Meanwhile...

Today at Robot 6, I have a review of Steve Ditko's Monsters Vol. 1: Gorgo, a Craig Yoe-curated collection of all the Ditko-drawn portions of Charlton's 1961-65 series, based on the pretty terrible giant monster movie that was the subject of an episode of Mystery Science Theater 3000.

As I mentioned, I was looking for any Objectivist subtext in any of the stories, but came up empty. The only politics of any kind came in this one story, wherein--well, check this panel out:

Talk about a one-issue party! Death to Gorgo and his mother! I wish I knew the name of their pary: The Death-to-Gorgo-crats? The Gorgo Death Party...? What?

Earlier in the week I reviewed Barry's Best Buddy, Renee French's new Toon Books book, at Good Comics For Kids.

Also at Good Comics For Kids this week, I participated in a roundtable discussing Brian Michael Bendis and Sara Pichelli's Ultimate Comics Spider-Man Vol. 1.

Raw Junior's Toon Books: The rest

Having read and wrote a little about Otto’s Orange Day and Stinky, I figured I might as well go ahead and try to track down the rest of the Toon Book/Raw Junior line, for completeness’ sake.

I still haven’t been able to get my hands on a copy of Harry Bliss’ Luke on the Loose, but I think I’ve got the rest of them. I should note before starting that these are all comic books packaged and sold like children’s books and are, in fact, intended for little kids. So if I say something like “This book totally sucks” or “This was a complete waste of time,” I’m only speaking here of my own personal reaction to the work, and not damning it or some aspect of it entirely.

I’m well aware that I’m pretty far outside the intended audience for these things, and as such I’m hardly the best person to ask for assessments of how good or bad they might be for that audience. I do feel pretty comfortable talking about how good or bad a comic is in general though, and I hold to the belief that the best works for children can still be enjoyed by adults, so deeming a work “not for me” doesn’t make it a bad comic, but certainly means it could have been better.

Anyway, let’s read some comics…

Mo and Jo: Fighting Together Forever by Dean Haspiel and Jay Lynch

This is a superhero comic, and as such, is closest to what I spend most of my comics-reading time with, and it’s also illustrated by Haspiel, an artist whom I was already familiar with before encountering his work in this book (And man, not only does Haspiel do great superhero art, but he proves much more adept at drawing a kids comic than I might have expected).

The superhero he and Lynch have created here is a rather random amalgam of powers and visual notes, a sort of generic hero that seems assembled of spare parts of other superheroes, and whom the Legion of Super-Heroes would have laughed at, and maybe even spit on, as he walked dejectedly away from Legion try-outs (Those Legion brats can be such jerks!)

He’s The Mighty Mojo, and he wears a red and yellow version of your basic Superman costume of tights, tunic, cape, boots and underwear-on-the-outside, with his name on the his chest (Unlike Superman, however, he wears gloves).

He’s got a Superman-like dollop of hair on the front of his head, and wears a smart Douglas Fairbanks-style moustache.

His powers are in his suit, and they consist of magnetic boots that allow him to run up the sides of buildings, and stretchy arms that allow him to, um, stretch his arms, making him like Plastic Man or Mister Fantastic, but only between the shoulders and fingertips.

Okay, he’s not going to be starring in a major motion picture any time soon, or sustaining a 350-issue monthly comic book series in the years to come, but he’s only gotta last about 40 pages. And besides, he’s not the focus of the book, his successors Mona and Joey are.

They’re the world’s two biggest Mighty Mojo fans, and also insufferable brats. When we first meet them, they’re arguing over whose turn it is to play Mojo on their videogame system, each of them pulling on a different side of the controller.

That’s when their gray-haired, mustachioed mailman Mister Mojoski appears, reveals that he is actually the Mighty Mojo, and bequeaths them with his super-suit, as he’s gotten too old and decided to retire.

The little brats fight over the suit, tearing it in half, but their mother is able to fix it and turn it into two suits, so now they each get one of the powers.

They still argue—a lot—which is where the title comes from; see not only are they fighting together as allies, but they’re fighting one another. Get it?

Anyway, there’s a big parade downtown the next day, and after the brats argue about who got the cooler powers (Neither; both power suck), they end up having to defend a giant, hippo-shaped parade balloon from Mojo’s foe Saw-Jaw, and incredible design that looks a bit like a potbellied humanoid alligator, with a metal lower jaw and weird, insect-like legs.

In the course of the battle with Saw-Jaw, the pair learn to work together, and ultimately become Team Mojo (“Those kids are twice the hero I ever was!” the former Mojo laughs).

It was hard for me to get into the story, despising the heroes as I did, but Haspiel’s art and the bright colors were more than enough to make it seem well worth the few minutes I spent reading it.


