Stockings Hung From the Top Shelf With Care

I link to Top Shelf Comics whenever they have one of their $3 sales. Because their stuff is great. Because you should support your independent small publishers. (Well, that is what I have always assumed, and I see no reason to change my mind.)

They have another sale, until tomorrow – December 14 – offering you free shipping on new release orders over $40, plus on orders from that $3 bin that is still pretty full.

You know. Think about how this goes.

Stockings always get stuffed with care with cheap stuff that seems sort of funny for a moment but isn’t actually that interesting. Think how much more baffled your family members will be by mysteriously Santa-provided copies of “Magic Boy and Robot Elf”, not to mention two of my favorite comics that would fit into a stocking: Dan James’ “The Octopi and the Ocean” and “Mosquito”. It makes me sad that these two titles continue to languish in the remainder bin. (Go ahead. Check out the previews.)

New stuff that looks good: Veeps, a comic book people’s history of the all those who were a heartbeat away from the Presidency. Kids will love Owly and the Korgi books. Alex Robinson’s new one is supposed to be good. (I like his old stuff. Haven’t tried the new yet.) There’s a new volume of Jeff Lemire’s Essex County series. (Possibly these names mean very little to you. Perhaps you should amend that situation.)

OK, something fun to talk about. The last time I snagged a bunch of Top Shelf $3 stuff I was lucky enough to get Scott Morse’s [that’s his blog] The Barefoot Serpent [check out the preview]. Which I vaguely thought was a comics bio of Kurosawa, which turns out to be half-right. That’s the outer frame, around a Kurosawa-spirited story that was just great. “A heartwarming story of a young girl befriended by an extraordinary boy, as her family recovers from a tragedy while on vacation in Hawaii.” Well, that sucks, as blurbs go. Anyway, the interesting thing about the book, apart from the fact that it’s great, is that it’s drawn as if it’s a comic for little kids. And the language is very simple. But the story-telling and framing and themes are a bit too subtle for a smart 7-year old. (I have verified this empirically.) There are too many lateral shifts and smart cinematic jumps. She liked it, but she sort of got lost. It’s very adult, but about a child.

This is something I’ve been thinking about recently. We are all familiar with the category of kids books that ‘work on two levels’. Adults like them, too, that is. (They aren’t like Barney.) But there’s another category of kids books: books that work for kids but actually work a lot better for adults. Can you think of examples? Here’s mine. My favorite book of 2007 was Sean Tan’s The Arrival [amazon]. I talk about it here. The picture book format works perfectly to capture the very adult anxieties of the immigrant experience – a state of being linguistically-challenged without being a child. Then I checked out some more Shaun Tan titles and, although I liked them, I don’t think they worked quite as well. He wants to create picture books about adult themes – that is, books that might actually be too subtle for their apparent audience, but great for people who appear to be too old for them, strictly. Examples, anyone?

UPDATE: Before I’m misunderstood, I should clarify. It’s not exactly a new thought that comics – sequential visual images, whatever – are interesting to adults. What is new is the thought that there’s a certain sort of subgenre, the childrens book, that might actually be aimed primary (rather than secondarily) at adults. It tends to have few words and a picture or so a page (to pick a rather canonic form). There isn’t any particular reason why books with few words and picture or so a page couldn’t be aimed at adults. And, in fact, I think they are more often than we notice. I’m thinking about Scott McCloud’s resistance to classifying childrens books as ‘comics’, even though they may technically meet his definition. I get the source of the resistance. It’s needless linguistic violence to call a picture book for children a ‘comic’. But it’s interesting to think about cases in which the form has been used to deal with adult themes. I’m thinking about Edward Gorey, for example.