#PBwithJ – Page 2

These Books Kill Fascists

4 Comments / #PBwithJ, #TransDayOfVisibility / Jerrold Connors / March 31, 2023

I picked up this book last week.

It’s an illustrated adaptation of Snyder’s ON TYRANNY: TWENTY LESSONS FROM THE TWENTIETH CENTURY and I’m thinking it should be required reading in middle school. We’re living in worrying times and in children’s books specifically, we’re in pretty dark territory. At a time when you think you’d want kids to have all the information they can have to navigate life, book banning has gone off the charts. The American Library Association reports that there were 1,269 attempted bans in 2022 (a 74% increase over 2021). I’ll admit I don’t know enough to know what happens behinds the scenes at publishing houses when the industry is faced with such a huge number of bans. In a time like this, do publishers shy away from controversial books? Do they capitulate (eg. Texas textbooks)? Or do they double down?

I would hope publishers would double down. Books are always a product of their time—the Environmental movement produced books like Bill Peet’s THE WUMP WORLD (1970) and Dr. Seuss’ THE LORAX (1971)—and in times like these I would love to see more books that straight up call out fascism. This made me wonder what picture books exist that could be called anti-fascist. I looked through my collection to see what I could find.

YERTLE THE TURTLE AND OTHER STORIES by Dr. Seuss (1958)

There’s Yertle, of course, the turtle tyrant who’s unseated by a burping commoner. Seuss did a number of anti-fascist editorial cartoons so his politics are pretty clear even without a Hitler mustache on Yertle (which, apparently, existed in an early draft).

THE BOMB AND THE GENERAL by Umberto Eco and Euginio Carmi (1989)

This book is probably more anti-war (or anti-bomb, if you consider the date) than anti-fascist, but the General in the story gets a comeuppance like Yertle. Maybe a 2/5 on the anti-fascist scale I just made up.

LOUIS I KING OF THE SHEEP by Olivier Tallec (2015)

Tallec’s LOUIS I KING OF THE SHEEP is definitely more anti-fascist. I mean:

It’s a mere gust of wind that brings about Louis’ downfall, not an uprising of oppressed sheep (or even just one burping sheep). The story shows that fascist rule can be fleeting, which is a comfort, but it also ends on a dark note. The crown lands on a wolf, who approaches the herd in the final spread. Lesson: don’t normalize fascist rule, even if it’s just a sheep with delusions of grandeur.

NOODLEPHANT (2019) and OKAPI TALE (2020) by Jacob Kramer and K-Fai Steele

These two! NOODLEPHANT is abolitionist, OKAPI tale is anti-capitalist, but both have elements of anti-fascism. The fascists, in this case, are kangaroos who consider themselves a special class of citizen in Rooville. At the end of NOODLEPHANT, the ruling kangaroos’ book of laws is turned into a tray of lasagna which is shared with all the citizens of the town. The kangaroos are are welcomed in good faith into the animals’ new utopia and they seem content enough (it’s a really good lasagna*). But the happy ending is short lived. OKAPI TALE opens with the kangaroos missing their privilege and collaborating with an okapi(talist) to reestablish their rule.

LOUIS I KING OF THE SHEEP tells us fascism is fleeting, NOODLEPHANT and OKAPI TALE tell us it’s freedom that’s fleeting.

*side note: I read NOODLEPHANT to several second grade classrooms a few years back and WITHOUT FAIL a couple kids would say “Mr. Jerrold, I’m hungry” after the description of Noodlephant’s special lasagna. The book had the same effect on me. Every. Damn. Time. Speaking of food:

ALICE’S RESTAURANT by Arlo Guthrie and Marvin Glass (1966)

This is definitely one of the more anti-fascist books I have in my collection. Granted, it isn’t really a kid’s picture book (just look at that cover), but except for some explicit language, it works like one.

What makes ALICE’S RESTAURANT so anti-fascist? Well, it describes the dangers of living in a police state, under the expectations and demands of an arbitrarily violent government.

The bureaucracy in the story is dehumanizing and is so familiar that it barely feels like satire. Thankfully, ALICE’S RESTAURANT does prescribe a salvation from fascism: get friends, get naked and dance your way out of it.

