Tagged: You Know: For Kids

It’s not usual for a creative team to accrete members over time. OK, sure, you can think of bands that got bigger as they got successful enough to add, for instance, a horn section, but those accretions tend to be semi-separate: The Fantastic Desperadoes with the Horns of Doom! People get replaced, of course. But it’s not common for new people to come in, set up, and just be added.

So I’m wondering what will be next for the team behind Pixels of You , a 2021 graphic novel from Amulet, Abrams’ teen-comics imprint. Co-writers (and partners in life, too, I think) Ananth Hirsh and Yuko Oda did the book Lucky Penny together before this – there, Hirsh was billed as the writer and Oda as the artist, but we all know artists in comics do at least half the storytelling (which means “writing”) anyway.

This time out, they have a new artist – maybe to have a particular look, maybe for other artistic reasons – J.R. Doyle, who also does a webcomic called Knights Errant and seems to do storyboard work as well.

Pixels looks nothing like Penny, and the tone is completely different, so that’s my assumption: Hirsh and Oda knew they wanted this new project to go in a different direction  If so, it worked: I had to look them up to remember what it was I read by them, and didn’t bring any expectations to Pixels.

Pixels of You is a personal drama, enemies-to-friends division (maybe more than friends, as is often the case), set in a near-future SF world. AI is ubiquitous and well-integrated – the SFnal kind of AI that quite likely will never actually exist, humaniform persons who are just part of human society. They don’t seem to be an underclass, though there are hints of prejudice and most AI persons may be vaguely considered lesser than meat-people. There are also hints that AI personhood, or possibly citizenship, are contingent in some way, with regular tests AI persons need to pass to stay in their current status.

Indira is a young woman working as an intern in an art gallery: she’s a wannabe photographer, and her boss is influential in that world. The internship is a strong way into the world she wants to be part of, and she’s trying to make the most of it. She also has a cybernetic eye – totally realistic-looking; no one knows unless she tells them – from a tragic accident in her past, and either that accident or the eye or both are the source of health issues, pain and bad dreams and sometimes worse.

Fawn is the next intern in line at the gallery: she’s on her way in as Indira is finishing her time. Fawn is a human-presenting AI, the “daughter” of two traditional-looking AI persons who seem to be quite successful – maybe managerial-class jobs, something like that.

They meet at a show, and immediately get on each other’s worst sides: Fawn insults Indira’s work, without know it’s hers. Indira is prickly and standoffish to begin with, so gives as well as she gets.

But the gallery owner needs them to work together, and forces them to do so: the next show, which was originally planned to be a combined look at their separate work, now will be of work they make together.

Both Indira and Fawn are well-meaning, mostly nice people, so they don’t stay enemies all that long. (Coming from Penny, I might have expected a longer, funnier sequence of squabbling, physical or verbal, but Pixels is a quieter, much more serious book.) They do learn to work together, they do learn each other’s secrets, they do become friends.

That sounds trite, I suppose, but any story is trite when stripped to the barest plot. The team here tells this one well – there’s a lot of single-panel pages to show what Fawn and Indira’s work looks like, and a lot of semi-wordless sequences, since photography is more about seeing than talking. It’s a sweet story, even if I do have some quibbles with the SFnal background.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

First up, I have to answer the question I had when I picked up this book: yes, that tin man. Well, one of those tin men, to be clearer.

Justin Madison’s debut graphic novel Tin Man  is set in a version of L. Frank Baum’s Oz, and his tin man, Campbell, has the familiar shape and form Americans expect from their tin men since 1939. But that’s not particularly clear at the beginning of the story, and it’s never important. It’s something bigger than an Easter egg, I guess, since there are plenty of references to Baum here, but it’s all background.

We’re in a recognizably modern world: suburbia, TV news, two-paycheck families, junkyards, high school students who play video games and hang out to do mischief. The land is called Oz, which is mentioned but not emphasized. It looks mostly like our world, with a few tweaks.

There’s a major space industry, and people can build space-capable ships in their backyards, in best Tom Swift fashion. Kids can aspire to get out of their dead-end towns by getting into the very selective VASTE Institute, something like a STEM magnet high school with much more emphasis on spaceships and big wrenches.