Benny and Penny in Just Pretend by Geoffrey Hayes

The title characters of this book are a brother and sister pair of anthropomorphic mice. Benny, the older mouse brother, is intent on playing pirate by himself, using a box for a ship and wearing his pirate get-up. His little sister Penny, dressed up as a princess and riding around on her mouse equivalent of a Big Wheel, wants to play with her big brother.

“I can play pirate too,” she cheerfully argues while trying to climb into his box-ship.

“No!,” he shouts, “Pirates are brave, and you are a cry-baby.”

What follows are Penny’s attempts to get her brother to play with her, and Benny’s attempts to avoid doing so. When he finally does get rid of her, by tricking her into playing hide-and-seek and then declining to look for her, he realizes he’s lonely and, when he goes looking for her and can’t find her, he gets worried.

It’s a pretty simple story, but it’s cute and charming and felt relevant to me, both on a literal level (particularly if you grew up with siblings) and a more abstract level of feeling suffocated or pestered by someone close to you until their absence makes you realize how much you like their presence.

Hayes’ artwork looks like it’s done in some kind of colored pencil, but I’m pretty terrible at deducing exact media (That’s just what it looks like to me). His designs seem pretty well balanced between representation and exaggeration; from certain angles his mice look like real mice, but they also have big expressive faces with a wider range of non-mouse emotion shining through them.


Benny and Penny in The Big No-No! by Geoffrey Hayes

This second Benny and Penny book was something of a disappointment to me, based in large part to my own probably unrealistic expectations. What is “The Big No-No?” What are those two stunned mice looking at with wide eyes on the cover, and what is it that they agree is “a very big no-no”?

I liked imagining it more than discovering it, I learned.

There’s a new kid who just moved in next door to Benny and Penny, and they’re trying to get a look at her or him by peering through a hole in the fence.

Eventually giving up, Benny goes to find his pail only to discover it’s missing! Could the new kid have taken it? Because taking things, Penny says, is a no-no.

When they investigate, they end up in the neighbors’ yard, which is a big no-no. In fact, that’s the big no-no of the title, going into someone else’s yard uninvited.

Oh youth, when that seemed like a big no-no…

The clues seem to point to the new kid being some sort of pail-stealing monster, but the truth is much more benign, and the conflict is eventually settled by the end of the book.

Other than the let-down of the title, I liked this one just fine; Hayes adds another anthropomorphized animal to the mix and does a really nice job of it (I actually like it better than the mice), and he draws awesome birds on the bottom of page 16.

Benny seems like real a-hole in general though. Between him and Mo and Jo, I feel like this line of books is presenting a strong argument not to ever have children, as they can be such horrible little monsters.


Silly Lilly and The Four Seasons by Agnes Rosenstiehl

Okay, this is the book that caveat at the top of the post most applied to: I didn’t care for this one bit, and, honestly, can’t find any real redeeming value in it. Rosenstieh’s art isn’t wretched or anything, but not even that struck me as anything out of the ordinary.

If it weren’t for the little blurb on the cover reading “A first COMIC for brand-new readers!”, I’d be confused as to why it was even published. Considering that blurb as some sort of mission statement, and thinking of the book as the Toon Books equivalent of one of those little board books for the earliest readers, I suppose its existence makes some small amount of sense.

It’s the same size as the other Toon books, but it’s formatted landscape style, more wide than it is tall. The first story page is divided into four squares, and in each one there is a globe, with a giant image of the title character astride it, wearing seasonally appropriate clothes to correspond to whichever of the four seasons that square is labeled. In the middle of the four squares is the sun, and little arrows show that the earth revolves around it.

“The world goes around…” Fall Lilly says, “…and the seasons change!” Summer Lilly finishes.

Each of the four seasons (and a second spring) begins with a splash page denoting which season it is, and then that’s followed by a few pages of big panels that fill the page from top to bottom, packed one next to the other like a newspaper comic strip, only huge, and in color. Lilly romps through these having unremarkable experiences and talking in dialogue bubbles. (In spring she goes to the park, where she dances, jumps and naps; in fall she goes apple picking, and so on).

I did like the way you could see the texture of the paper through the art drawn atop it, an dhow the size of the images is big enough that you can really appreciate the way each of the lines are drawn but, um, that’s about it. Additionally, Lilly’s not at all silly, which is kind of surprising, given her name.

Review: Stinky

Trawling the Internet for articles to link to in my link-blogging feature at Blog@ the other day, I cam across this School Library Journal article that highlights a few of the fresh comics faces whose work for younger readers received Eisner nominations.