And finally, the last book:

KEEDLE, THE GREAT by Deirdre and William Conselman, Jr and Fred L. Fox adapted by Jack Zipes (2020)

KEEDLE, THE GREAT is a recent adaptation of a book written about 80 years ago. From the book’s notes:

In 1940, two young people decided to publish a strange book with the title Keedle to give Americans hope that the world can overcome dictatorships. To them, Keedle represented more than Hitler. Indeed, he represented all the dictators in the world then and now. This book is a reminder that we have always ridiculed authoritarian regimes. When we keep the power to laugh in their faces, the bullies will shrink away as we retain our integrity and humanity.

In the story, a little sociopath named Keedle rises to greater and greater power until the world decides to laugh at him. At which point:

He begins to grow smaller:

Until he can be squished like a flea:

The message in Keedle: you have to take the threat of fascism seriously, but what you don’t have to do is treat a fascist with any kind of respect. Pow!

OTHER BOOKS

I suppose you could make the argument that any picture book with a subversive protagonist is antifascist and that kids, already tuned into an unjust world, will catch on. Maybe. But, personally, feeling more and more that kids are inheriting a much worse world than the one I grew up in, I’m kind of done with subtlety. I was watching HISTORY OF THE WORLD: PART II and Mel Brooks gets it right. In a skit about Hitler, the writers go to great lengths to remind you what a disgusting pile of shit Hitler was. It’s a lot harder to say “disgusting pile of shit” in a picture book, but maybe there’s a way to say book banners, climate deniers, transphobes and all those other bad actors who are hell bent on making our world worse with every passing day are, like fascists, extremely poopy.

I’ll hold on to the hope that publishers are presently making these antifascist books and look forward to them coming out in the near future. You know, before all libraries and public schools lose all their books and are shuttered permanently.

*a group of children’s book authors and illustrators heading to the library*

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The Cricket in Times… Rectangle?

4 Comments / #PBwithJ, #RepresentationMatters / Jerrold Connors / March 29, 2023

On the topic of updating classic works (see James Marshall post) I wanted to talk about this one:

When I tell you I’m a big fan of THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE, please believe me. I’m a big fan of THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE. One of my prized kidlit possessions is a copy of the book (tenth printing, 1966) signed by George Selden.

I read it first as a student in Mrs. Boehlke’s third grade classroom at Jakarta International School and it made a big impression on me. The book painted New York as magical, of course, but it also cemented Connecticut as a place I desperately wanted to visit (never mind that I had access to coral reefs and rainforests in Indonesia, I wanted to see a bubbling brook in a Connecticut field). The descriptions of music left me tracking down the various overtures and arias that made up Chester’s repertoire and the animal’s feasts inspired a life-long love of liverwurst (it’s still one of my favorite sandwiches). Looking back, though, I wonder if what made me fall in love with the story was that it’s the first one I ever read where I saw myself in the protagonist. Like Mario, I was a lonely kid who loved animals.

I don’t remember feeling any particular way about the representation of Sai Fong, the older Chinese gentleman who plays a part in several chapters, but I do recall finding having to swap the Ls and Rs in his dialogue a bit tedious (Selden swaps the letters in that familiar way, “Velly good” and “most honalable” etc). It’s tedious and annoying and, or course, insensitive. If the book has a saving grace, it’s that the Chinese characters are sympathetic. Sai Fong (and his friend, another Chinese gentleman) help Mario and Chester early in the story and then return towards the book’s end and get to share in Chester’s triumphant final concert.

The portrayal of Asian characters in THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE isn’t BREAKFAST AT TIFFANY’S level obnoxious, far from it, but I would agree that the book (given its status as a perennial classic) could use an update. I was excited to learn last year that there was a revised and updated version in the works and, naturally, picked it up as quickly as I could.

