The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, selected and edited by Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly - review

The TOON Treasury of Classic Children's Comics, selected and edited by Art Spiegelman & Francoise Mouly

This hefty tome landed on my desk with a question on a Post-It: "Shelve with adult or in kids' graphic novels?"

Let's discuss. First of all, the beast is 350 oversize pages long. It has an introduction AND a foreword. On the other hand, the Introduction is written by Jon Scieszka, and the first word of it is "Wow."

Dennis the Menace and Little Lulu are in this book. So's Pogo, Uncle Wiggly, Donald Duck, and Gerald McBoing Boing. The comics are funny - slapstick name-calling kid-friendly funny, fast and loose and unselfconscious, but the editors obviously did not select anything truly offensive. Nobody gets called fatso or four-eyes, and I was on the lookout for characters getting smacked in the mug with a frying pan, and I didn't see a one.

It is an interesting exhibition of the state of play in the mid twentieth century. If you were writing a paper about humor for children, or the evolution of adult perceptions of children's humor, you would refer to this book. But you would also giggle.

I think that what most tempts us to slide this puppy in with the grownup books is its sumptuous production and classy design. Printed on ivory paper, the cartoons are reproduced in their original misregistered halftones, but I swear the page numbers and some of the interstitial text looks as beautiful and fine as letterpress. This high-quality presentation is something that Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly are known for. I swear that man took the money he made from Maus and sunk every cent into TOON books, their publishing company. They've been using toothy paper and thick inks since RAW, and if comics ever become thought of as fancy and luxe, it will be because of these two. 

While this book might be kind of too much for a kid to check out of the public library, it would make a really excellent gift - it would be the kind of book that would stay in a child's bedroom for six years, as he picked it up and put it down, browsed for something silly, or showed his favorites to his friends. And it deserves a home next to The Best American Comics. Librarian's choice.