Review: The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics
Given the subject matter of mainstream comics in their current form — and the high profile stampede of Hollywood to adapt any superhero comic they can get their slimy fingers on — it’s often forgotten that half a century ago the medium was not identified with any particular genre.
Like radio, comics walked in a populist, sometimes lowbrow arena that was as filled with cowboys, medical professionals and wise-cracking children as anything else.
At the middle of the 20th century, there was an entire corner of the comic book industry that had more in common with Golden Books than anything else. In an era when children’s literature too often demonstrated a slavish devotion to stodgy old classics, comics and Golden Books were there to offer little kids something more modern and engaging, something that might actually make them want to read rather than ensure they must.
Golden Books cast a long shadow on the development of the children’s book industry that exists even today. The quality of those shot high up, getting more adventurous with each decade, to the degree that in some cases, children’s literature has gone in an exciting experimental direction. Comics, unfortunately, dropped the ball in regard to kids, focusing on the narrow adventure fantasies of 13-year-old boys.
Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly have worked to correct that course with their Toon Books line of easy reader sequential work, and here they lend their imprint’s name to the title of a miraculous 350-page treasury of comics from before 1965. It’s a work of comic book archaeology with a high standard for the stories included and a high purpose as well — something of value in cartoon form for little kids.
Spiegelman knows his stuff, and he manages to pack the book with a great mix of accepted brilliance and off the beaten path gems that deserve discovery after all these decades. He takes great pains with the better-known work that he has chosen, presenting stories that really exhibit strips like Little Lulu at their best, as well as odd little efforts that are less well-remembered, if at all. What results is a compendium of unique and absurd works that function as a concentrated version of the vast quantity of quality stories that were available, scattered amidst the standard and the forgettable of the time.
Spiegelman and Mouly divide up the volume into thematic sections — Hey Kids, Funny Animals, Fantasyland, Storytime and Weird and Wacky — that feature some powerhouses of the comics medium in lesser known works. Names like Jules Feiffer, Walt Kelly, Jack Cole, Harvey Kurtzman, Basil Wolverton and even Dr. Seuss. Highlights include Kurtzman’s hilarious gag strip “Hey Look,” Wolverton’s cartoons of people with odd faces and a Captain Marvel art parody that has the hero entering the real world of surrealism.
The collection also unearths a huge amount of lesser known characters like Intellectual Amos and his little goblin friend Wilbur, Burp the Twerp and his interchangeable bodies, Billy and Bonnie Bee and their adventures outside the hive, the ne’er do well Pie Face Prince and many others.
These comics are given the official stamp of approval via an introduction from National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature Jon Scieszka, whose own narrative style has obviously been influenced by the types of comics included in the treasury. It’s in that way that comics ended up influencing the culture of kids directly — through children’s book authors and illustrators who savored the affordable entertainment when they were young and carried some level of the aesthetic to their own work.
What has resulted is a collection that’s great for little kids, a book you can cozy up to on a rainy day and read and laugh at together. It’s great for adults, too, but what a waste to read it alone.
Journalista – the news weblog of The Comics Journal » Blog Archive » Oct. 5, 2009: Worth the read (October 5, 2009, 11:24 am).
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