CSBG Archive
Friday With The Focus Group
I haven’t done this in a while, but I do occasionally pass on review copies of the things I get to my 6th-grade cartooning students and ask them what they think of them, and I’ve got a few of those right here.
This time it was prompted by Tom Pomplun at Graphic Classics offering to send along a review copy of their latest offering, Louisa May Alcott.
Louisa May Alcott features an adaptation of “Little Women” by Trina Robbins and Anne Timmons, and also presents lesser-known Alcott stories including the gothic mystery “A Whisper in the Dark” by Antonella Caputo and Arnold Arre, “Lost in a Pyramid” by Alex Burrows and Pedro Lopez, and “The Rival Prima Donnas” by Rod Lott and Molly Crabapple. Plus “Buzz” by Mary Fleener, “The Piggy Girl” by Shary Flenniken, and poems illustrated by Toni Pawlowsky and Lisa K. Weber.
On the whole, I really approve of the Graphic Classics line, I think they’re doing nice work there. (Given a book front-loaded with talent like Trina Robbins, Mary Fleener, and Shary Flenniken, it’s hard to go wrong.) Certainly, the old Classics Illustrated comics of my youth were gateway books for me to stories I never would have bothered with otherwise.
MOBY DICK. From the original Classics Illustrated series, which I first read in a doctor's office back in 1968.
But I’m also aware that I’m not really the target audience, and as a teacher I’m always curious what the kids think of books like this. So I offered Louisa May Alcott to my 6th-grade girls, explaining that it was a review copy and anyone who wanted to write a review was welcome to it.
Rahel took me up on it.
Here's Rahel with her entry for the Seattle Neighborhoods card contest. I turned the class loose on that as an art project a couple of weeks ago.(And yes, before anyone mentions it, we corrected the typo.)
Here is what she had to say.
The first story, Little Women, was very touching. The pictures are just amazing. This story is good for the holiday of Christmas. I bet this story would be good for young women — drama, laughter, feeling and so much more! The second story, Whisper In The Dark, didn’t stick out as much as the first but that’s just because it’s a different kind of story. The images were very detailed and it was very dramatic, especially the ending. The rest of the book was just as amazing as the first and second story. I think this book is just wonderful for young women.
There you have it. I was struck by the fact that Rahel had never heard of Louisa May Alcott or Little Women, there’s a huge culture gap between the life Rahel lives and the lives of Jo and her Victorian posse, and yet the story still worked for her. So I’d call that a successful adaptation.
I got a lot of complaints about only offering Louisa May Alcott to the girls, so I agreed to bring in some other review copies for the kids to look at. (Understand, the boys had zero interest in Little Women, they just thought they should have a shot at some swag too.) The agreement is always that if they write me a real review, at least a page, then they can keep the book. I figure they deserve at least the same deal as any other reviewer gets.
Almost all the review copies we get here at CBR are digital, usually in the form of a PDF file. Nevertheless, fair is fair, so I decided to run a couple of bound photocopies of books I thought the kids might be interested in seeing.
I thought an obvious choice was Mark Waid and Marcio Takara’s The Incredibles: Family Matters, from Boom Studios.
Surprisingly — dare I say “incredibly”? — the kids were largely indifferent to this one. They were interested at first, but their idea of an Incredibles sequel is one on the screen. The question I kept getting was an excited, “Is there going to be another Incredibles movie?” and when I told them no, this book was the sequel, their interest waned. The kids that actually read it seemed to enjoy it a great deal, but only Jai’el wrote up a review. There are spoilers, for those who are concerned about those things.
Here's Jai'el. Wondering why I have my camera out.
Hare are her thoughts:
I thought the story was really really good because of the quality of the pictures. I could really see the feeling of Jill’s family, finding out she was a villain. I thought the story was written with a lot of quality and feeling put into it. I especially thought the end was really really good, how Violet’s boyfriend told her she was worth it. I had one question, if the mom was evil why wasn’t the whole family evil, or both parents at least? Wouldn’t they have to be evil together? But it was good.
I admit I was moved by Jai’el’s easy assumption that families always confide their evil doings to one another. Clearly she never met any of my relatives.
But the book that was the clear runaway hit, that got passed around so eagerly that an actual fight almost broke out over who got to keep it — and remember, this is just the review photocopy version — was Mr. Stuffins. Another one from Boom!, written by Andrew Cosby and Johanna Stokes with art from Axel Medellin.
