Stories for Kids--Not Pinheads

As a photographer prepares to shoot a portrait of Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly in their art-crammed SoHo studio, Mouly nudges her husband to put out his cigarette, thinking the picture is for a children’s magazine.

Though Spiegelman is assured that it is not, he puts out the cigarette anyway and pops a piece of gum into his mouth. “I have a feeling I’m going to be chewing a lot of gum,” he says with a sigh.

It’s hard to think of Spiegelman, the nicotine-stained counterculture cartoonist, going bubble gum. This is the guy, after all, who has made a career on the premise that comics are an art form suitable for adults. He won a 1992 Pulitzer Prize for his adult comic book “Maus,” a Holocaust memoir in which Jews are depicted as mice, Nazis as cats and Poles as pigs. He raised hackles by drawing a Valentine’s Day cover for the New Yorker magazine showing a Hasidic Jew passionately kissing an African American woman just months after an outbreak of violence between Jews and blacks in the Crown Heights neighborhood of New York--both sides were offended. And, with Mouly, he created Raw, the hip, edgy adult “comix” magazine of the 1980s that provided a subversive commentary on the Reagan-Bush years.

But now the pair has turned to kids’ books: Their latest collaboration is “Little Lit: Folklore & Fairy Tale Funnies,” a large-format hardcover children’s storybook created comic-style by many of the same artists who worked on Raw, along with some New Yorker cartoonists as well. Published by Joanna Cotler, an imprint of HarperCollins, it is planned as first in a series, and an exhibition of the work is on view at Storyopolis in Los Angeles through Nov. 30, where the pair will appear Friday at 6 p.m. “Little Lit” is not Spiegelman’s first foray into children’s books; three years ago he wrote and illustrated “Open Me--I’m a Dog” a story of a puppy transformed into a book, also published by Joanna Cotler.

In person, the couple are a contrast in styles. Spiegelman, at 52, is the classic New York intellectual dressed in rumpled clothing and wearing thick glasses; voluble and mordantly wry, he is cheerfully unpretentious. Mouly, 45, is a native of France who came to the United States at 19 as an architecture student. Speaking with charmingly accented English, she displays a European mix of casual stylishness and piercing intelligence.

Comics That Will Grab a Child’s Interest

Spiegelman believes most children’s literature is “condescending,” marketed to a consumer “somewhere between a chimpanzee and a pinhead.” Only half joking, he claims that he and Mouly set out to prove that “comics are not just for grown-ups anymore.” They developed “Little Lit” by challenging artists to make works that would grab and hold a child’s interest.

More than just a collection of stories, “Little Lit” also includes quizzes, puzzles and games. But the majority of the book is devoted to fairy tales. Among the reinterpretations of well-known classics are “The Sleeping Beauty,” interpreted here by Daniel Clowes, which picks up the story after the “happily ever after;” “The Princess and the Pea,” here by Barbara McClintock with animal protagonists; and a fairly straightforward, if wisecracking, “Jack and the Beanstalk,” by David Macaulay.

Others have somewhat obscure origins. Spiegelman turned to an old Hasidic fable for “Prince Rooster,” the story of a neurotic young royal who thinks he’s a cock. Cartoonist Kaz recreated “The Hungry Horse”--a quirky, brutal anthropomorphic folk tale from Estonia--which he claims was told to him by a one-armed gypsy horse doctor at the racetrack.

“Many of the artists on Raw started out with safety pins in their ears and were now using those pins on diapers,” says Spiegelman. “It was a question of going from sheer self-expression to making something worthy of a kid that would amuse, divert, entertain. That’s not the same as letting it all hang out.”

Although Spiegelman’s interest in comics is wide-ranging--he currently is working on a book about Jack Cole, a legendary cartoonist from the 1940s and ‘50s, as well as a music-theater piece about the rise and fall of American comics--the idea for “Little Lit” was Mouly’s. Initially, Spiegelman says he had to be “dragged, kicking and screaming” into the project, but Mouly persuaded him despite the fact that he wasn’t crazy about editing again. Mouly has been art editor at the New Yorker since 1993, and she remembers well the French comic books of her youth, which were designed around solid storytelling rather than the superheroes of American comic books.

Married for nearly 25 years, Spiegelman and Mouly are parents of two children, Nadja, 13, and Dashiell, 8, and have long been troubled by today’s children’s fare. “There is so much instant entertainment. Superficial pleasure is so easily gotten these days,” Mouly says. “Video games are designed like slot machines, simply to get you to put in the next quarter. With so much media competition for children’s attention, “We wanted to try something that kids could make their own, not just be a passive audience for.”

