It was my Dad who brought it home, because he'd started reading it in the early '60s, around the same time you did.
Yeah, so as it got tamer, the artists who'd grown up with the earlier, less tame MAD went berserk. And presented things outward again. Certainly the underground comix artists all were readers of MAD in its earliest incarnation.
Well, the difference between our Dads bringing home comics, is that your dad had no idea what he was doing with those comics.
He was clueless. That was one of the reasons I became a cartoonist.
I love that panel, where he's obliviously bringing home those pre-Comics Code issues.
[Laughs]
While we're on the subject of influencing kids, let's talk about the children's book.
At first I just thought it was one more piece of evidence of being bi-polar or something. I have one book that's labeled adults only, and one's directed at kids, specifically five- and six-year-old kids just managing to struggle through their first lessons in reading. And the more I think about it, the more connected it feels to me. It all started because Francoise, my wife, had this idea that the best use of our abilities as cartoonist/art director/publisher was no longer to do something like RAW magazine, there was no need for it. We'd done that in a vacuum of comics in their darkest moments of no place to go with interesting work. So there was no reason to go with a RAW brand and put out books that can be published elsewhere, but to make something that's more like an applied art. Comics taught me to read, taught her to read, both our kids learned to read literally by destroying my comics collection. Francoise wanted to do exactly what she's doing right now, this thing called TOON Books, and I just thought it was too much work, frankly. So I convinced her to move sideways and say, 'Well, let's just do a comic book for kids of all ages, like Raw for kids. But Francoise wanted the full bore challenge which was really controlled comics for kids. Not meaning nicey-nice, but meaning they could really function the way an early reader is supposed to function. The problem with it is there's no such category. And the problem was finding a publisher. A lot of people courted Francoise, and then when they found out what she was doing said, 'eh, if this works, we'll buy you. It's not exactly a picture book for kids in comic format, some of which are starting to exist, it's mainly comics having been worked out with people like educators from Bank Street Books, Clark Scientists, and trying to find what could work to get a kid to read that's more interesting than 'See Dick Run, Run Dick Run.' Because basically you see Dick run and you're not interested in reading the words underneath. And in the comic, it actually mimics the way people learn to speak. Which is when you're an infant, your mother leans over and says, 'Oooh, pretty baby! Would baby like some milk?' [gestures bottle] or 'Milk' [gestures holding breast] depending whether you're breastfed or not. Milk becomes 'milk' because of the associations that have to do with acting out, pointing at. More than even picture books, comics function to recapitulate that process by having the words be mostly dialogue, having the figures acting stuff out. Some repetition, but not as much as the mind-numbing repetition in a lot of the early readers. So I ended up doing this because I hit a wall, and I realized that the introduction was as complex as the work it was introducing. So I was gonna try to write a prose afterward that was gonna help explain the introduction which was gonna help explain the book. In the course of that, I found t really painful to write, yet didn't want to relinquish it to someone else. In the course of that, having hit a wall three weeks running, it was really hard to find the ways of phrasing this thing. So when I hit that walls, I figured I'd do one of the books for the Toon series, and wanted to do one for the earliest possible readers. Meaning clarified to the point of insanity, but still not stupid. Using a literally restricted word list. Trying to make sure one read left to right at all times to learn that arbitrary direction you have to learn, and making something that was mysterious enough to make you want to read it again and thereby get the repetition.... The series is very difficult to put over, because when we did RAW in the '80s, there was a mighty apparatus of very flexible independent book stores all over the place that's been decimated and then some in the years since. And so publishing oneself is a much bigger struggle than it used to be. So it's worth babbling for, because it kids learn to read and think then we won't have Republicans anymore? One can only hope, as it says on the Obama button in my suitcase.
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