By David Melling

Hodder Children’s Books

There’s a blurry borderline between some picture books and comics. And it’s one that’s blurring more and more as both genres find new ways to tell stories and as more and more publishers in the book field embrace comics as a way of delivering a story.

Picture Book This is a little look into this world.

Initially I’d planned to use the big picture book library we have at the primary school I work at for a lot of these picture book posts. (See this post for the immense generosity that enabled us to get out picture book library). But this week I forgot to bring a book home from the school.

So I’ve had to raid Molly’s bookshelf. She may have grown up past picture books right now, but we’ve got a whole shelf of favourites from her younger days – special books we hope she’ll pass on to her own children.

The Kiss That Missed isn’t a comic style picture book at all, but it is quite delightful and David Melling’s illustrations are as cartoony as you get. An absolutely perfect read aloud book – and more than that, it’s funny.

The first time we read it, we loved the pictures, loved the simple idea of a King, too busy to find the time to read a bedtime story and give the little prince a goodnight kiss. But…..

The kiss goes missing, and the King dispatches his bravest, most fearless knight to recover it. Through dark forests, facing packs of hungry wolves (with dribbly mouths), bears (with long claws and growly roars), and even a dragon (with “this lot would be nice for breakfast” eyes).

But the knight’s not that brave, not all that fearless and not the most competent either:

Which is where the book gets very playful – it takes a silly gag and keeps going with it, putting the knight into more and more ridiculously funny situations. There are lovely visual gags all the way through, playful language on every page. But the very best bit, the bit that made us all love the book, still makes us laugh every time we read this, is this:

…. turn the page…. tension builds …. what is the terrible secret of the forest?

And that’s a perfect way to leave it. Put the right voice on and that page transition just had/has Molly giggling away in knowing expectation. And the brilliance of the line and the sweetness of the memory has me smiling every time I think of it.

The Kiss That Missed is one to keep.

By Theo and Michael Dudok De Wit

Collins

There’s a blurry borderline between some picture books and comics. And it’s one that’s blurring more and more as both genres (stupid, stupid, stupid me. Comics aren’t a genre. Nor are picture books.) find new ways to tell stories and as more and more publishers in the book field embrace comics as a way of delivering a story.

Picture Book This is a little look into this world.

Oscar And Hoo has a really lovely European comic feel to it. It starts with the album size of the book and continues with the art – big pages, a lovely ligne claire meets Bill Watterson style. It’s pages are a mixture of beautiful full page pictures, proper comic pages and something in between. But every page, every single page is quite lovely. A real mix of the picture book and comic mediums, even the thick borders around those full pages have a comic panel feel about them.

The whole thing starts magnificently – in best Home Alone style little Oscar is swept along in his parent’s frantic rush to get ready for their holidays:

And poor Oscar is prone to daydreaming, which means that inevitably, little Oscar turns around to find he’s suddenly all alone. Poor little thing goes, quite understandably, a little frantic:

This voice turns out to be his only friend whilst lost in the desert, his only hope of getting back to safety. It’s Hoo, a fragile little cloud, equally lost and alone:

The whimsical, heart-wrenching tale of their trek through the desert to find Oscar’s parents and to find Hoo a home is one that may well bring a teear to your eye. It does with me. It’s a great book to read aloud with little ones, but also a treat on the eyes for older children and grown ups alike.

Oscar And Hoo is a delightful, lovely book. There’s a second book; Oscar And Hoo Forever – just as lovely, just as sweet, just as beautiful.

“The issue for me boils down to this – just because your audience is children, doesn’t mean they’ll accept any old crap. Some comics are written solely to keep kids happy – they set up, they hit with a punchline, they tell you to come back next week. In between there are mildly diverting shapes and colours, but in the end it’s a one-sentence joke dragged across a page as if it were roadkill spelling out BORING with its entrails. The artist isn’t taking this opportunity to embrace the gloriously surreal, the rich silly heritage of cartoons, the irreverence of their characters. They’re assuming the audience are idiots.