One of them was a Ms. Eleanor Davis, whose book Stinky (Raw Junior) was nominated in the “Best Publication for Kids” (Which looks like a particularly competitive category; Andi Watson’s Princess at Mighnight, Akira Toryiama’s Cowa! and Tiny Titans are also in the running).

I had not heard of Stinky until the nominations were announced (In fact, after the original announcement that Francoise Mouly would be doing a kids line of books, I hadn’t heard hardly anything about any of the Raw Junior “toon books”. A fact which leads me to believe that whoever is selling the things really oughta sell ‘em a little harder, and/or the rest of the comics blogsphere echo chamber should pay a little more attention to them, because that tends to be how I hear about a lot of books that I don’t hear about from the publisher’s or through publishing industry publications).

But then, that’s one of the good things about the Eisners. If their judges think a book is worth consideration for the award, with few exceptions it is probably a pretty good book, or at least a book I ought to read. So, having just read Otto’s Orange Day, I placed a reserve on Stinky at my local library.

Like Otto’s Orange Day, Stinky is a nicely designed book. Mouly and Jonathan Bennett share a design credit for it again, and apparently the entire line is designed with a unified look. I imagine they will look quite nice all lined up next to one another on a kid’s book shelf.

Stinky is the story of Stinky, a kid-sized swamp monster who is rather aptly named. He eats onions constantly, emanates stink lines and flies with visible dotted-line flight patterns, and his best friend is a huge, repulsive, equally smelly toad named Wartbelly.

This is what Stinky looks like:

As with Otto’s Orange Day, this is a very simple story, divided into three chapters: One that introduces the characters and a conflict, a second in which the conflict escalates and a third in which there’s a resolution and a lesson learned.

In the first chapter we meet Stinky and follow him on what starts like a normal day—brushing his teeth with a stick and a tube marked “Crust,” breakfasting on a pickled onion, taking Wartbelly for a wagon ride through the muddy swamp, right up to the edge of town, where he gets skittish.

See, he hates kids, since they hate gross things and like non-gross things. So he’s extremely unhappy to see that a kid, who goes by the name Nick, has just built himself a treehouse at the edge of the swamp.

Stinky tries a variety of plans to drive Nick away once and for all (including hiding his hammer in the alligator-infested heart of the swamp), but Nick keeps embracing the various gross, stinky and scary things Stinky throws at him.

Ultimately, Stinky learns that kids aren’t as horrible as he thought, and, in fact, Nick at least seems to be a lot like Stinky.

It’s constructed elegantly enough, and Davis’ dialogue sounds natural without ever being too obvious.

Being a grown-up, it was the art that I took the most pleasure in. The image above probably gives a pretty good idea of Davis’ flat, simple character design and her big, thick lines, but what I liked best about her work here was the level of detail she packed into the panels.

Not necessarily in the style—it never gets crowded with lines or anything—but in how much she puts in the panels.

The page is a splash of Stinky’s bedroom, for example, and it’s jam-packed with leaves, rocks, mushrooms and jars of pickled produce. Bats hang from the ceiling, cockroaches sleep with manga sleep-bubbles swelling from their noses, a cloud of flies hovers above Wartbelly, a spider hangs on a web above them, a little knife and fork in two of its arms, and a bluebird sits smiling on the window sill, a clothespin over its beak to block out the smell.

Davis similarly fills most of the panels with little animals in the margins. Rats play cards o his floor, a spider knits a sock with a ball of yarn in a tree branch, a mole parent reads a book to baby moles in an easy chair in their burrow. I love looking at the pages and hunting out the details, and I assume they would make this a great book to be read to for kids, as there’s so much to keep little eyes busy while the readers handles the words for them.

It’s an all-ages book, in the best sense of the word.

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Here’s a scan of the inside back cover, which is devoted to a map including all the locales Stinky and Nick pass through:
That possum tree really creeps me out.

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This is a really thorough profile on the Toon Books line; I really liked the part where Mouly expressed her preference for just calling them “comics.” “They're great books,” she said, “but not novels.” Yeah. I know the ship on what we call these things has sailed, and “graphic novel” is the term we’re stuck with for now, but I do like just calling all comics “comics.” Stinky may be a hardcover and have a spine, but it’s more of a comic book than a “graphic novel” or “graphic novella” or “graphic book.”

Okay, now I've read Otto's Orange Day

Never let it be said that I don’t listen to my commenters (Even the ones over at Blog@Newsarama, whom aren’t anywhere nearly as well-bred, sophisticated and good-looking as you guys are).

