Feasting on the DFC - How Many Wows Doth a Comic Book Make?

The sun shined on the one day I needed it to shine - yesterday when I had a little barbecue party. And then this morning it shone again as I sat in the conservatory, catching up with my comics reading. I've only just begun to digest the September 5 issue and golly what a visual feast it is.

There's the cover highlighting the start of a new comics serial, Mezolith, story by Ben Haggarty and art by Adam Brockbank:

I mean, wow, really, WOW! It's painterly and yet those beautiful lines just made me itch to pick up a pencil and draw! (Click on the images to see it in full screen) Check out the first page of the comic, the play on angles. And the story moves too!

There's a small animation of this stone age comic on the DFC website.

And here's a frame from Monkey Nuts by the Etherington Brothers. I sat and looked at it for a long time:

Wow, wow, wow!

And then there's this frame from Sneaky, The Cleverest Elephant in the World - art by Laura Howell and story by Peadar O Guilin.

I like! I like!

And of course, always everyone's favourite, Vern and Lettuce by Sarah Macintyre - poor Vern swaps a tuba for a rather large jumper knitted from his own wool.

Awwww.

Notes from Slushpile Readers

So Lindsey from Puffin read my post on the DFC people's comic book workshops and said if my nine year old liked comics, she would probably like Diary of a Wimpy Kid by Jeff Kinney.

This really interests me - the previous time I blogged about the connect between comic books/graphic novels and traditional children's publishing, I had a spike - from my daily readership of 300-500 a day, almost FOUR THOUSAND people read Comic Books Are Not Just For Klingon Speakers - about the rising interest in comic books for kids in the US! What does that mean? Should UK publishers (notoriously resistant to comics) pay attention?

Here's a sample page from Diary of a Wimpy Kid (blurb: "a novel in cartoons":

Lindsey was right! My nine-year-old devoured it like a bag of sweets! And slushpilers should note that Jeff Kinney himself has had an interesting journey to publishing - working on the book for six years before publishing it in daily instalments at Pearson's educational website FunBrain.com (bite-sized blogs targeted at various ages and differentiated between boys and girls are another interesting feature). Thanks for that, Lindsey!

***

Speaking of Puffin - Puffin is one of the few children's publishers who actually maintain a readable blog (in the UK, in the US they all blog). Visit the Puffin Blog here ... but do try to avoid any stalker, publish-me-now-or-else behaviour.

***

People who've attended one of my talks on authors online may have heard me talk about the potential ofgroup blogs for overworked authors - this way, authors can share the burden, expand their audiences ... you get what I mean. Well, my author pal Fiona Dunbar (Pink Chameleon, The Truth Cookie) kindly forwarded this link over the weekend to the Awfully Big Adventure blog recently started by a group of children's authors.

Do visit, leave comments etc etc. I think it's an awfully terrific thing to do! Way to go!

Fiona also pointed out Sally Nichols' (Ways to Live Forever) post featuring this cartoon from Tales from the Slush Pile over at the Children's Boookshelf at Publisher's Weekly. (Thanks, Fiona).

***

And speaking of Fiona, she's just rather hilariously blogged (on her brand spanking new blog) that some big powerful telly people are thinking of basing a sitcom on her Truth Cookie series!

These things usually take tiiiiiiiiiiime. So let's all cross our legs and fingers and wish upon stars that it will happen. Soon!

The Cool Company of Comics People

The DFC comic book had me worried at first.

First of all, the name - if the C in DFC means comic, then we all have to stop and think before saying DFC comic. DF Comic? DFC Book?

Second, the first few issues were met with a resounding silence in my household. The kids didn't seem to notice, merely grunting when I pointed out my friend Sarah McIntyre's strip, Vern and Lettuce (pictured).

And then, slowly, slowly, the copies piling up next to my bed began to appear in unexpected places. Under the sofa. On the trampoline. In the magazine rack next to the bread flour.

I caught my 17 year old reading it the other day.

"Do you like it?" I asked hopefully.

"I don't know," was his reply. "What is it?"

Which makes me think the DFC is probably plugging a very large gap. I grew up in a country where the daily newspapers each had an entire page devoted to the 'funnies' - comic strips - targetted at kids. It was the first page I read in the paper and I spent a lot of time cutting out my favourites. It seems there is no such culture here in England.

Nine-year-olds I prepared earlier reading the DFC

DFC content is probably most age-appropriate to my nine-year-old - which is great because she has become a big fan, snatching every issue from me before I'd even had time to caress the stamp. So last weekend, when London's Cartoon Museum hosted a DFC afternoon, we went for it!

Sarah McIntyre posted great photos of the event on her blog - I was rather embarrassingly one of the more enthusiastic participants, shoving five-year-olds out of the way to get my share of the paper.

I'd been working on an early reader series called 'Evil Baby' so I had a go at drawing the character:

He looks a bit like my nephew, Matthew:

Cartoonist Adam Murphy helped workshoppers create expressions for their characters:

I did my best, but I couldn't quite get Adam's face:

Sarah McIntyre told the kids how she had stumbled upon making comics at art school when she discovered that a lot of her friends were into them. She showed us some exquisite mini comics that she had made and then we made our own. Really cool.

The best thing though was seeing all the awesome kids and their incredible imaginations just whirring away. I sat opposite this fantastically talented boy (right) and two other kids. They just churned out the most wonderful (if rather violent and gory) stuff.

My nine year old invented two characters. Knowman -

And Larry the Pot Guy (a Lemon who lives in a pot):

She said Larry the Pot Guy had a strawberry sidekick.

I couldn't have thought all that up.

Just goes to show what comics can do. Bring it on, DFC!

SCBWI Bologna 2008: Comic Books are not just for Klingon-Speakers

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 blog

The 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!