They’re patronising them.”

He’s quite right, of course – as a writer or artist, treating your reader with a lack of respect is the disastrous road of the lazy hack, be they writing for adults or children. And anyone who’s worked in children’s publishing or bookselling knows that in fact kids are often far more demanding than adult readers, more openly critical and more honest about what they want and what they enjoy reading. Which actually means that a lot of the time working in kid’s books, prose or illustrated, can be an even harder slog than writing for adults. It’s a bit like the way good comedy is often perceived as being ‘easier’ than creating good drama, when actually it is the former that requires even more thought and commitment; ditto books for kids.  And with kids you also have the added responsibility of engaging a restless young mind with the magic of reading – put them off at a young age with bad books and chances are we see another kid who will grow up rarely looking at books, a whole universe largely ignored by them.

(Jamie’s take on Desperate Dan for the Dandy, by Jamie Smart, Dan is (c) DC Thomson)

Jamie again: “Children want original ideas as much as adults, more so! They want their imaginations filled, enriched and provoked. They want to be swept away and carried along, they want characters, beauty, humour and story. This is why the rich intertwining darkness of Harry Potter caught everyone by the curlies, or the loveable Spongebob ended up in everyone’s home. They weren’t made to keep children distracted, they were grown from seeds and given the right space to grow.

I think this is important. And I tell anyone who asks. You want to create things, you do it for yourself. And from yourself. You build your own little world up, and you get lost inside it, until you and it are almost the same. Your characters are part of you. You don’t write them, they talk for themselves.”

Okay, I will stop quoting Jamie here because you should go over and read his whole blog post – it is relevant to any writer or artist and also of interest to parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers too, I think. And I appreciate the fact that Jamie, rather than simply tear into the lazy cartoonist whose work so provoked his ire, has taken a very mature and reasoned approach to this whole debate rather than simply having a go at certain creators, it’s a positive, constructive piece and you should go and read it.

(Sarah with the Vern and Lettuce collection at the Edinburgh International Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Cartoonist and illustrator Sarah McIntyre first came to my attention via her Vern and Lettuce strips in The DFC. Since then, I’ve been following her work both online and in print. She’s a fantastic artist whose mini-comics never fail to make me smile. In this interview (cross posted with Down The Tubes), Sarah talks about her art education, the links between comics and picture books, and why she sees a healthy future for the British comics scene.

MB: Are you a formally trained or self-taught artist?

SMc: A bit of both, really. A very kind art teacher give me after-school oil painting classes, starting when I was five. I spent the next six years mostly painting kittens, puppies and rather tedious landscapes, but it made me love mucking in with paint. My high school art teacher was also great in that she didn’t make me follow the class assignments, just let me set my own projects and get on with them, even if I had to stay through lunch break or after school. I took a few oil painting classes from a wonderful and slightly dotty Hungarian woman who collected filing cabinets full of dead crows that had been run over on the road in front of her shop, so we could draw them.

(‘Dear Diary’ mini comic showing a teenage Sarah with her dotty Hungarian art teacher, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I didn’t think I could earn any money doing fine art, so I studied Russian at university. But in the States, we have this great option of completing a ‘minor degree’, which is half a regular degree, so I did my minor in History of Art. And the professors there let me fudge the requirements a bit so a lot of that time was spent drawing life models in the art studio instead of memorising slides. Before my last year of university, I spent two years in Moscow, running around its galleries and museums, teaching myself a lot about Russian painting and its arts and crafts movement at the end of the 18th, beginning of the 19th century. Until I realised I couldn’t live on the pay of three dollars an hour, I worked in the Moscow branch of Shakespeare & Co bookshop, and we hosted these marvellous arts evenings where I got to meet loads of fascinating painters, sculptors, writers and poets, and occasionally I’d get to see their studios.

