When characters on
the Simpsons expressed surprise that
Spiderman creator Stan Lee was still alive, the graphic-novel obsessed Comic Book Guy said:
Stan Lee never left. I'm beginning to think that his mind is no longer in mint condition.
Now I personally am glad that Stan Lee never went away - Spiderman was (IS) my all time favourite superhero. But the whole mint condition thing, the fact that Comic Book Guy (who once translated Lord of the Rings into Klingon) even exists, demonstrates the problem with comic books.
Comic books never had a good reputation with teachers, parents and librarians. And now, the readership has been totally taken over by adults - many of whom are of a type similar to Comic Book Guy.
But things are changing.
In 2007, the
Michael L. Printze Book of the Year (the Oscar for YA book writers) went to the graphic novel
American Born Chinese by
Gene Luen Yang.
Recently,
The Invention of Hugo Cabret by David Selznick - a graphic novel published in the form of a hardback -
won the 2008 Caldecott Medal.
In May, Philip Pullman publisher David Fickling
will be launching a weekly comic anthology. Here's a link to
the DFC's about page. Hmm. There is something familiar about
the art on that DFC page.
In 2006 David Saylor - who published
Hugo Cabret and is known for his art direction of the Harry Potter US editions - launched Scholastic Graphix, a comic book imprint for the world's largest children's publisher. The New Big Idea of Scholastic Graphics is actually an Old Big Idea. That kids love comics. Here he is interviewed by the
All Age Reads blogThe first thing I'd love to change is the perception that “comics aren’t for kids anymore”. Perhaps it would be wiser to say: "Comics ARE for kids (and for everyone else, too)". In the push to make comics respectable and noteworthy, comics for kids have been somewhat ignored in the last 20 years. I believe strongly that now is the time for publishers to create wonderful comics for kids: we’re poised for an explosion of graphic novels, and perhaps even a new golden age.
David told the Bologna SCBWI conference that it was at the
massive comic convention Comicon that he had a Pauline moment about kids and comic books. Here was a "major pop culture event in the US", an "incredibly vibrant world". He "remembered how strongly connected to comic books I had been as an eight and nine year old" - not with superheroes but with character-based comics like
Little Lotta (pictured right) and
Richie Rich.
Scholastic is the largest distributor of children's books in the world. Why were we not publishing comic books? Why were there no comics being produced for kids?
The result of this epiphany was Graphix, Scholastic's imprint devoted to comic books - which launched in 2005.
David set out to find comic books that, because of the graphic novel's skew towards adults, had not reached the kid's market.
Graphix's big success is
the Bone comic books by Jeff Smith, that pretty much already had achieved cult status as a black and white, self-published comic book. Jeff's website explains:
Apparently, BONE was one of the most requested graphic novels in libraries across the country. By kids! Now, if you’ve followed my career in comics, you know I’ve fought against BONE being labeled a children’s book. Mostly for marketing reasons - -today’s comic book readers are mostly adults, and a kid’s comic wouldn’t survive long - but also because I wasn’t writing for kids ... (but) the kids found BONE and claimed it. They got enough librarians looking for it, that Ingram [the library distributors] called us. When trade magazines like Booklist, Library Journal, and Publisher’s Weekly began reporting on the high circulations of graphic novels and teachers’ discovery that kids actually were reading them, big publishers like Scholastic took notice.
Graphix adapted existing bestsellers like
The Babysitters' Club and
Goosebumps to the comic book format.
David had some negotiating to do to get booksellers to put comic books into their children's sections, drawing a lot of knowing merriment from the audience when he said:
Comic book stores are not friendly to women and kids
Librarians were the first to take the new comic books on board. Children were easy. Teachers less so. But David predicts the dawning of a "golden age of comics for kids" as the gatekeepers of our children's reading life realise that "visual literacy" has a role to play in keeping kids reading.
As a child, I was the proud owner of a towering comic book collection - and read classics like
Lorna Doone after being introduced to them in Classic Comics.
Little Lotta and
Spiderman didn't do me any harm either.
Words can't express how wonderful it is to witness the return of comics for kids! As Comic Book Guy would say:
There is no emoticon for what I am feeling!
The rules:
Of course if any of us were offered some Hollywood cash for the film rights to anything we've written, the answer is pre-ordained!