I might have expected the only revision to be the removal of Sai Fong’s broken English but there are a few other changes. Sai Fong’s Emporium (a bric-a-brac and novelty store) is now a music shop, which makes sense given the themes of the book, but Chester, who is a natural musician is now referred to as first a fighting cricket and then a poet. The legend of Hsi Shuai is gone, I’m assuming this is because Selden’s version is probably not accurate or maybe it’s not his story tell. But if the book is updated and the revisions are credited to an Asian author, couldn’t you say that part of the story belongs to them? I’m not sure why the legend was removed, but I kind of miss it. I feel a bit of the magic is gone. It’s a tough assignment, keeping Chinatown an particularly unique destination (Mario, a born and bred New Yorker had never traveled there) without relegating it and Sai Fong to a “magical minority” role.

But I’m not writing about any of that. My concern with the reissue is that the book’s producers have completely messed up the art. I’m going to share some scans from the 1973 Dell Yearling edition (pictured on the left) and the 2022 revised and updated edition (pictured on the right). I’ve scanned then at the same resolution, how you see them is how they would look side by side.

You’ll notice the original has a lot of blank space at the top and bottom of the page. The art in the new edition has been set to “stretch to fill” (a command that will have an image asset stretch vertically and horizontally to eliminate empty areas on the page) and as a result, the image is distorted. It’s not such a big deal if the object is stretching proportionally along both axes. But if you’re stretching a lot only in one direction, then you get something like this:

Most of the images in the new edition have suffered some distortion but the majority are only scaled a little. The illustration of Chester, Harry and Tucker celebrating a farewell dinner (which also serves as the book’s cover) is scaled around 7% taller. I doubt most readers without a side-by-side would notice any difference.

But the difference is there. I’ve overlaid them at the same scale so you can see how much it’s stretched (cyan lines added to show there’s no horizontal scaling).

Twelve years ago Phil Nel wrote about an updated version of James Marshall’s THE THREE LITTLE PIGS in a blog post titled Vandalizing James Marshall. Would I call this Vandalizing Garth Williams? I don’t know. Marshall’s book had its trim size changed to fit a mass market model. That was unfortunate (as was the use of Edmunds as the book’s new typeface). With the updated edition of THE CRICKET IN TIMES SQUARE, I feel like the art issue is carelessness more than anything. If the white space surrounding the art was a concern, the easiest fix would have been to fill it with those text descriptors you see in older chapter books. Something like this:

*2022 edition, “corrected” image with subtitle added by Jerrold*

Then again, I can’t help but think the illustrations were enlarged to target a younger audience. Maybe there’s a feeling third graders these days aren’t interested in reading about talking animals (ugh). If that’s the root of these art and layout changes, that would seem to be an editorial decision not in keeping with the book’s original intent and I’d be inclined to call it vandalism. If the revised edition goes into reprint, maybe they could return the art to its original aspect ratio. How do we make that happen?

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Cowboy Hegemony and Casual Cultural Racism As It Pertains to Texan Humorists With a Special Focus On the Works of Tex Avery and James Marshall

3 Comments / #JamesMarshall, #PBwithJ / Jerrold Connors / March 24, 2023

I was scrolling through the Fuse 8 n’ Kate archives to see if they had done a book I hope to recommend when I noticed I missed a recent episode. It was the one following their review of The Stupids Step Out and if you listen to it to the end, you’ll hear Betsy refer to an email she received which talked about James Marshall and his frequent use of Native American headdresses as a costume for his characters. That email came from me, and that topic—what was Marshall thinking when he drew those headdresses?—is something I’ve meant to write about for a while. It wasn’t until February 26th of this year that my thoughts came together and I compiled them in a follow-up email to Betsy. So, if you heard the letters segment of the Laughing Latkes episode and was left wondering what exactly my incendiary thoughts were, this post is for you.