But they’re still kids, and that’s what Tin Man is about. Three young people who each want something – though they don’t all exactly know what they want, when the book begins – who meet, and who each find something like what they want (or need) by the end.

One of them is Campbell, the tin man. He grew up with his people, in the forest, chopping down trees. But he heard of a wizard, in a far-off city, who makes mechanical hearts for tin men that allows them to feel, and Campbell wanted that for himself. His father didn’t understand why; they fought; Campbell ran away. There’s a bit more to the story, but that comes out in the course of the book.

Campbell meets Fenn in a junkyard. Campbell is there: living or hanging out or just existing. Fenn is a local kid, maybe ten or so. He’s obsessed with space; his hero is Jed Astro, a famous explorer. And Fenn is picking through junkyards as he tries to build a spaceship himself – he finds a mechanical heart, he befriends Campbell, he’s the glue that pulls this story together.

The third character is Fenn’s older sister, Solar. She used to be an academic whiz, head of the class at her high school, recruited for VASTE. But she’s hanging with the stoners and bullies now, dating the worst of them: slacking off, skipping school, avoiding work and responsibility, looking to get a job at a local garage and give up on all expectations.

Fenn wants his old sister back: the one who cared about space and science and the future. The one that worked with him and was good at the same things he cares about.

Solar wants… Well, she used to want to go to VASTE, to go to space, to get out of this town and make something of herself. Now, she doesn’t seem to want anything.

Campbell wants that mechanical heart, we think – but we learn that he’d already gotten it, and how that went.

Meanwhile, Terrible Twisters are running through Oz, getting closer. And Solar’s new friends – especially her boyfriend, Merrick, their leader – are mean and destructive and getting worse. And we learn why Solar changed, what happened in her life (and Fenn’s) recently that soured her on life.

And they all get what they want, or maybe need, at the end, as the twisters hit and Merrick continues to be a horrible human being and Fenn’s homemade spaceship turns out to be unexpectedly useful.

Madison has a somewhat indy-comics style, a little grungy, with dot eyes: it reminds me a little of Jeff Lemire, though not that grungy. His places are real, his people expressive, his colors crisp and bright. And he’s just sneaky enough, with his Oz references and unobtrusive storytelling, for a reader like me who eats that stuff up. Tin Man is another one of the flood of recent graphic stories aimed at teens, but, like the best of that flood, it’s not limited to them.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I’ve had this same problem my entire book-reviewing “career” – what to say about another book in a series, when it’s the same kind of thing as the ones before. Even if you really like the new one, you’ve already said the things you could say.

So, let me start out by saying that Are We Lost Yet?  is the fourth collection of Will Henry’s “Wallace the Brave” daily strip. The comic itself appears in newspapers and on GoComics every day; the three prior collections are Wallace the Brave , Snug Harbor Stories , and Wicked Epic Adventures  (links are to my posts). This one was published last year, so it includes comics that I’ve seen since I started reading the strip online, which is nicely circular.

(In fact, there’s one of my favorite panels in here, which I clipped and saved to use as a reaction image online – though I never get as much use out of the things in that folder as I think I will. I’ll shove that into this post, a little further down, so you can see if your tastes in humor and reactions are anything similar to mine.)

Those three posts are all pretty substantial; I like this strip and have enjoyed trying to explain the things I like about it. I’ve probably devoted less time to Henry’s cartooning in these posts than I should: he’s a supple cartoonist who fills his panels with details but always in a quick-looking, energetic style. He’s really clearly on the side that cartoons should be cartoony: eyes goggle, bodies fly in reaction to events, sound effects proliferate with a variety of perfectly onomatopoetic lettering.

I don’t want to repeat myself, but this is a great strip, one of the best of its kind and one of the most fun and energetic strips currently running. The only contemporary thing as creative and amusing as Wallace the Brave I can think of is the Peter Gallagher Heathcliff, which is otherwise utterly different.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

This is the third collection of Will Henry’s Wallace the Brave daily strip; it follows Wallace the Brave  and Snug Harbor Stories . Usually, with a series, the advice is to start at the beginning – but any half-decent newspaper comic has to be capable of standing on its own, every single day, out of any context, providing a little moment.