Mouly recalls that when they first met, Spiegelman introduced her to classic American comic strips, and she was struck by their “conviction and innocence.” “Little Lit” pays homage to that era by including “Gingerbread Man,” a 1943 comic about a runaway cookie by Walt Kelly, the creator of “Pogo” and an artist on the Walt Disney classic film “Fantasia.”

“If it’s a good story, kids won’t think of it as an artifact,” Mouly says. Indeed, her children are fans of such classic comic characters as Betty Boop, Little Lulu and Krazy Kat. “When something is good, it can stay alive, it doesn’t matter what the style is.”

Spiegelman believes that the dark side of classic stories is part of their staying power. “These fairy tales have lasted all these hundreds of years because they don’t try to gloss things over; they aren’t demographically written to whatever our notion of political correctness is at the moment,” he says. “Kids may not have a lot of experience, but they’ve got a wealth of very complex feelings and emotions and ideas running through their heads. And they learn to clean it up for adults--if you insist.” He points to Maurice Sendak’s “Where the Wild Things Are” as a book that will be around for a long time. “It doesn’t try to be nice.”

Asked how “Little Lit” differs from what Disney might do with the same stories, Spiegelman responds, “I would suspect it would be more market-tested and thereby have the edges rubbed clean. And it is in those edges and textures that life happens, and art happens. Disney would say, OK, in this scene the girl has to win or otherwise girls will grow up thinking they can’t be winners. And with all best of intentions, you have the superego stomp out whatever id there is.”

“You wouldn’t have the individual voices,” adds Mouly. “One of our impulses behind publishing was never to establish a ‘house style,’ the way that Disney has. You actually respect artists as individuals telling a story in his or her unique way. In ‘Little Lit’ you can go from [David] Mazzuccelli’s story about a Japanese fisherman and sea princess to something totally different, like Lorenzo Mattotti’s brilliant and colorful story of two hunchbacks.”

“It’s when a specific voice comes out that art happens,” chimes in Spiegelman. “The best thing that Disney’s done in years is the stage version of ‘Lion King,’ and that’s because an individual voice got to come through it, [director] Julie Taymor. The energy resides in somebody’s specific sensibility that got to be written large by Disney resources.”

Preparing Children for the World

While the idiosyncratic visions in “Little Lit” are apparent, so are the moral underpinnings in the stories. Spiegelman says that he chose the Hasidic tale of the rooster prince because it had a lesson to impart without hocus-pocus or magic powers. “If you want to help somebody, you have to put yourself in their place,” he says. “You can be as crazy as you want as long as nobody knows it. In ‘Little Lit,’ there are touchstones that I wish I’d had access to when I was little. Comics help prepare you for the world.”

Indeed, inherent in many, if not all the stories in the book, is a sincerity that seems light-years away from the irony-drenched text of Raw, which once irreverently carried the subtitle “the Graphix Magazine of Postponed Suicides.”

“We’ve gotten to a point in a hall of mirrors of being 15 mirrors away from anything of substance, so there’s a hunger for something else,” Spiegelman says. He notes that even the supremely ironic film director David Lynch recently made the G-rated film “The Straight Story,” about an aging farmer who drives hundreds of miles on a lawn mower to visit his sick brother. “That’s why we’re having a Norman Rockwell show coming to New York City in an art world that’s so reliant on distancing devices. It leads you to someone just coming out and saying what he means. We were after something similar in ‘Little Lit.’

“When you’re dealing with kids,” he adds, “it’s a matter of imparting something without feeling you’re going to be put down for it. It’s not a question of trying to climb back into the Eisenhower years. But having been forced to live through the media-drenched realities that have made us all into these ironic creatures, how can we climb to the other side of it to use those strategies to actually say something to kids that is worth saying?

“I think ‘Little Lit’ may be one of the best examples of something where I feel I’m in the mode of predictor, rather than describer, of something that’s not fully around us yet,” he says.

Asked if he was entirely sincere in what he has just said, Spiegelman takes a puff of a cigarette, glances at his wife and says, impishly, “As sincere as my smirk will allow me to be, anyway.”

Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly will appear for a question and answer session and will sign books at 6 p.m. Friday at Storyopolis, 116 N. Robertson Blvd. (310) 358-2500.