I spent several years working as an illustrator, just taking a few evening classes here and there. My favourite short course leader was Elizabeth Harbour, who set loads of brilliant little book projects, similar to the kinds of things you see at small press fairs now. She’s the one who got me set on the path to making full books, not just drawings. About five years after moving to London, I enrolled at Camberwell College of the Arts to do my Master’s degree. I was lucky, it was the first year Janet Woolley began leading the course, and it was still small, only 14 students. (I think it’s over 50 now) Jan combined being a total powerhouse with being quite mumsy; she really cared about the people on her course and looked after us at the same time as pushing us hard and being utterly frank with us. What I didn’t learn on that course, I was able to pick up from the Association of Illustrator’s Business Start-up classes and seminars led by the Society of Children’s Book Writers & Illustrators. And Ellen Lindner on my course started me off learning about comics, pointing me to the kind of comics I actually liked, not the kind I’d seen when I walked into mainstream comic book shops.

(early comic made in art college, in response to reading ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull, by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

I think it wouldn’t have been too difficult to slide through the course without doing much; I tried to come up with at least one piece of artwork every day and I think that decision made all the difference. I only felt I’d made my first real breakthrough about a week before the final show. Jan and the Graphic Design leader actually let me set up a second, separate show in the hallway because my work had changed so dramatically between the stuff I’d carefully printed up for the exhibition and the artwork and comics I’d been doing in the meantime.

MB: So when did you actually start making comics?

SMc: When I was about eight years old, I used to make a magazine called ‘Family Favorite’ and leave it on my neighbours’ doorstep, ring the bell and run away. I think the first comics I ever made were for that magazine, and they were copied, possibly even traced, from Archie comics. But all the comics I ever read in the Seattle Times or Archie seemed to have funny punch lines, and I didn’t think I would ever be able to do that. And I read a few of my mother’s stashed-away story comics (Jack London’s ‘White Fang’, a couple fairy tales) but they were so old and brittle that I didn’t think people still made them. I didn’t even connect them as a storytelling medium with the funnies in the newspaper. In fact, the linework and colours looked so polished to me that I never even thought about real, live people making them at all. Maybe I thought they grew on trees or something.

I think my first comic was a little book I made for my dad for his birthday, telling his life story from my point of view. It was more of an illustrated book that a comic, but if would have fit in with minis you see at small press fairs. My first comic I made at art college was a double-page spread about some yobs throwing a beer can into the Thames and then the river bursting its banks to take revenge on everyone. Ellen gave me some good tips on it and it made me start thinking more seriously about making comics. I read a book called ‘On Sight and Insight’ by John Hull about the experience of blindness and thought I’d write a graphic novel with a character in a soundscape environment, simulating blindness, but in a visual way, using typographical artwork. That subject was WAY too big for me at the time and I had to shelve it. I made a couple travel minis and took part in an online comics jam with some people on LiveJournal. Then the opportunity came up and I cheekily promised David Fickling I could do a page a week of comics for the DFC. I practically had my fingers crossed behind my back when he asked me if I could do it; I had absolutely no idea if I could, and I sweated bullets. But I approached Vern and Lettuce like a children’s book, just drawn within panels instead of pages, and the editor didn’t ask me to stop, so I figured it must be okay. I was overwhelmed when people started telling me they liked it.

MB: What did producing Vern and Lettuce, a weekly comic, teach you in terms of making comics and also the business, deadline, discipline side of being a comic artist?

SMc: I was already used to deadlines and discipline from making picture books, although I still had a lot to learn about the business side of things. When I started with David Fickling, I was approached by one of the best agents in the business and she’s made my work phenomenally less stressful.