My students just couldn’t get enough of Mr. Stuffins. Listening to the kids trying to excitedly explain what it was to the kids who hadn’t read it yet was almost more fun than the book itself.
Jai'el is trying to explain Mr. Stuffins to Raul and Gus.
“It’s a teddy bear who thinks he’s a spy, and he can do kung fu and stuff, and he’s got to save this little boy… it’s awesome, you all have to read this, it should totally be a movie!” That was Jai’el trying to put across to the boys what the book was about.
It was the only book that more than one student wanted to do a review on. Emma got it first.
Emma with her Neighborhood Appreciation entry. Since the city isn't returning the art, I made it a point to get shots of the kids with their entries.
Here is Emma’s assessment of Mr. Stuffins – If you get the chance to read Mr. Stuffins, read it!! The plot is great and the characters are well thought up. I liked everything except the song (“A is for Apple”…) is annoying. Overall it is amazing!!
And Rahel also wanted to write it up. She adds: I love this story!! the teddy bear looks hardcore but cute. The beginning was so dramatic and amazing and so is all the rest of the story!! Mr. Stuffins is all fuzzy and cute but he’s a good agent too, I really loved this, I could read it over and over again. Good story!!
So there you have it. The clear front-runner. If you are wondering what to get for the imaginative sixth-grader in your life who likes to read, look no further. Seriously, I don’t think I’ve ever seen so many kids in my class agree on the coolness of a comic this side of Naruto. But Mr. Stuffins won over all of them.
Anyway, that’s it for this lot. Thanks to Tom Pomplun at Graphic Classics and Chip Mosher at Boom! for sending along the review copies; I really do appreciate it and it makes for a fun extra-credit class thing, I know my students enjoy it.
Rahel checks out The Incredibles. She enjoyed it, but decided writing two reviews was enough for one day.
So for any other comics publishers out there who might be wondering what young people are interested in reading, my class wants you to know that they are “totally up for doing more reviews!”
And everyone else, I’ll see you next week.
16 Comments
Thok
December 11, 2009 at 4:34 pm
Huh. I’m sort of curious what your kids would have thought of Landridge’s Muppet stuff, but you probably didn’t have a review copy of those issues.
Greg Hatcher
December 11, 2009 at 4:40 pm
I can get one. In fact Julie has a real, non-review copy around here somewhere that she bought at ECCC last year for herself. My gut hunch is that my students would probably snoot it as ‘kid stuff,’ but you never know.
sterg
December 11, 2009 at 4:43 pm
It’d be cool to see what they’d have to say about those “New Look” Archie comics.
Whatever they read, I think the student reviews would be way cool to read!
Lavina
December 11, 2009 at 5:33 pm
It amazes me the difference between the children in school now, and those that were in school only a generation ago. It’s also saddening to think them unaware or disinterested in the greater classics.
MarkAndrew
December 11, 2009 at 6:53 pm
Well, you guys just sold me on Mr. Stuffins.
Dave
December 11, 2009 at 9:15 pm
“It’s also saddening to think them unaware or disinterested in the greater classics.”
I was in school a generation (or two) ago, and I can say with some authority that in sixth grade, we hated the greater classics, too. Since I teach literature classes now, I can also say that a quick review of the cultural authorities’ personal writings reveals that this trend goes back to about the advent of the written word. Some of us do get over it, but honestly, I doubt things have really changed as much as people imagine they have.
bad_trotsky
December 11, 2009 at 10:48 pm
Hahaha not surprized they liked Mr.Stuffins if the comic is any good at all. Its a super spy cute teddy bear! I had read about the comic but had not realized how cool it would be for younger readers. You win this one Hatcher, but this is not over.
Edo Bosnar
December 12, 2009 at 1:18 am
Yep, I’m rather curious about Mr. Stuffins now, too. And I love these review features – damn, Greg, you have a great job!
As for kids and “the classics”, personally comics and then pulpy SF and fantasy novels were my gateway to more ‘serious’ literature – I was reading Twain, Steinbeck and similar stuff long before most of my peers. My impression is that this has always been the trend with the so-called ‘geeky’ kids who are really into comics, SF, computers, etc.