Why did my thoughts click on February 26th? February 26th is Tex Avery’s birthday. Tex Avery, in case you didn’t know, is the famed Looney Tunes director and creator of Bugs Bunny (though he’d became more famous later in his career for Droopy and his work for MGM) and if you’ve ever watched one of his cartoons, you’ll notice they come with more gags per minute than any other cartoon director’s work. A number, perhaps unsurprisingly, are problematic but he was by all accounts a highly sensitive and empathic person and I’ve often wondered about that disconnect: how did Avery view those gags? What blinders did he have on? And then I read a review of one of his shorts by SWAN BOY cartoonist Branson Reese:

This part:

One of the problems with making a gag a second cartoon in the early fifties if you aren’t an especially sensitive man is that some f***** up racial and cultural stereotypes get in there. You can almost imagine Tex Avery directing his own direction here: a man shoveling every joke he can get his hands on into a furnace. He pauses and looks down at his shovel to see a blackface joke. He looks up at the camera and shrugs before throwing it into the short. I don’t think it was malicious, just indifferent. But I also don’t think that’s better.
https://letterboxd.com/film/magical-maestro/

I think Reese put his finger on it here. Avery was mostly indifferent. A gag is a gag is a gag and he’s cramming as many as he can into the 600 feet of film that make up one of his cartoons.

Now, that said… Tex Avery has this one cartoon set in an Native American village (BIG HEEL WATHA, 1944) and it opens with the main character looking at the audience and saying “Hello, all you happy tax payers”. This is a play on Droopy cartoons where Droopy always opens with “Hello, all you happy people” but it very clearly points to a political opinion which (except for Hitler-bashing) is a rare thing in a Tex Avery cartoon.

Where this connects to Marshall? Marshall, like Avery, was a born and bred Texan and I think Native Americans, in his day in Texas, were a visible minority in a way they weren’t in other states (except maybe Arizona and New Mexico). I have no doubt both he and Tex Avery grew up surrounded by strong prejudices against their respective local tribes. How could they have not? I, myself, in third grade in Jakarta, Indonesia, half a world and a generation away, went as an “Indian Brave” for Hallowe’en, wearing the costume my older brother was given for his performance as “Lonesome Polecat” in a high school production of LIL’ ABNER.

I think the argument can be made that, like Tex Avery, Marshall was first and foremost concerned with gags. An efficient storyteller, Marshall relied on a number visual shorthand devices. The headdress, ultimately, was one of those—a convenient costume, a quick way to say “this character is playing dress up”. That he landed on the headdress and not, say, a pirate’s eye patch or a real estate tycoon’s top hat, is no accident. But like Reese in his appraisal of Avery, I don’t think it was malicious. Just indifferent. And I agree there as well, that this doesn’t makes it any better.

To me, the question of whether James Marshall was racist or not is immaterial. On the balance of intent versus impact, the impact of Marshall’s choices clearly outweighs his intent. This iconography remains harmful and I think acknowledging that is important. Beyond that, though, I don’t know. Frank Asch’s Bear received an update (as described in Debbie Reese’s blog here), maybe George and Martha could use one. If the question comes down to “would Jim himself approve of the change?”, I can only offer that Marshall, also like Avery, is remembered as a kind and extremely sensitive person. When I interviewed Marshall’s agent for the biography, he said Jim was one of the two kindest people he had ever worked with in all his years in publishing (click through for the other person). You take that, Marshall’s great respect for his young audience, and the fact that the man liked having his books out there (and loved) and you probably have a pretty convincing argument for updating any future editions of the books.

And if you’ve read this far and you have the inclination, rights and means to produce an updated version… (ahem) I do a pretty good Marshall.

UPDATE: a big thank you to Betsy Bird for suggesting the title for this article, a much better alternative to mine (sung to the tune of that Gene Autry song): The Hippos Wear Feathers in Their Hair (clap clap clap clap) Deep In the Heart of Texas.

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#PBwithJ: THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES (1998)

14 Comments / #FolkloreThursday, #PBwithJ / Jerrold Connors / March 16, 2023

I heard you like picture books by celebrities!

Yeah, yeah. I know people love to hate on celebrity-authored books, but I, quite honestly and just for the record, I have no opinion on them. This book, though, stands out in my mind because it had ALL the celebrities. I hadn’t seen it since I thumbed through it at a bookstore in Napa twenty-five years ago and I suddenly wanted to see it again. Thanks to ThriftBooks over on ebay, I was able to pick up a copy.