In terms of making comics, I’d never submitted more than a few single illustrations in digital form, and I still had a lot to learn about Photoshop. I still only really know what I need to know, but I try to keep things simple by sticking as closely as possible to the methods of traditional printmaking. For Vern and Lettuce, I tried to think of the layers in Photoshop as the layers in a screen print, one layer per colour. I hate the overly slick, airbrushed effects and gradients so many people rely on in Photoshop; it often it makes beautiful linework look like cheap pizza flyers, or makes everything look muddy. But I love the imperfect, slightly textured look of hand painted signs, and I saw some gorgeous revolutionary posters in Moscow in places like the Mayakovsky Museum. They owe a lot of their visual power to the fact that the painters didn’t have many colours of paint, they just made do with two or three tins. With Photoshop, I can access millions of colours, but if I just stick to a few, my work looks so much better. There’s a lot of experimentation in Vern and Lettuce with this; I was very strict with myself in the first few pages, then I started to introduce more and more colours until about episode twelve, when I got frustrated and reined in my colour palette again.

Writing was also difficult, the relentless pace of the weekly deadline. In the beginning I had a few weeks to play with, but then I took a holiday and after that, I was finishing bang on the day the strip was due for print. There’s this tricky thing, just like in picture books, where there’s supposed to be a sort of ‘flip’ at the end of the story. It can be a joke, but it doesn’t even have to be funny, just something to give the strip closure and make the reader look at things a bit differently. A lot of the other DFC people I talked to started their stories with this end point in mind, but I never did. My way of working was just to put Vern and Lettuce into a situation and see where they went. They’re so real to me that I can hear exactly what they’d say to each other. And sometimes they defied tight little endings, they still weren’t very domesticated animals. A few times they got me into a real panic and I’d ring up my DFC colleague Woodrow Phoenix, who lives nearby. He would patiently look at where my strip had gone and then walk me through to the end of it. It’s been the same working in a studio with Gary Northfield; it’s shown me that endings aren’t magic, that much of the job just requires focusing and taking things to their logical conclusion, and then one step beyond. I think it’s the ‘one step beyond’ that looks like magic to the rest of us. (I think DFC artists James Turner and Jamie Smart live in the land of one step beyond.)

(Airship, a comics jam with David O’Connell)

Doing comics jams with David O’Connell also helped me get my writing out of terrible ruts. In a comics jam, I can’t get pig headed about where a strip is going; when I hand the next page over to Dave, he always takes it in a direction I would never have dreamed up. When I get his page and start on the next one, it’s almost like a completely fresh story. That really helped show me that there’s never one solution to telling a tale, the permutations are infinite, and when I’m stuck, instead of blundering on with something dull, I can step back and send the story flying in a completely different direction. And writing with friends makes things more fun. Vern and Lettuce were great to me that way, in introducing me to so many amazing comics friends who know how to combine hard work with being a bit silly.

MB: Can you give me a couple of examples of ‘flips’ from your own work?

SMc: Well, things such as the raisins in Vern’s cake ingredients, which turn out to be something much less palatable (see below). Or the little stowaway moles that parade out of the airship, just as Vern thinks he’s going to get some peace in his park keeper job.

MB: You make comics and picture books. What’s the difference between the two? Is there a difference? Is any distinction arbitrary, they are, after all, both collisions of text and art? What do picture books do well that comics don’t and vice versa?

SMc: This is a huge subject, I can do long workshops on the answer to this, and it needs me to show lots of visual examples. But I was amazed with The DFC, at how smoothly I could transition from picture books to comics. In the old days, a lot of picture books had very simple formats: a picture, possibly in a box, with text underneath. But there’s more of a move to vary formats in picture books now, and make the text intertwine and work with the pictures. I’ve always liked doing this, and never wanted to leave it solely to the book’s designer. Often in picture books, you’ll see several small images on a page, which picture book editors would call ‘vignettes’, and comics people would call ‘panels’. Many picture book people (Russell Ayto, Mo Willems, Posy Simmonds, Raymond Briggs, Satoshi Kitamura, loads of others) have been using comics formats for years, even if they wouldn’t have called it that, or wanted you to call it that. I remember the surprise of learning that Maurice Sendak’s 1970 book, In the Night Kitchen, was a direct tribute to Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo in Slumberland. I always knew it as a picture book, but of course, it’s a comic, too, and a love letter to comics.

I don’t think there has to be any boundaries between picture books and comics. I think they can flow into each other entirely seamlessly, and keep people developing their visual literacy well after they’ve moved on from reading only children’s books. And it lends added sophistication to children’s books, when kids can read a book that’s slightly above their level without it being a huge break from picture books to text-only novels. I think this merging needs two things to happen: Editors need to overcome their prejudices against books looking too much like comics, or ‘cartoony’ (a damning adjective in an editor’s office). And I think this is happening, as they realise there’s a market, and librarians go nuts trying to get their hands on these books that ‘reluctant readers’ will pick up. (You can see this happening with picture book publishers such as David Fickling with his DFC Library, Walker Books, a bit with Templar; and even more so in the USA with Toon Books, Scholastic Inc and others.) Some editors are starting to warm up to speech bubbles, as a clear and vibrant way of showing who’s talking on a page. Children’s magazines such as Okido and Anorak are just getting on with it and making lovely non-traditional, kid-friendly comics. And some publishers are tentatively starting to experiment with publishing adult picture books, such as those by Audrey Niffenegger (although she had to prove herself first with a text-only novel).

It’s essential that comic fans do their best to let people know about the new books they love, so we’ll get a chance to see more of them. Write reviews, blog about them, make as much noise as you can.

(Vern and Lettuce, from pencils – above – to inks – below – and then the final coloured page – lower image, all by and (c) Sarah McIntyre)

The second thing is that comic creators need to go visit the children’s book sections in shops, see what’s happening right now in publishing, and accept that some stories can be told without having to rely on sexual clichés, excessive violence or bad language, and that it doesn’t make them a wimp for writing these kinds of stories. (I keep hearing comics people saying ‘I’ve got this amazing character, who fights THIS character, it’ll be awesome!’ And that’s their whole story.) I think sometimes people switch into a different mode when they’re writing for children, they get very patronising, clichéd, or even boring (because their adult comics rely on sex or cheap shock tactics and they suddenly can’t use them). Or they over-egg the pages with so many high-impact graphics that there’s no resting time for the eyes and it’s hard to read. There’s nothing wrong with a comic that has a single panel on a page. I think simpler formats with less panels may be a way forward for making comics for children. Reflections of a Solitary Hamster does this well: sometimes a single panel, sometimes two, three or four panels, but the large pages have plenty of breathing space.

Kids like clear stories with solid plot lines and well-developed characters they can relate to. I believe, if you can write an excellent story for children, adults will like it just as much as the children. I think it was Philip Pullman who said something about the difference between kids books and adult books: that adults remember what it was like to be kids and can relate to the experience, but kids have no idea what it’s like to be adult yet, even though they wish they could. So you need to keep that in mind if you’re writing about adult characters or including adult conversations in a children’s book, don’t talk over their heads. You can have more than one story going on a page at the same time, but the simplest story always needs to be the best one, don’t neglect it for subtext.

In terms of format, picture books tend to be shorter, full-colour, and better paid for the amount of work put into them. You might earn as much for a 32-page picture book as a 200-page graphic novel. Which means the picture book editors will scrutinise each page in much more depth. As comics get more popular (and I don’t doubt that they will), hopefully publishers will raise their payments for comics, but it may take the best comic creators getting good agents, or really learning hard negotiation tactics before this happens.

MB: What next for Sarah McIntyre?

SMc: A week after Vern and Lettuce comes out, I’m launching another picture book with the writer Anne Cottringer, called When Titus Took the Train. (You might recognise one of Anne’s other books, Eliot Jones, Midnight Superhero.) The editor and designer said they really wanted me to illustrate it because of my ‘comic sensibilities’. I originally thought they wanted it in comics format, but it’s more of a straightforward picture book. But there are bits of comics creeping in from all sides. Woodrow lent me some of his Western comics, such as Bat Lash, Buffalo Bill and Johnny Thunder so I could get into the wild frontier swing of things. The story’s about a kid named Titus who goes by himself on a big train journey, which gets more and more fantastical, so it’s not entirely clear what’s really happening and what he’s imagining. Bandits, white water canoeing, a T-Rex… actually, Gary helped me with the dinosaur because mine wasn’t looking nuts enough. I thrust a post-it note across the studio at him and begged, ‘Gary, please please will you draw me a T-Rex?’ He scribbled something in two seconds that was just PERFECT. So you might notice that my dinosaur looks an awful lot like Gary’s Derek the Sheep. (I call him Derek the Dinosaur. It’s one of my favourite spreads.)

(Gary Northfield lends a hand with some dino-design! This is the sort of thing that happens at the Fleece Station and, below, a spread from Titus Takes the Train which borrowed from it)

MB: Who would you like to big up, comics-wise, on both the small press and the pro’ scene?

SMc: I’m constantly amazed by the pictures Warwick Johnson Cadwell keeps making. Such amazing line work and colouring, and he looks every part the boat captain that he is. (I’m a bit smitten with him, can’t you tell?) He contributed to the first Birdsong anthology, and I’m also keenly watching the work of another contributor (and one of its editors), Will Kirkby. He also has gorgeous line work, and I’m hoping he takes his more epic, Japanese influenced tales and turns them back to his hometown in Sheffield to tell more personal stories. (But that’s just me, we’ll have to see where he goes.) Darryl Cunningham is on a roll after launching his hard-hitting novel Psychiatric Tales. Viviane Schwarz is working on a marvellous sheep comic with Walker Books and she’s posting its progress on her blog. My three studio mates at the Fleece Station, Gary Northfield, Ellen Lindner and Lauren O’Farrell all have amazing projects up their sleeves at the moment and we all joined together because we get so excited about each other’s stuff. We all work in slightly different areas, and I think some great thing are going to happen in the places where our creations cross over. And the DFC Library crew are making magic, I’m so excited by the books they’re putting out.

I think Nikki Gamble, who heads the Write Away website and huge picture book review database, is very hot on comics for children and teenagers, and sharing them across the country with teachers and librarians. So I’m hoping we’ll get a lot more comics in front of kids with the help of people like her, Paul Gravett and others, and the industry in Britain will make even more business sense to publishers and booksellers and really take flight.

(Sarah sketching in and signing one of her books at the recent Edinburgh Book Festival, pic from Joe’s Flickr)

Sarah’s Vern and Lettuce is published next week by David Fickling and you can follow her Live Journal for regular updates on her work, events and  plenty of lovely sketches; Sarah will be at the Wigtown Book Festival on Saturday 25th at 10am and on the same day there is one of her Morris the Mankiest Monster original pieces being auctioned for the very good cause of the Facing Africa charity, you can bid in person or online here. Matthew posts thoughts on his Citizen Badham blog and the brand new issue of Comic Book Heroes (from the SFX stable) has a special feature on the British small press comics scene by Matt.

by Nadja Spiegelman and Trade Loeffler

Toon Books

“I wanted to write a story that would have both hugs and bugs— a friendship and gross facts about flies” Nadja Spiegelman in School Library Journal.

Poor Zig – he’s late with his homework and needs to find a pet for the class zoo or his teacher’s going to be calling his parents. Unfortunately for him, his best friend Wikki has been driving the spaceship again and the two friends always get lost when Wikki does the driving.

As luck would have it, the alien pair happen to arrive at a very familiar green and blue planet which has plenty of interesting animals for them to look at and maybe, if they’re not eaten in the process, they might even get to take one of them home for their class zoo – there are flies, frogs and raccoons waiting for them, and Wikki has lots of interesting facts about them all.

(Fun and facts in Zig and Wikki from Toon Books.)

Zig And Wikki is a new Toon Book with a twist; it’s the first non-fiction book they’ve published. So we get to look at a simple food chain and explore the wonder of nature on our own planet with these two extra-terrestrial visitors. There’s just enough science in the little factoids to interest the readers but it’s never allowed to dominate and things are always kept lovely and light.