Sijo
December 12, 2009 at 7:16 am
Why is it that everything called a ‘Classic” is automatically deemed worth reading? It’s just not true. In my high school days, I had to read novels for both my Spanish and English classes… and I found I enjoyed reading the ones in English (Twain, Dickens) MUCH more than the ones from Latino America. Of course that may have been because Latino writers went trough a period called “Naturalism” where they were obsessed with showing the world in all its stark grittiness, though I suspect they were just sharing their pessimism. Reading those books was TORTURE. What’s the fun of watching characters suffer straight from start to finish? Of course that also applies to some writers in other languages, and Spanish certainly has its more positive masterpieces, but my Spanish class left us assuming that life really sucked in our countries.
Speaking of being positive, once more, thanks for sharing your experiences with us, Greg… your columns never fail to cheer me up. It is definitely my favorite CBR column.
Greg Hatcher
December 12, 2009 at 12:03 pm
Well, in fairness, I think that’s what the word means. But I get what you’re saying. I’ve never understood the appeal of any number of ‘classic’ writers… and several of the authors regarded as greats today were derided as junk when they were current.
But that wasn’t actually my point about Rahel. The thing that struck me was that she’d never heard of Little Women. But she was completely open to checking it out, because it was a comic.
That is, I think, the great gift of Classics Illustrated and all those similar efforts that came after, all the way up through to Graphic Classics. My experience as a kid, and the one I saw mirrored in Rahel, was that it wasn’t so much about getting educated about “classics” as it was getting a leg up on a “hard” book. Back when I was in elementary and junior high school, I looked upon a great many classic works with much less hostility than my schoolmates because I’d already encountered them as comics. I put up Moby Dick as one example of that — another was Hamlet, a Classics Illustrated comic that I just purely enjoyed the hell out of when I was ten because of all the swordfights and so on. One of the barriers between kids and literature is simply the culture clash of prose styles. Just off the top of my head, I remember Frankenstein, The Swiss Family Robinson, and Treasure Island as being a pretty hard slog when I was in fourth grade, and those were books I really wanted to read because of the adventure content. But I had to work at it.
Seeing a comics version first can really help a kid find that willingness to make the leap, to get over the hurdle of, say, ornate Victorian-style prose that might otherwise put him off trying a book. I’m not suggesting the comics are a substitute for the real thing. But they’re a gateway. I bet if Rahel ran across a Louisa May Alcott book in the future she’d be a little more likely to check it out because she enjoyed the comics.
Brian D.
December 12, 2009 at 1:54 pm
Greg, let me add my voice to the chorus of “thank yous” here– on a site that has so many great writers, yours really are my favorites, and these student reviews are fantastic. And thanks for turning me on to MR. STUFFINS– just added to my pull list!
Peter Woodhouse
December 12, 2009 at 2:49 pm
@Sijo: “(Latino America… writers went trough a period called “Naturalism” where they were obsessed with showing the world in all its stark grittiness, though I suspect they were just sharing their pessimism. ”
So they already had their Watchmen and DKR way before comics did? Go figure…
The name’s Stubbins, Mr Stubbins… I hope his enemies come to a grizzly end (ouch, sorry about that!). OK, you’ve sold me. Great article on a great website.
Peter Woodhouse
December 12, 2009 at 2:50 pm
Sorry that should be ‘Stuffins, Mr Stuffins’. Doh! School report: Must do better, see me…
Mary Warner
December 12, 2009 at 11:21 pm
So how do they squeeze all of Little Women into one volume along with several other stories? Is this a thick hardcover or something? Little Women is a pretty thick book (it was published in two volumes originally), and there’s a lot that happens in it. I afraid they must’ve chopped the story up really badly. (Which was a problem with those old Classics Illustrated stories. I read a few that were printed in small black & white paperbacks when I was a kid, and they really compressed some of the stories.)
Lavina
December 13, 2009 at 10:56 am
@Dave: I don’t know. I came from several schools wherein at least half the class had a liking for the classics and could converse intelligently on most books. Then again, those schools weren’t in America so I don’t have perspective on the trend here.
—
QR
Carlos Futino
December 14, 2009 at 4:57 am
@Greg Hacther
While I see that books like Classics Illustrated can bring kids like Rahel to know the classics, I’ve always thoguht they don’t get them to actaully read the classics. Reading a comic book adaptation (or watching ta movie adaptation, for that matter) just isn’t the same. I think these comics should be constructed as a way to bring kids to the original books (I have no idea how this could be achieved, I just think is something publishers should have in mind).