The story is Hans Christian Andersen’s THE EMPEROR’S NEW CLOTHES as told from the perspective of various court members and townspeople. The threads of the story are held together by a moth (illustrated by Quentin Blake) who flutters around the kingdom acting, if you’ll pardon the expression, as a fly on the wall letting the reader in on the various schemes and machinations behind the Emperor’s eventual humiliation.

So, each character (celebrity) gets a spread and each spread is given to an illustrator, themselves a celebrity of the children’s book illustration world. I mean look at that line-up! It’s a who’s-who of the then heaviest hitters—headliners at your local Bookstop, Borders, Coles, or Waldenbooks.

*Sabrina, JTT and Stormin’ Norman make this the most 90s line-up ever.*

So I’m flipping through the book and I’m instantly struck by two things: man, did illustration have a “look” back then and, boy, do I ever miss it!

Thinking about how so many books from the 90s had that painterly look made me wonder which media dominated illustration at various times. It’s hardly a scientific survey, but I’d break it down like this:

DECADE	MEDIA
70s	ink/ink and watercolor
80s	colored pencil
90s	oil pastel/oils
00s	gouache
10s	digital gouache/Procreate
20s	???

We’re only three years into this decade so maybe it’s too early to call it, but I expected to see a turn towards silkscreen and risography. Sure, I’m a zine fan and it was probably more than a little bit of wishful thinking but I remember rubbing my hands together when Joohee Yoon’s THE TIGER WHO WOULD BE KING (2015) came out and thinking, “Oh man! Here we go!!!”

*My face when risography didn’t become the next dominant style.*

Maybe it’s too gritty, indie, or artsy but I don’t think silkscreen/risograph is making headway as a dominant style for the 20s. That’s okay, I’m used to being wrong (I thought pencil was going to take over the 10s solely on the incredible appeal of Benjamin Chaud and Isabelle Arsenault’s works and it didn’t). Digital gouache, which some might call the “Procreate” style, stole the show. You see a lot of it and I think it’s poised to stick around for a while. To be clear, I’m not throwing any shade at those works! I have a fondness the style, it pairs really well with humor and a mid-century modern design sensibility. I will say, though, that I think few people do it as well as the OG (Original Gerald).

I’m interested to know what you think. Do you agree with my breakdown above? Have I overlooked an entire style or maybe missed the boat entirely? Hit me up in the comments. For now, I’m off like the the Moth, to go grab a late lunch. See ya!

*Master of this style. Remind me to do a Quentin Blake post.*

UPDATE: To clear up a question from the comments: The Gerald Mc Boing Boing comparison was in reference to the style, rather than the medium. A better way to put it might be to say gouache/digital gouache looks really good with cartoonier characters. A lot of animators working in the early part of the 2000s were drawing inspiration from artists like Mary Blair. Gouache was getting a lot of play in Pixar concept art, for example. And given that there’s always some cross-pollination between animators and illustrators, it’s probably inevitable it would make its way into picture books.

*left: I CAN FLY (Blair 1950), right: AN UNLIKELY ADVENTURE (Chou 2020)*

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Picture Books with Jerrold

1 Comment / #PBwithJ / Jerrold Connors / March 16, 2023

In December of 2021 I had this idea that I wanted to start a new YouTube channel where I’d talk about picture books. I wanted to do it in the style of Cartoonist Kayfabe over on YouTube. The deep dives into comic books the two hosts take are ridiculous. Nothing like that exists in children’s book publishing and I thought I could enjoy creating that kind of a program.

I drafted a few episode ideas and ran them past my family. My son suggested I name the program “Picture Books with Jerrold” and brand it PB&J (which was and still is a killer idea). I sketched up a potential logo and even filmed a pilot, as pictured below.

And then I realized I was more interested in making books than talking about them so I ditched the idea.

Now, though, with this blog back up and running, I’m itching to talk about picture books again. I won’t be wearing a suit (probably) and I’m not diving deep (definitely), but I’m going to share books from my collection every now and then with the tag #PBwithJ. First up will be this book that has been hovering on the periphery of my mind since I saw it in a bookstore twenty five years ago and which I just purchased off ebay for the low, low price of four dollars and eighty-five cents.

Check in on Thursday, I should have it up by then.

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