And Wallace – if it’s not in your paper (it’s not in mine), you can read it online at GoComics every day instead – is much better than half-decent. It’s at least all-decent: funny, involving, memorable, drawn with verve and written with a puckish wit.

So you could jump into Wicked Epic Adventures  first if you wanted. Or either of the preceding books. Or, probably, the fourth book, which I haven’t read yet. Or, as most people do with daily strips, with the daily strip itself, until you get the point where you want to read a big clump in one designed package at once.

Wallace is a person: a six-year-old boy in the bucolic New England town of Snug Harbor. His creator lives in Rhode Island, but I’ve gotten more of a Maine vibe from Snug Harbor – it’s not near a big city, and seems to be on an island or otherwise separated from anywhere else. (Tourists arrive by ferry at a dock, for another touchpoint.)

Wallace McClellan is one of those relentlessly positive, endlessly active kids – the kind of person who has so much energy and crazy ideas that he would be annoying if he weren’t so nice. (And, frankly, I still find him annoying some of the time.) He’s also the center of the two semi-separate casts of the story, as often happens in a strip comic. One group is his family; the other is his friends at school.

His father is a commercial fisherman; it’s a bit vague about whether Mr. McClellan works for a larger company or is an independent guy with his own boat and operation. His mother doesn’t work outside the home, but is an avid gardener and surfer, and a more modern version of the tough, loving mom figure than you see in most strip comics. She also seems to be the source of Wallace’s imagination and crazy ideas. His younger brother Sterling is less prominent here than he’s become more recently, but he’s a different and pure kind of wild child.

In school, Wallace often fails to heed the grounded, helpful Mrs. Macintosh, who is mostly in these strips to be a voice of reason when there needs to be an unheeded voice of reason. His best friend is Spud, my favorite character: a quirky, food-obsessed fussbudget who I suspect would be much more at home further away from all this nature and who gets dragged along on all of Wallace’s crazy schemes without ever enjoying or agreeing to any of them. And then there’s Amelia, who is still “the new girl” at this point – fairly newly arrived in town, with the take-charge, no-nonsense attitude of a girl who is smart, knows it, and has plans for herself and the world.

The core plot for these strips is still mostly “Wallace does something nutty” – that has changed a bit, more recently, with particularly Amelia driving some plotlines and the newer character Rose being a voice of reason that does get heeded, at least sometimes.

And the joys of a daily strip are in how the creator works out semi-standard plots with well-defined characters – Henry does that well in Wallace, which follows the rhythms of the school year (we get a summer vacation in this one) and relies on everyone’s established character points for his storylines. He’s also a light, visually inventive artist, happy to dive into sidebar visions and ideas, with a line that’s always illustrative and loose.

Bottom line: Wallace the Brave is one of the best strips currently running, fun and distinctive while still clearly in the great tradition, with interesting echoes of a number of predecessors. If daily strips are anything you’ve ever cared about, you should check it out.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I have no idea why this very specific and distinctive book has such a generic-sounding title. I could make up stories of epic battles behind the scenes, with different factions jockeying for utterly different titles (How Daisy Saved the World! My Y2K Story – Really! The Second-Worst Journey in the World! What I Did on My Summer Vacation World-Saving Trip! My Story, by Marguerite de Pruitt!), and only able to agree, after months of internecine warfare, on this one. But that would be entirely fictional, if amusing.

What we have is Danger and Other Unknown Risks , a title which could apply to practically any adventure story ever told. This one is written by Ryan North and drawn by Erica Henderson, the team that did the Squirrel Girl  comic for several years to vast acclaim and strong sales and the adoration of a huge number of fans, more of them small and/or female than was typical for a Marvel comic.

The cynical side of me assumes that they did Danger so they could have something similar that they would own; the sunnier side of me assumes that they liked working together so much that they just had to do it again. Either way, this is very much the same kind of story: spunky, young, optimistic heroine in quirky adventures across a world that needs to be saved. Marguerite, though, does not have the plot armor Doreen Green did, does not have any superpowers – she has one spell, which has different effects in every realm and borderline useless everywhere – and, even though she is a well-trained Chosen One, her failure is very much possible.

