The Hero of Little Street

by Gregory Rogers  
Allen & Unwin, Austrailia 2009
Roaring Brook, US 2012

The Boy, who previously met the Bard and the Bear and battled a Midsummer Knight, takes "readers" on another adventure, this time through the world of Vermeer.

The Boy, out titular hero, is kicking around when a soccer ball appears. One swift kick and the ball lands in a fountain, and the bully boys who were previously playing with the ball are none too happy. They chase the Boy to take refuge in an art museum where he finds himself joined by a dog from one painting, helps a musician in another painting, and is let out into the world of Flemish masters through Vermeer's "Little Street." When his canine companion is taken from him the Boy tracks him down to a basement butchery where hundreds of dogs have been captured and caged. After making a daring escape the Boy and the dogs return to the "real" world where they meet up with the bully boys again. The Boy gets the last laugh as the newly freed dogs chase the bullies down as a favor to their new master, and the Boy continues on to another day and another adventure.  

click image to enlarge

That Rogers does all this without words in a comic-framed format is only half the marvel, his real strength comes in the ability to make the real and the fantasy imaginings slip fluidly in and out. When the dog slips out of Jan Van Eyck "The Arnolfini Wedding" the reader doesn't question it any more than the Boy does, it simply happened and is part of the world. As it is the world Roger's Boy inhabits has the feel of another time and place where time and technology play no part. It adds a sense of timelessness about the whole affair, a story of a boy and a chase and a series of adventures.

And it was while thinking about the story in this light that I realized this is where picture books are more liberal than their wordier counterparts up the literacy line. A picture book has the advantage of being like a short story where there may be a one-up change in the main character's position of predicament from the beginning of the story, but no need for there to be the sort of emotional or plot development necessary for traditional narratives.  I mean, I suppose I could find a three act narrative in The Hero of Little Street – act one: hero chased by bullies; act two: in the museum world; act three: return of the hero triumphant – but in the end it feels more like a cumulative series of adventures in the mode of the Odyssey. