Art Spiegelman turns his talent to young readers
Defender of the graphic novel now creating reading primers
Last Updated: Tuesday, December 2, 2008 | 6:03 PM ET
CBC News
Jack and the Box by Art Spiegelman uses graphic storytelling to develop a love of reading in young people. (Toon Books)Art Spiegelman, who moved the graphic novel into adult territory with his Pulitzer Prize-winning comic Maus, has set out to generate more respect for the comic form for young readers.
He is creating a series of books he refers to as primers for readers age five or six who are just learning to decode language.
Jack and the Box, a book just released by his wife Francoise Mouly's publishing imprint Toon Books, is the latest in the series.
"Now I'd actually like to shine a flashlight on the really engaging deep literature for kids which can happen in comics," Spiegelman told CBC's cultural affairs show Q.
He believes the simple primers that start with "See Dick run" bore children and underestimate their intelligence.
"It's a matter of thinking that kids, because they're not experienced in the world, they're somehow stupid. It's a Victorian notion that their minds are innocent, and they are, but they're also hungry," he said.
Jack and the Box is the story of an unpredictable and rather scary toy. It looks like a picture book, but it's not aimed at three year olds, Spiegelman said.
"The goal is not teaching the [younger] kid who is just learning the notion of up and the notion of down… it's for the kid who has to look at these arbitrary squiggles from left to right and turn them into language and learn to enjoy what a book is," he said.
"Comics, by acting out and showing you things that happen from moment to moment — even more than a picture book, having the text be the dialogue, so it's not a repetition of the picture but carrying more information — invites one into reading," he said.
Spiegelman has been a champion of the comic, creating underground comics in the 1970s, the anthology Raw in the 1980s and the Pulitzer Prize-winner Maus, the story of his family's survival of the Holocaust, in graphic novel form in the 1990s.
He's done work for children right down the line, from his Garbage Pail Kids comics for a gum company to the well-regarded Little Lit series he did with his wife. Spiegelman said he always knew that comics were turning kids into readers and lovers of literature.
"That turned into wanting to give back the real pleasures of what I think were the greatest accomplishments of children's literature in the last century, which were comic books for kids," he said.
"They were the most sophisticated and rich kid's literature, but kind of got cast in the same shadowy danger zone as other comics by people who refer to all comics as junk literature."