Our world has been transformed. Y2K happened – several hundred years ago, we think, while being a bit vague on how many hundreds – but was instead a magical transformation. The world is now radically balkanized, with obvious borders between different magical zones where physical laws can work entirely differently. (Our heroine, Marguerite, tosses a toad across borders as a testing mechanism, which implies some places don’t support biological life at all…but we don’t see any of those potentially fatal realms in this book.)

Marguerite has been sent by her uncle Bernard – this is the kind of “uncle” like Donald and Mickey and Scrooge, where the actual parents, if there ever were any, are never even mentioned – on this world-saving mission, along with her companion, the talking dog Daisy. The two need to find three specific artifacts and bring them back to Bernard, who will use them in a massive spell that will Save the World. The world needs saving, Bernard says, because the magical realms are diverging more and more every day, and that will eventually Destroy the World if it is not Saved.

Readers of books for younger people may guess that Not All Is As It Seems. Marguerite and Daisy discover Shocking Revelations and The Real Truth and have to Change Their Mission. But they’re always going to Save the World. Along the way, they steal those three artifacts of the Before Times, run away from and/or confront various nasty or otherwise opposed forces, meet some friends and helpers, and, as always with North/Henderson stories, model positive friendship at all times.

Reader, they do Save The World. How could they do otherwise? And if you’ve been looking for something to scratch that phantom Squirrel Girl itch, this is exactly the thing for it.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

I used to read a lot of strip-comics collections: I assembled a full set of Doonesbury back in the day, kept up with Dilbert until the writing on the wall was too obvious to ignore [1], and had multiple books from probably a dozen other currently-running strips over the years. But, somehow, the past decade or so has made that seem old-fashioned. Maybe because of so many re-runs (Get Fuzzy, for example, which I still read in the paper but can never tell if it’s actually new, because it generally isn’t) and legacy strips (too many to mention, not that I ever cared for most of them in even their earlier forms), maybe because of just the weight of time.

Will Henry’s Wallace the Brave is probably the first newspaper strip where I’ve read two collections in…ten years? More or less? So I may end up grumping about some aspects of the strip, because what I apparently do best is grump, but let me underline that first: I like this a lot more than just about anything else I’ve seen in a newspaper for a bunch of years.

Snug Harbor Stories  is the second collection of the strip, after the self-titled first book . It was published in 2019, soon after the strip started running in newspapers. (If I’m reading the Wikipedia entry correctly, it had an extended try-out on GoComics starting in 2015, the first book hit in 2017, and it was actively syndicated into papers starting in 2018.)

And this is a strip comic, so this book is the same kind of thing as the first book, only more of it. I feel like the strip these days is really focused on the kids and from their point of view – so, for example, the teacher and parents are seen from a metaphorical kid-height rather than being viewpoints – but some of these earlier strips are more obviously coming from an adult perspective. I enjoyed that difference, but great strips develop focus and stick to it, so the overall change is both expected and admirable.

I also thought there were even more inventive layouts in this book than the first one, which could be Henry getting comfortable with what’s possible within the physical constraints of the strip. My mostly-uninformed idea would be that inventiveness is easier digitally – as when the strip was only on GoComics in the early days – than in print, but maybe newspapers are not quite as hidebound and backwards-thinking as I assume.

I still like Spud as a character a lot better than Wallace, though I don’t think I’m supposed to. Wallace can just be too much of a muchness, constructed to be the eternally wide-eyed optimist dreamer, like a Tom Sawyer with all cynicism and sneakiness surgically extracted. Spud is quirky and weird and particular, like normal people. But one of the things that makes a great comics strip is characters you argue about, even in your own head – strips are formed over time, through lots of moments and jokes and recurring ideas. So even my saying, “I like Wallace the Brave the strip better than I like Wallace the character” is a good sign for the strip as a whole.

Anyway, this is about a bunch of six-year-olds, and, like all comics, they’re smarter and more articulate and have more physical freedom of action than any six-year-olds have ever had in the real world. Calvin and Hobbes is the most obvious predecessor: the two strips have a similar sense of infinite possibility and joy in the outdoors and exploration. But Wallace is more about community and friendship – Wallace himself is central, but he’s not the whole strip. He’s the catalyst or the glue, but the strip is as much about his friends and family as about him specifically.

