Tue Apr 8, 2008 1:57PM4 comments ›
Tue Apr 8, 2008 — by Van Jensen
Review: 'Little Vampire' by Joann Sfar
Poop jokes and dismemberment for kids

There are three stories in the new Little Vampire collection from First Second ($13.95). In the first, the little vampire makes friends with a living boy, Michael. In the second, the two overcome a bully. In the third, they protect a pack of dogs.
If those sound simplistic, they should. The stories spun by the French cartoonist Joann Sfar are quite basic in structure, making Sfar something of a European corollary to James Kochalka.
Inevitably, though, Sfar's stories take on a rich feel, their depth created in a thousand little interactions among the characters and in the seemingly endless details scratched into the margins of panels.
Those details might strike some parents as shockingly severe. The monsters inhabiting little vampire's home are more frightening and gruesome than cute (think Beetlejuice or Nightmare Before Christmas
). And their actions mirror that ugliness.
One monster is obsessed with poop and even pushes around a wheelbarrow full of it (which eventually becomes a minor plot point). In the story of the bully, the monsters actually kidnap and eat the bully that has terrorized Michael (acting out MIchael's dark fantasies). The story then becomes about using ghostly powers to return the bully to life.
Sfar uses those types of complications to add another layer to the rote tradition of story as parable, twisting cliches in ever more unexpected directions. He doesn't treat children as innocent or naive, putting his many children's books more in the tradition of the original fairy tales, not their Disney-fied reincarnations.
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Comments (4)
mike weber (10:58 PM on Tue Apr 8, 2008)
And then there's "Scary Godmother", which walks the same borderline, but a bit more to this side - which doesn't mean there aren't some pretty scary characters lurking here and there ...
Anonymous (1:05 AM on Wed Apr 16, 2008)
I'm 30 years old, and I read much of what Sfar produces (he puts out a LOT of books), and this series is one of his best.
Anonymous (3:57 AM on Tue Oct 13, 2009)
very much like south park in the sense that southpark is a cartoon with very vulgar content, and this is a book that appears to be for children, but really not so
Anonymous (3:55 AM on Tue Oct 13, 2009)
yeah, those books are pretty fucked up, the one about the little bully is the worst, there's jewish cats, attacking monkeys, drunk wizards that call eachother "retarded midgets" poop jokes, a guy who thinks albert einstein is his father (albert einstein as it turns out has never met the guy), and a boy who wants another kid at school to die. all in all it was fucking hillarious, but not for kids