Cooper’s, Lil Abner’s, or Superman’s, was for one to be so virile and handsome, to be in such a position of strength, that he need never go near girls. Except to help them. And then get the hell out.”

—Jules Feiffer, The Great Comic Book Heroes

This week is Jules Feiffer's Superheroes Week

The other day I was perusing some of the old books being discarded from one of my local libraries. Just as libraries are always getting new books in, they’re also getting rid of old ones, to make room on the shelves: The ones that never go out, or contain out-dated information, or are available in newer prints, or are completely falling apart with age or over-use. Usually then end up in book sales sponsored by friends of the library-type volunteer groups, a sort of win-win for everybody. The library gets some money out of books they needed to get rid of anyway, and customers get old books at a super-cheap price.

At one such sale, I found a large, red, extremely battered book. It was about nine inches wide and 12 inches high, and had some sort of stain or discoloration on the blank red cover. It was the spine that caught my eye though, as there was a silhouette of a caped strong man on it. Flipping through, I saw a lot of prose strewn across the opening pages, and then about 130 pages full of full-color reprints of Golden Age superhero stories. Superman! Batman! Wonder Woman! Plastic Man! Captain America! The Human Torch! Golden Age Green Lantern and Flash! The Spirit! And still more!

It was like a sampler platter of the best of the Golden Age superheroes; the DC stories looked like ones I’d read in library-borrowed DC Archive hardcovers (all of which I’d like to own, and none of which I can afford—expand your Chorincles trade program, guys!), but I’ve never really read precious few Captain America, Namor and Human Torch stories.

And it only cost $1, on account of how beat-to-hell it was.

It wasn’t until I got home—there were other comics-related books to sift through—that I realized exactly what this big red book was.

This was The Great Comic Book Heroes (Bonanza Books; 1965) by Jules Feiffer, a classic and oft-quoted essay by Feiffer that describes his own relationship with comics (he was one of the few that was there at the beginning, and is still working in some aspect of cartooning) and his childhood attraction to the various heroes.

It was one of the earlier works of comics literary criticism, and everyone who saw the second Kill Bill has heard at least part of it (David Carradine’s speech to Uma Thurman about the true nature of Superman is in here).

Fantagraphics has since brought the book back, with a fantastic cover image, but the Fanta edition just contains Feiffer’s prose, whereas this old volume featured stories starring many of the characters he discussed (The only one missing a story is Sheena The Jungle Queen, and poor Captain Marvel was only allowed one-page, due to his legal status at the time).

As I was reading Feiffer’s fantastic essay, every few pages I would hit a paragraph featuring a wonderfully insightful observation, one that was framed in a colorful, witty way; one that I was somewhat surprised to find was still relevant.

It’s not simply that Captain America and Batman are still starring in comic books today, or that the comics blogosphere likes to joke about how gay Robin is or what exactly was up with Wonder Woman and the ropes.

I think it’s a mixture of the ascendancy of the superhero in American culture as a whole at the moment, and the increased interest in comics (fueled in large part by the mainstream publishing industry’s embrace of the graphic novel format) leading to ever increasing discussions of these subjects. Who are these heroes, where did they come from, what do they mean, how were they created—these topics are more talked about now than at any time in my life.

Feiffer talks a lot about Dr. Wertham, for example, a man who's work against and worries about comics have recently been discussed at great frequency online, in print and, hell, even on The Colbert Report, thanks to David Hajdu’s recent and well-publicized book The Ten-Cent Plague.

I kept noticing points of Feiffer’s and thinking, “Hm, that would make a good blog post.” By the time I’d thought that a half-dozen times, I figured I might as well go ahead and do a theme week of posts.

Now, Feiffer’s career is one of those that can make you feel deeply ashamed of yourself just by reading his online bio. Comics artist, cartoonist, playwright, screenwriter, children’s book author and illustrator—Feiffer seems to have done it all and, to make one feel even more inferior, he seems to have done it all incredibly well.

Given all that, this isn’t going to be Jules Feiffer Week because I’d need a lot more than a week to discuss Feiffer, even if I were to just focus on his comics/cartoon/sequential art work.

So instead, this week is simply going to be Jules Feiffer’s Superheroes Week. Every day for the next seven days, I’ll post a quote from his essay about some of the superheroes and subjects we’re still talking about today, plus some image-heavy looks at some early adventures of the Golden Age’s greatest bare-chested heroes (which were included in the 1965 version). This will be in addition, rather than a replacement of, our regular features, like Wednesday night’s Weekly Haul, and the monthly looks at DC and Marvel’s preview reviews.

In the mean time, I’d highly encourage everyone to check out fellow “Best Shots” shooter and frequent EDILW poster Michael C. Lorah’s excellent and wide-ranging interview with Feiffer for Newsarama. You can read it here.