Art

Entertainment

Picture This!

From children's books to adult fare, storytellers use comic
strips to appeal to readers of all ages.

SUZANNE CHESSLER

Special to the Jewish News

L

ook to Art Spiegelman for comic books
that can't be defined as comical.
Spiegelman, 53, the son of a survivor,
holds a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his adult
comics-style renderings about the Holocaust. Maus
and Maus II express his father's experiences by depict-
ing Jews as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs.
The New York-raised writer/illustrator, early a
contributor to underground comics and later co-
founder/editor of the avant-garde comics magazine
Raw, has turned to young readers in recent years.

Kid Appeal

He started with Open Me ... Im a Dog,
moved on to Little Lit Folklore and
Fairy Tale Funnies and now has released

with changing and charged reactions to the tragedy.
"Every kid I've met is strange, so I don't think of
the book title as pejorative," says Spiegelman. His
drawings and comics have appeared in many publi-
cations, including the New York Times, the Village
Voice and the New Yorker, which recently carried his
darkened rendering of the Twin Towers on its cover.
"Children's imaginations are willing to roam, and
we were trying to signal that these stories would be
stretches in one direction or another, built around a
genuine respect for the way the mind and imagina-
tion work on the part of kids.
Rather than devising bland stories for bland kids,
"the goal was to make something that could be reread
often, throughout a lifetime if necessary. It meant
asking for a highly developed set of skills coming in,
and we went back and forth with the people [before
each entry was finished]."

Little Lit Strange Stories for Strange Kids

More Than The Sum Of Their Parts

(Joanna Coder Books/Harper Collins
Children's Books; $19.95).
Co-edited with his wife, Francoise
Mouly, art director of the New Yorker,
the anthology includes pieces by famed
writers, such as Jules Feiffer, Claude
Ponti and Kim Deitch.
Spiegelman gets the book started
with "The Several Selves of Selby
Sheldrake," a tale about the multiple
dispositions independently discovered
in and by a mother and her son.
Spiegelman found his story particularly
relevant after Sept. 11, when his own
daughter and son found themselves

Barbara McClintock's "Runaway Shadow"
explores loneliness. Ian Falconer's and David
Sedaris' "Pretty Ugly" delves into definitions
of beauty with some jarring images. Maurice
Sendak's "Baby Keller" introduces an infant
who can swallow cats, birds and people and
also be swallowed himself— with all ulti-
mately "unswallowed."
The drawings can be unsettling, including
the "Strange Picture" by Francois Roca,
which challenges children to find 22 odd
things in a cityscape. It is among other
interspersed puzzle pages.
"My wife and I had to shepherd each of
these pieces, find what could be put next to

"Every kid I've met
is strange, so I don't
think of the book
title as pejorative,"
says Spiegelman.

Budding Artists

Michiganders contribute to comics craze.

omic strips with some serious
messages are on the minds of
a writer-illustrator who grew
up in Michigan and a writer-
illustrator team currently living in
Michigan.
Neil Kleid, 26, who was raised in
Oak Park and now lives in New York,
is taking on freelance projects to push
toward full-time work in this field.
Engineer Mark Messler, 45, and librar-
ian Randy Farb, 41, are hobbyists

C

12/28
2001

52

focused on 4 Corners, a comic strip
that explores Jewish traditions and
appears in The Flint Jewish Reporter
and on a Web site they maintain
(www.geocities.com/fourcorners).

Personal Statements

"I've always been interested in comics,
and I learned to draw by taking exam-
ples from what I saw," says Kleid, a
graphics art graduate from Wayne

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly

another and make them more than the sum of their
parts," explains Spiegelman, who has lectured at the
University of Michigan.
"Some of the artists were people we'd worked with
in the past for grownups. Some were people we met
through the New Yorker. Part was finding people
who were making picture books for children but not
necessarily in comic form.
"We were looking for people who understood
what it means to tell a story in a sequence of pic-
tures, have a clear idea of narrative and show draw-
ing capacities that are appealing to us."
Spiegelman, who considers himself culturally
Jewish, included a Chasidic tale in his other Little
Lit book but offers no specifically Jewish stories in
his latest hardcover publication.
"My biggest project now is a three-panel opera,
which is an epic theater piece about the rise and fall
of the American comic book," he says.
"I'm also beginning to work on a series of pages
aboUt post-traumatic stress and the way my mind
has been since Sept. 11." El

State University and former
"Bit City: A Random
marketing employee at the
Tale" is a mystery being
Jewish Federation of
published by Committed
Metropolitan Detroit.
Comics in an issue of
Kleid, always enthusiastic
Threads, which features
about new ideas to explore,
three intertwining stories
has several projects in the
completed by different
works.
people.
His story "Letters From a
On his own, sometimes
Broken Apple" soon will
under the Third Eye
appear in 9 11: Emergency
Publishing Anthology ban-
Neil Kleid: 'A lot of ner, Kleid self publishes
Relief an anthology being
my writing explores and uses various New York
published in January by
psychological issues." outlets to sell his work. He
Alternative Comics, with
proceeds going to victims of
is completing an autobiog-
the terrorist attacks. (For more infor-
raphy, Singles Night, which references
mation, go to
his Orthodox beliefs.
www.indyworld.com/relief)
"I like comics because they are so

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