New writer Nadja Spiegelman (yes, Art and Francoise’s daughter) does a grand job of laying everything out just right, getting the mix of facts and fun just right. And the art by Trade Loeffler is exactly what it needed to be – simple, fresh and fun.

(Perhaps not the best way to catch a frog for their pet zoo. But never mind, it’s fun to watch. From Zig And Wiki, published by Toon Books.)

Zig And Wikki is just as lovely as every Toon Book I’ve seen so far, and the science is simple yet informative, perfect little interesting factoids ideal for the age range.

Just like author Nadja Spiegelman says in the interview – it’s all about bugs and hugs, and that just about describes this lovely little science based graphic novel. It’s absolutely perfect stuff, yet again, from Toon Books. The art of making delightful, simple, yet educational graphic novels aimed squarely at an early reader level is a very hard one, but time after time they get it just right.

Except, for this one moment….. one panel in Zig And Wikki that just stopped me in my tracks, as Zig & Wikki lose the fly they’d been chasing….

It seems bugger is one of those words that really doesn’t mean the same thing over there as it does here. Think of it as a variation on “oh, drat” (See this website for more analysis), but it might have been an idea to edit it out for us foreigners and our children. But even with that little weird linguistic moment, Zig And Wikki is brilliant, wonderful stuff for those first readers and a great first non-fiction graphic novel from Toon Books.

(Sarah with Anthony Browne and a picture of her with Anthony created by one of the local teachers, borrowed from Sarah’s blog)

Okay, normally we don’t cover kid’s picture books, but as several of us are big fans of Sarah’s comics works we couldn’t resist peeking at her work on Morris too and it was fab, making both Richard and my own faves of the year. Well done, Sarah, may your wonderfully gross monster delight more kids with his disgusting antics!

When King Cupcake is kidnapped by hungry aliens, it’s up to his feisty daughter, Princess Spaghetti, to save him from becoming their dinner. She blasts off into space to show those naughty aliens who’s boss – and introduces them to a delicious alternative to people: chocolate! This hilarious romp will delight chocolate lovers everywhere! (From Scholastic’s PR)

There, doesn’t that make you feel better? It’s out in March 2010. Her current book, Morris The Mankiest Monster is still available (and a perfect Christmas present). Meanwhile you really should pop along to Sarah’s blog, which frequently delights and lightens a day.

First up: The latest Panel Borders podcast concludes a month long series of shows on “collectives and anthologies” with Dickon Harris chatting to the Banal Pig pairing of Steve Tillotson and Gareth Brookes about their self published comics whilst Alex Fitch talks to Sarah McIntyre and Viviane Schwartz, who, along with Gary Northfield, share a studio they like to call the Fleece Station. The podcast was first broadcast on Resonance 104.4 FM, streamed at www.resonancefm.com and podcast at Panel Borders.

And whilst on those Fleece Station folks, Sarah McIntyre’s Live Journal has some great news about her Morris The Mankiest Monster book nearly selling out, a book from Oxford University Press and three new projects from David Fickling Books, including two featuring Vern & Lettuce!

And finally, should you want to get all manky over the weekend there are some lovely Morris templates over at the Random House website that should keep your own little monsters quiet for an hour or so. (pdf direct link, web link)

by John Hattis Dunning and Nikhil Singh

Walker Books

“A wonderfully imaginative and stylish piece of work and a perfect example of the adventurous new directions that comic books should be taking in the future.” Alan Moore.

That Alan Moore quote on the back of this children’s book pretty much sums up Salem Brownstone for me – because from the beautiful hardback cover to the Aubrey Beardsley influenced / inspired artwork and the decidedly dark and unsettling story of Salem Brownstone, it’s pretty obvious that this is a children’s book for decidedly grown up and possibly slightly strange children.