And Henry is an inventive, somewhat loose artist with great sound-effects, a willingness to draw weird stuff (people, places, layouts – all of it) and a complete and total lack of fussiness at all times. It’s a lovely, always organic-looking strip full of energy and life

I still think the best way to discover a strip is day-by-day rather than in clumps; the good ones stick in your mind even in small doses like that. But, when you’re ready for a larger dose, Snug Harbor Stories (and the book before and, so far, two books after) are there.

[1] From the evidence of my bookshelves, I think this was 15-20 years ago, which is even longer than I thought. I also should note that I wrote this post in early January, before the recent unpleasantness. But Dilbert‘s creator has been a wealth of unpleasantness for quite some time now.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

My problem is that I’m always comparing books with other books, or just wanting things out of them that they never promised. This is, of course, a Me Problem, and I try to tamp it down when it hits.

I have a major case today, but I’m going to try to be fair to Nayra and the Djinn , a fine new graphic novel by Iasmin Omar Ata with lovely colors, a positive story, and a message that will resonate with a whole lot of readers younger than I am. Nayra is officially published today; you should be able to find it in all the usual ways and places you find books.

You see, I recently read another book about wishes, Djinni-adjacent, connected to Egyptian culture and Islam – Deena Mohamed’s Shubeik Lubeik  – and anything I say about Ata’s YA book could well be me wanting it to be more like Mohamed’s book for adults. That’s a bad impulse! I want to make that clear. Each book, each story should be precise and particular – even things I might think of as flaws [1] can be important and specific to that book.

I’m saying all this to stop myself from doing it. Let’s see if I succeed.

Nayra Mansour is a younger child in a high-pressure Arab-American immigrant family. She also has only one close friend at school, Rami, and is being bullied – in the mostly psychological, nasty-names way that young women are most likely to attack each other. She’s feeling overwhelmed and increasingly unhappy, especially since it’s Ramadan.

She’s fasting all day, since that’s important to her, but that makes her hungry and cranky and tired – and also gives her bullies more things to use to attack her. It’s a vicious circle that only gets tighter, especially when her parents refuse to listen to her complaints – admittedly, she mostly does the nonspecific teenager-y “you don’t understand me!” yell rather than trying to explain in depth, and they are equally loud and stereotypically tigerish immigrant shouty parents – and just point to her high-achieving, seemingly perfect older siblings.

In case I buried the lede above: this is very much a YA book. Nayra continually fumes and runs away and has titanic, massive emotional swings. I don’t know exactly how old she is, but she is about as sixteen as it is possible to be. Readers who are many decades past their own equivalent life-stage may find they have less patience for that kind of drama, and may wish that Nayra was somewhat more constructive in her problem-solving.

But, instead, she meets a djinn, which the cover and title gives away. Marjan has their own issues and has fled the djinn world for reasons that won’t be explained for a while, but that stays secondary to Nayra’s problems. (Again: YA story. Big, overwhelming, all-encompassing drama.)

Nayra’s new friendship with the djinn supplants her previous friendship with Rami – parenthetically, I kept getting the vibe that the relationship was hugely more important to Rami than it was to Nayra, and wasn’t sure if that was supposed to be a romantic thing, but the relentless focus on Nayra and her emotions leaves that unclear – but having Marjan in her corner generally does make things better for Nayra, as the month of Ramadan rolls on.

On the other hand, Nayra has also secretly applied to transfer to another school, to get away from the bullying. Her parents don’t know this, and would probably not be in favor: they don’t seem to be in favor of anything other than “shut up and be a perfect student.” And the bullying troubles are getting worse. And her schoolwork is taking a hit – from spending time with Marjan, from the bullying, from stress and anxiousness, from spending too much time reading about Arab folklore online, and from the physical stress of Ramadan.

So everything blows up, as it must in a YA story. It does end mostly happily, though Nayra still doesn’t explain things to other people in the ways I hoped she would. Still, she’s young: she has a long time to learn that skill, which will be hugely valuable. I hope she does.

