Making a Splash in Washington

Earlier this month on the New York Times oped page, Colin H. P. Buckley reveals how politics, a children’s picture book, and compassion mixed as he served an internship in the office of the ailing Sen. Ted Kennedy:

The senator, she explained, had recently written a children’s book called “My Senator and Me.” The book depicts a day in his life from [his dog] Splash’s perspective. Someone — I’m not sure who — suggested including an e-mail address where curious young readers could reach the supposedly computer-savvy Splash.

That’s where I came in. Someone had to reply to Splash’s e-mails, in his voice, lest the children think the dog had let the thrill of being a published author and Washington power broker go to his head. . . .

But beyond Splash’s indiscriminate eating habits and love of tennis balls, he was little more than a furry mystery to me. What would he say in response to the hundreds of e-mails that came to him from children across the country? School simply hadn’t prepared me for this.

Most of his messages went something like this:

Dear Splash,

My teacher read us your book. You are so cute! Can you come over and play with my dog? What kind of dog food do you like? My mom says your senator is a great man. I hope he feels better.

After checking with the senator’s assistants on Splash’s preferred dog food brand, and then reading the book myself to better prepare for my role, I answered every single e-mail, ending each reply with the mandatory “WOOF WOOF!! Splash.”

(My Senator and Me is a “celebrity picture book,” a species unloved by children’s-lit critics and bloggers. It came out in 2006, with illustrations by David Small. According to a reader comment at the Fuse, Small was already working on his graphic memoir Stitches, though he didn’t start final artwork till mid-2008. My Senator and Me, and its celebrity-level royalties, probably helped Small carry out the much larger project of developing and completing Stitches, which will probably now have a longer life in print.)

The Eisner Award Nominations of Oz

Among this year’s nominees for Eisner Awards for excellence in American comics are three with an Oz connection.

Eric Shanower and Skottie Young’s adaptation of L. Frank Baum’s Wonderful Wizard of Oz was nominated for Best Limited Series or Story Arc, and for Best Publication for Kids. Shanower has won two Eisners for his Age of Bronze series, but for Young, judging by his reaction on Twitter, this is an exciting new honor.

Philippe Ghielmetti’s design for the Queer Visitors from the Marvelous Land of Oz collection from Sunday Press was nominated for Best Publication Design [and, the Wonderful Blog of Oz points out, for Best Archival Collection/Project—Strips]. This is a giant-size reissue of the newspaper comic page Baum wrote in the early 1900s, along with a competing series from his former colleague W. W. Denslow.

And, though it’s several steps off the Yellow Brick Road, the magazine Fables received nominations for Best Continuing Series and Best Writer in Bill Willingham. A young magic-worker named Ozma has been appearing in this comic book’s recent storylines.

David Small’s Stitches received nominations for Best Reality-Based Work and Best Writer/Artist–Nonfiction. It’s notable that this book was not nominated as Best Publication for Kids or Best Publication for Teens. Within the comics community, there’s no assumption that the comics form automatically makes a work suitable for younger readers.

Serious Comics and Talking Animals

Matt Phelan’s The Storm in the Barn is showing up on a number of “year’s best” lists, but my feelings on its magical plot machinations match those expressed by Jessica Bruder in the New York Times Book Review:

Jack finds himself face to face with the Storm King, an evil spirit who withheld the rain to win power. . . . Jack finally wins a climactic battle on top of a windmill, and it starts to rain. He’s saved everyone. Unless you go with a possibility suggested earlier in the book: Jack has “dust dementia” and has imagined the whole thing. Either way, the fight doesn’t feel all that redemptive.

Both this book and David Small’s Stitches allude to classic works of Victorian children’s literature, and that’s another way that the latter seems much stronger to me.

In The Storm in the Barn, Jack’s sister reads descriptions of a desert from L. Frank Baum’s Ozma of Oz. As I noted earlier, Phelan found those passages through Wikipedia, and his quotes are anachronistic—the kids’ mother couldn’t find the phrase “Deadly Desert” in that book because it didn’t appear till a later one. That’s just a symptom of how that literary allusion feels nailed on rather than organic to the story.

In contrast, David Small’s use of Alice in Wonderland in Stitches has clearly grown from his own childhood love of that book. Allusions are integrated throughout the story. First he shows himself as a young boy playing as Alice, getting to escape “to a land of talking animals, singing flowers and dancing teapots.”

