Brookhouse and Portland Estates My visits to Brookhouse School and Portland Estates Elementary in Dartmouth a couple of weeks ago were great. Fantastic questions from the kids in every class I was in. I was impressed! Special thanks to Colton at Portland Estates for the giving me the cooool drawings.

I was also jealous of you lucky kids at Portland with ducks swimming in the stream right by your playground.  ¶ 3:47 PM 0 comments   

  The ducks are back! The ice on our pond has nearly all melted, and, right on time, the ducks are back.

We have a pond in our back yard, and the ducks come every spring. They hide their nest away in the cattails at the back of the pond, and spend a lot of time swimming around, quacking, and ducking their heads into the water, finding goodies to eat. We live near the ocean, and sometimes, when I'm lucky, I see the ducks flying straight up the hill from the salt water and heading to our pond. Watching them land on the water is magical. I'm glad they're back again.  ¶ 1:29 PM 0 comments   

  Daisy's Summer Adventure I just finished writing the first draft of the Daisy Dreamer story for the summer issue of Chickadee. I can't tell you anything about it yet, but I'm really excited about this story. It has a theme I've been wanting to use in a story for a long time. And kids have told me they'd like to see this kind of story too.

The summer issue of Chickadee is a lot of fun. It comes in a digest form -- a small little magazine that can fit into your pocket. You can take it with you camping or to the beach!

I always enjoy writing the Daisy Dreamer adventure for the summer issue. The stories are not longer than the regular stories, but they take up more pages, because there are usually only one or two panels on each page. So I know Gabriel is going to have a lot more space to show off his super drawing skills.

Anyway, stay tuned for the summer story. The magazine comes out in late June.  ¶ 12:27 PM 0 comments   

  The RJS It's great getting to read the comics kids write and draw. Kris is visiting right now. He's in Grade 5, and he pulled out his one and only copy of The RJS, drawn on looseleaf paper. (Kris also had the good idea of protecting the pages in plastic sheets.)

RJS stands for Rejected Superheroes, and it's based on Kris and a bunch of his friends. Except they are superheroes and have crazy names, and in the end they cause what looks like a nuclear explosion and everybody dies. I loved it.  ¶ 4:04 PM 0 comments   

  Wonderful, Awful Groo I read a book with four issues of Groo the Wanderer last night. It was called The Groo Nursery.

Groo is the longest-running creator-owned comic in the world. (Creator-owned means it's owned by the creators, not by the comics company. Comics like Spiderman (Marvel) and Batman (DC) are owned by their companies.) Sergio Aragones draws Groo, Mark Evanier writes the scripts, and Stan Sakai does the lettering.

I have been reading Groo for almost 20 years, and now my 12-year-old son is a Groo fan also.

The thing is, I can't quite figure out why I like it. Groo is a very, very, very dumb warrior. All he really cares about is fighting and eating. Typical dialogue can go like this:

Rufferto (Groo's dog): I can tell what my master Groo is thinking! He is thinking of some wise, profound way to put this money to use so it benefits all mankind...

Groo: I wonder how much cheese dip I can buy for ten thousand kopins...
(Groo the Wanderer, Epic comics issue 32, Oct. 1987)


Like many jokes in Groo, you can see this one coming from miles away. Not only that, but the stories are full of exposition -- characters telling you things they would already know. Most stories end with a moral, and I usually hate morals. Sometimes they have a really obvious message, like don't believe everything you read, or if you knock nature out of balance, bad things will happen.

But Groo is also funny, and the violence is never, ever serious. It makes me laugh. Even the idiotic Groo screensaver makes me laugh. Maybe that's enough of a reason to like it, and to keep on reading it.

If you want to check out Groo, good news -- back issues are easy to find, and almost always cheap. And the Halifax Public Library system has lots of Groo too.

  ¶ 12:44 PM 0 comments