As I said up top, Ata has a colorful art style that pops particularly well when showing the djinn world. The publisher compares their style to Stephen Universe, which I’ve never seen – it looks like plain ‘ol manga-inspired western comics to me, all big eyes and huge gestures, but I am One of the Olds. Nayra is a positive, energetic, very teen-aimed book where problems are resolved non-violently and people do eventually learn to understand each other’s differences, which are all good things. I found it a little too teenager for my personal taste, but I did stop being a teenager in 1989, so that’s only to be expected.

[1] I’m not the authority on flaws. Other people have different opinions.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.

Books aren’t just catapulted out into the world willy-nilly, no matter what some people might think. There’s always a complex calculation on the publisher’s side, to figure out who the audience is and how best to get to those people. The books that don’t have any clear audience, or obvious way to reach them, are the ones that tend to be rejected.

Newspaper cartoons, on the other hand, tend to be thought of as “for everyone,” at least by your less thoughtful kind of editor. And who else is left in the newspaper industry after thirty years of cutting? Admittedly, newspaper strips tend to skew to the older side, like everything else in a dead-tree newspaper, but that can mean that the more thoughtful editors – I’ve been told they still exist, perhaps like the Sasquatch, eternally rumored and never witnessed – try to counter-program, picking features and investigative series and even strip cartoons that appeal to different, even younger audiences.

But I didn’t think Will Henry’s “Wallace the Brave” strip was particularly one to appeal to current-day kids. It’s set in the modern world, as far as I can tell, and it features a central cast of kids, but the tone feels like nostalgia, like an imagined version of what growing up used to be like, before helicopter parents and cellphones and Internet, set in a rinky-dink New England fishing town that might as well be cut off from the rest of the world. It’s a very constructed world, is what I mean: a vision of what never was, but that older generations always talk about as if they lived through it.

But the first collection of that strip, called Wallace the Brave , as is traditional, includes a bunch of activities for kids at the back, so my guess is that someone actually thinks this will primarily appeal to actual kids, and not just adults who want to believe their youth was carefree and wonderful. Those someones may even be right, though I wouldn’t want to try to attract elementary-school kids to a dead-tree newspaper feature these days.

Anyway, this first Wallace book came out in 2017 and collects what looks like roughly the first four to six months of strips. It has 166 pages of comics, and pages are mostly a single daily, so that’s how I do the math. Henry, or his editor, has laid this out more like a graphic novel, with longer strips and sequences – I think mostly Sundays, but potentially week-long continuities, or maybe even new material for the book? – a few panels to each page, making the whole book flow more than the average strip collection.

Oh, don’t get me wrong: the  majority of pages here have what seems to be one daily strip. But Henry sticks to four-panels for a daily less than most, so some dailies are turned sideways to get one long panel in, some have three or five or seven panels arranged in two or three tiers on the page, and some places, as I said, it’s clearly a longer sequence stretching across multiple pages.

The strips are about a kid named Wallace – that’s him at the right on the cover. He’s the traditional pushy dreamer for stories like this, the guy who wants to do everything and experience it all, impatient with rules and limitations and always ready to do “real” things. The two overlapping circles of the cast are his family (fisherman father; stay-at-home mother; younger brother Sterling, who is not quite as feral as he later becomes in these early strips) and his friends at school (neurotic best friend Spud, overwhelming new girl Amelia, teacher Mrs. Macintosh).

Wallace the Brave is not a direct descendant of Peanuts, but Henry’s kids are smarter, more thoughtful, and better-spoken than their real-world counterparts in the same ways Schulz’s were; they’re neither realistic six-year-olds nor the doll-like joke-engines of strips like Family Circus. And what they do is in the vein of early Peanuts, or Calvin & Hobbes – more-or-less what real kids do, only more so. Sometimes more so because that’s what makes it funny, sometimes more so because that’s the “perfect childhood” mythology here. Sometimes both.

Henry has a great illustrative line, detailed and energetic – it reminds me of a lot of the great strip cartoonists of a century ago, back when they had more space for extra detail and complication.

This is a fun strip, which I started reading maybe a year ago, maybe a bit less. You can search out the books if you want – I think there are three more after this one, so far – but the best way to read a daily is daily, so either look for it in your paper (assuming you have one) or check it out on GoComics , and slot into its daily routines.

Reposted from The Antick Musings of G.B.H. Hornswoggler, Gent.