Daisy Chains
Your favourites
Whenever I visit a school to talk about comics, one of the first things I do is ask kids what comics they like to read, and if they can think about why they like them.
The answers are always interesting. But what surprises me the most is how old favourites continue to popular. Let's say I'm in a Grade 5 class. The question "What comics do you like to read?" will almost always bring up these answers:
GarfieldHagar the HorribleArchieBoneCalvin & HobbesThere are other ones too, of course, but I can almost always count on hearing these answers. I asked a kid why Garfield last week, when I was at
Oldfield Elementary, and he said, "A fat, sarcastic cat!"
I think there are a couple of reasons these comics are popular. Most of them are simple. The drawings don't get in the way of the story. The jokes in Garfield, Hagar and Archie are predictable, and so are the stories. You pretty much know what's going to happen, and it's comfortable just enjoying the stories.
Also, I think a lot of parents have these comics lying around the house, so kids get to read them when they are young.
Bone is a bit different, because it's not a strip. But it does have a kind of fairy-tale quality, and lots of slapstick too. A winning combination.
And Calvin and Hobbes? Just brilliant. Great art, great humour, a sassy six-year-old. I think it will be a favourite for many years to come.
Gaston Lagaffe
My kids mostly learned to read by reading comics. And comics are a great way to start reading in a second language. If you are in French immersion, your teachers want you to read as much as you can. So why not read comics?
Daisy Dreamer appears in French, in the magazine
Les Explorateurs (where she is called Catou La Curieuse). If you're a bit older (or maybe not) you should be able to find good French comics at the library. An excellent one to get you started is Gaston Lagaffe, by Franquin (who died 10 years ago this month).
Gaston works for Spirou magazine. He's supposed to deliver the mail, but he spends most of his time lazing around, thinking up ways to outwit the policeman who is always trying to ticket him, coming up with fantastic new inventions and recipes, and generally attempting to get out of doing his work.
A lot of the humour is slapstick, so you can understand many of the gags without even reading the words. But because you have the pictures as a guide, the words are often not hard to figure out. Just so long as you know that "Rongnutudjuu!" is a sound of frustration --not a real word.
If you can't find any Gaston books, you can get a gag every day from the Gaston website. Just click
here.
The End
After months of waiting for it, we went and bought the new (and last) Lemony Snicket book when it came out. It's called
The End.
When I first heard about Lemony Snicket, I thought "Oh great. Just what kids need. More stories filled with horror and violence." But Lemony Snicket manages to do something that is very, very difficult. He takes a story filled with horrible stuff and makes it clever and funny.
The series is great. Right up until the end. Or, should I say
The End.
The first 12 books are filled with hints about the secret story of the Beaudelaire orphans, and what happened to their parents -- and all the effects of the VFD schism (if you've read the books, you'll know what I'm talking about; and if you haven't, it's too complicated to explain).
Then, along comes Book the Thirteenth, where, instead of tying things together, Mr. Snicket takes us to a remote island, introduces a whole new storyline, and never ties together any of those loose ends.
Partly, that's the point he is trying to make. In life, things don't all tie up neatly. But it also makes him look foolish, and it makes you feel foolish for trying so hard to figure out all the different clues in the first 12 books. They were meaningless. He just made them up as he went along, I guess.
Adventures with Ardo-X
Pick up the January/February issue of Chickadee and check out my first short story for kids. It's called "Adventures with Ardo-X" and it follows a kid and an alien into deepest space.
Make sure to also take a look at Daisy Dreamer's new adventure in the same issue. This time she saves a rover on the surface of Mars and turns into a giant African snail too! Cool fact about giant African snails: they sometimes eat the paint off the sides of buildings. That can't be good for them.