This is something for the teen discovering unusual art, dark moods, the work of Aubrey Beardsley, Lovecraft, Gorey, Tim Burton films and Neil Gaiman fantasy characters – indeed the style and especially the characters are very reminiscent of Gaiman – make the characters as weird and unusual as you can – and then back it up with great storytelling.

First impressions here are very, very strong. It’s wrapped in a gorgeous purple flock hardback cover, large enough to feel like a Euro comic album or perhaps some exotic spell book. Flip it open and it’s very different to your normal teen book; great organic font throughout, matching perfectly Singh’s art that wouldn’t be out of place in some 70s underground comix:

(A children’s graphic novel or some bizarre 70s comix work? Look at the lovely detailing – the art-deco, that raised eyebrow. Wow. From Salem Brownstone © 2009 John Harris Dunning and Nikhil Singh)

As you can see from the art on display across this review, it’s a lush, delicious mix of gorgeous clean line work on the figures, all big open white faces and an incredibly detailed background technique that includes art deco / art nouveau stylings, masses of shadow, tons of cross-hatching and much more. Gothic meets 70s Underground. The darkness of the backgrounds merely emphasises the incredible moments throughout the book where Salem’s flights of imagination or moments of magic take him to a pure white backdrop – it’s visually jarring and brilliantly effective stuff.

(Perhaps not what Salem was expecting he’d find in his father’s house – meet Cassandra Contortionist. She wont be the strangest person he meets this night either. From Salem Brownstone © 2009 John Harris Dunning and Nikhil Singh)

The story’s a simple one really – young man discovers his dead, largely absent father had a mysterious other life, goes to investigate and finds himself imperilled – classic teen fiction really. Salem Brownstone, a young man of modest means receives word of his father’s death by telegram that instructs him to take possession of his father’s house and it’s contents – something that will irrevocably change Salem’s young life. Because his father was no ordinary man and within moments of venturing inside the house he discovers his father’s strange tastes in interior décor, his magician’s costume and a strange contortionist girl sitting inside a pentagram with his father’s scrying ball. This is just the start of Salem’s new life – a life filled with surprises and new dangers – as he soon finds out when the mysterious and deadly shadow boys pile in through the windows of the house and he and Cassandra Contortionist are forced to flee to the nearby circus which has had dealings with the Brownstone family before …. it seems his father’s legacy to Salem also includes an unfinished battle with some mystical and deadly force from another world.

And that’s just the first 10 pages or so. It only gets stranger and better from there. The opening half of the book, maybe three quarters of it is just wonderful; strange, dark, intriguing, packed with delicious possibilities and interest, lots of great characters thrown in front of us and the prospect of an epic battle for Salem as he takes his father’s place and continues his fight.

(Salem meets Cassandra. The night gets stranger and stranger. Loving the artwork again – those backgrounds, the detailing, the organic and slightly threatening smoke. More wow from Salem Brownstone © 2009 John Harris Dunning and Nikhil Singh)

But it all slightly falls down in the final quarter and the reason it fails is that the story spends so much time doing all those wonderful things I’ve just described that the ending comes off as a rushed, inconclusive and messy thing. After it did so well to begin with – relaxed, intriguing, full of bizarre little detailing and ever so beautifully illustrated the rush to get to the end is such a let-down. If only the book had another 20 or 30 pages it would have been absolutely wonderfully entertaining and strange stuff. I’m assuming that this is merely the start of a series, but that still doesn’t ease my disappointment at the rushed ending.

In some ways the criticism of the ending is magnified simply because, on the basis of the first 50 or so pages in this 80 page story, this could have been, should have been wonderful. But if I told you that the pacing problem still doesn’t ruin it, just makes me wish they’d had those extra 20, 30 pages to get it absolutely right I hope you get an idea of how very good, how deliciously strange and wonderful Salem Brownstone is. The story may be too short and the pacing may be off, but the characters steal the show, beautifully illustrated by Nikhil Singh and perfect for anyone, child or adult who likes a little bit of strange gothic fantasy in their lives.

Richard Bruton.