Later, Alice’s nightmarish shrinking and growing informs one of the adolescent David’s recurring nightmares (shown through stat panels) as he struggles to escape from a confining house.

Finally, the White Rabbit comes on the scene as a therapist who provides the book’s breakthrough—without, of course, ever losing track of the time. It turns out David was in the nonsense world all along. Unlike The Storm in the Barn, Small’s Stitches is about sorting out the real nightmares from the fantastic ones, not mixing them up.

Stitches and Scars

David Small’s Stitches may or may not be “Young People’s Literature,” the category of National Book Award for which it was a finalist. But it certainly deserves that level of critical accolade.

Stitches is an emotionally powerful memoir in comics form of growing up in a difficult family. As many reviews have reported, as an adolescent Small developed a cancer in his neck, quite possibly caused by his radiologist-father’s overly optimistic X-ray treatments for sinus troubles. Removing the cancer cost Small half his vocal cords. More importantly, his parents didn’t tell him about his illness or the extent of the operation beforehand.

But that’s not the more emotionally wrenching part of this memoir. Small’s parents withheld a great deal more. The book starts with the family landscape, and the first chapters are memories from early childhood, seemingly disconnected and almost inconsequential. Gradually the narrative builds into a portrait of a troubled teenager, with scenes from family lore, dreams, cartoons, and real life that seems more baffling than the rest.

The story has several dramatic turning points that coincide gracefully with when the reader turns a page: the discovery of the “growth” on Small’s neck, his discovery of family secrets. But Small works with the graphic form on a more subtle level as well.

For instance, one of those page turns reveals Small’s scar after an operation, a long line of stitches stuck to his neck like a millipede. As dramatic as that full-page image is, I was struck just as hard by the panels on the spreads that follow.

As shown here, suddenly the whole setting is full of arrays of parallel line, mirroring those stitches—his home has become one big scar. The preceding pages, in contrast, were full of misty gray washes, reflecting Small’s post-operative fog.

My mother, who like Small grew up in postwar Detroit, reports that Stitches gets that culture right as well: the giant cars, the cocktail parties, the auto show in the Ford Rotunda. She’s also been sharing the book’s emotional moments with friends who don’t read comics. (That surprised me so much that when Mom reported how one friend had “cried after hearing about Stitches,” I thought she meant the intense knitting marketplace.)

“Mr. Small’s first work for adults.”

Yesterday the National Book Foundation announced the nominations for this year’s National Book Awards, which includes a category for “Young People’s Literature.” This covers both fiction and nonfiction, and poetry as well.

Among the nominees this year is David Small’s memoir in comics form, Stitches. I was one of many observers who thought that was striking, given that Stitches hasn’t been marketed as a book for young readers.

GalleyCat followed up on the discrepancy and discovered that the publisher, Norton, had nominated the book in the Young People’s category, which determined how it was considered. “We always intended to submit Stitches in the young people’s category,” said the firm’s head of publicity.

It’s true that Norton’s catalogue copy for the book concludes, “…Stitches will transform adolescent and adult readers alike with its deeply liberating vision.” And it is about Small’s childhood and adolescence.

However, in 2007, when Norton acquired the book, it said: “This will be Mr. Small’s first work for adults.” (See that press release as a Fuse #8 Reproduction.) Seven Imps understood it to be a “graphic novel memoir for adults.” USA Today reported it as the “First adult book by Small.”

Powells.com prefaced a question to Small by saying: “After working on more than forty books for kids, you’ve created one about yourself, for adults.” Amazon’s page for the book has no data for “Reading Level,” as the children’s titles do. And editor Roger Sutton reported that The Horn Book never received a review copy.

I can’t help but think that Norton always intended to submit in the Young People’s category because Stitches has its best shot for serious consideration there. For one thing, it’s not clear how fictionalized the book is—where do we draw the lines for graphic nonfiction?—so as either Fiction or Nonfiction it might present headaches for the judges.

And, of course, Stitches is in comics form. I think this categorization shows our culture’s continuing assumption that comics are for younger readers—unless they involve sex, of course. (You can read earlier versions of this grouse about how Sara Varon’s Robot Dreams got treated as an early reader, how Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell is shelved as a teen book, how Flight and Laika were nominated for Cybils Awards.)

If those are the rules of our cultural system, kudos to Norton for playing the game well. But will the judges’ choice be fair to books that were created and published with young readers always in mind?