When rounding up links to stories about comics from the non-comics media for Linkarama, the thrice-weekly link-blogging column I contribute to Blog@, I came across this little story from the Poughkeepsie Journal. It was a guest column by youth service librarian Beth Zambito, in which she recommends graphic novels for young readers, including popular books like Owly, Amelia Rules and the newer collection of Scott Morse’s Magic Pickle (Which Oni published as singles several years ago), along with two books I hadn’t read. One was Gettysburg: The Graphic Novel, which I’m kind of skeptical of just based on the title (I haven’t read many worthwhile books that include a colon and the words “The Graphic Novel” in the title so far), and the other was Otto’s Orange Day by Frank Cammuso and Jay Lynch.

In that particular installment of Linkarama, I wrote, “I’ve never heard of Otto’s Orange Day though, so I guess I better visit my local library.”

Frequent Blog@ commenter Vinnie Bartilucci posted this in response: “Otto’s Orange Day is one of Francoise Mouly’s Toon Books line of little kid’s picture books written and drawn by some of the most creative people in comics. WELL worth seeking out.” He also posted a link to toonbooks.com.

Well, since then I’ve visited my local library and secured a copy of Otto’s Orange Day, read it, scanned a few images and put it on my Blog About This Sometime schedule for Saturday.

And hey, today’s Saturday!

It’s written by Jay Lynch and illustrated by Frank Cammuso, and I must confess that I’m completely unfamiliar with the work of either of them, although from their biographies it seems pretty clear that that says more about my ignorance than their experience. (Actually, I’ve heard of some of Cammuso’s work, I just haven’t read any of it personally).

Both have a lot of experience with comics though, so I suppose it’s no surprise that this is a very accomplished, very polished work. It’s strange in that it reads like a comic, but looks, feels, smells and in all other ways resembles a children’s book. (It’s even sized for children’s hands, at nine inches-by-six inches, and is a lovely little object, for those of you/us who may fetishize books as objects; credit for its design goes to the line’s editorial director Francoise Mouly and Jonathan Bennett).

Otto is a little anthropomorphic cat who happens to be a couple different shades of orange, and reminds me of my friend’s cat Ramram, who recently passed away:
(Above: Ramram, sitting like a human being, as was his wont)

“Orange was Otto the cat’s favorite color,” a caption box informs us on the first page, and Otto, wearing the cartoon character uniform of a shirt and no pants, tells us how awesome orange is: “Orange is pretty. It’s bold and it’s strong!”

Yeah, sure Otto—but you can’t rhyme anything with it!

Then he sings a song about the color orange, only to be interrupted by a ding-dong at the door. It’s the mailman (well, he’s actually a maildog), who delivers a package to Otto:
This is the one moment of the book in which my suspended disbelief could not longer be suspended, and was thus re-spended. Why on earth would Aunt Sally Lee take the time to send her nephew a lamp, packing it up, writing him a letter and taking it to the post office, and not dust the lamp herself? What kind of aunt sends someone a dusty present?

Well, if you’ve ever experienced any genie-related entertainment before, you know what happens when he dusts it off. A (humanoid, rather than feline) genie appears, this one blue, goatee-ed and tapering off to a wispy tail like the Disney genie from Aladdin, only with a gold tooth and wearing a big gold G necklace (probably for “Genie,” rather than “gangsta”).

Otto of course gets a wish, and he wishes that everything in the world was orange. This leads to four pages of Otto running about, exulting in the orange and making some rather forced rhymes to describe exactly what “everything” encompasses: “ Orange clowns in orange gowns!… Orange monkeys…cows and lizards. And in the winter, orange blizzards.”

He soon realizes that having everything in the world be orange has some drawbacks. When his mom serves him a lambchop for lunch (Lamb? For lunch?!), for example, he wanders away from the table in disgust:
Then there’s the matter of traffic lights, and police APBs (“Alert! Be on the lookout for the escaped orange criminal… He or she has orange hair… and orange eyes… and is wearing orange!”).

Otto tries to fix things, with the help of his aunt, but the genie is being less than cooperative and, in the end, they have to trick the genie into making the world normal again, using something Otto learned himself in the course of realizing a one-colored world has its disadvantages.

I liked the story okay, but it seemed to be more of a kids’ book than an all-ages book (That is, targeted at younger audiences at the expense of older audiences). I mention that as an observation more than a criticism, by the way; there’ s certainly nothing wrong with kids’ comics targeting kids.

If I have a few reservations about the script (for adult readers, not kids, for whom it’s perfect), I have none about Cammuso’s art, which is pretty great.

The designs and sense of motion seem highly influenced by classic animation of the humorous short variety, but the lines look like those in an exceptionally well-drawn comic strip (In fact, it reminded me quite a bit of Bill Watterson’s, particularly in the way Cammuso lends energy and excitement to the common, every day settings like a kitchen table or a living room).

So I guess I’m inclined to agree with youth service librarian Beth Zambito and Blog@ reader Vinnie Bartilucci.