Drawing Power

COMIC STRIP

The Adventures of Prose Guy

Prose Guy can no longer ignore a growing force in the publishing universe. It's his day of reckoning with graphic novels' ... drawing power!

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"With our daughter," Mouly says, "you could hear the little wheels turning and the light bulb went up and boom, she was reading. With our son, you could hear the wheels turning -- and nothing was happening."

They knew what to do, "which was to keep reading with him and make sure that reading is a pleasure." And they learned that what really held his attention was comics.

Spiegelman read him classics such as "Little Nemo" and "Krazy Kat." Mouly, who speaks French with her kids, read from the wide range of children's comics available in France. "It made me very aware," she says, how much they can be "a magic bullet at that moment." Comics give beginning readers a visual narrative to hold on to, "a thread through the labyrinth" that she thinks is even more important for children who don't have parents reading to them.

There was a supply problem, however.

American comics were now geared almost exclusively toward teens and young adults. "Oddly, as the medium grew," as Mouly and Spiegelman explain in the Toon catalogue they wrote together, "kids got left behind."

The couple's first impulse, in looking to correct this, was not to launch a line of books themselves but to work with an established company. Mouly says she shopped the concept "to every children's book publisher in town." Over and over, she was told: It's a great idea, but it won't work.

Why not?

It seems that an important seesaw hadn't yet tipped.

Bookstores need to know where to put things, Mouly explains. And publishers didn't want cartoon books aimed at beginning readers because "they didn't exist as a section in the store."

'The "Ulysses" of Comics'

Confession time: When I started on this self-education project, I'd barely read any graphic novels. It wasn't that I opposed the things on principle. It was just that -- somewhat snobbishly -- I didn't put them in the same category as real books.

Oh, I'd read "Maus" and been amazed by it. Much later, I read the similarly lauded memoir "Persepolis," by Iranian exile Marjane Satrapi, which vividly personalizes the tragedy of the Iranian revolution. But most graphic novelists remained just names to me, if that.

"I hear you're interviewing Adrian Tomine! You're so lucky!" a younger colleague burst out one day. Lucky indeed. I'd never heard of the guy 24 hours before.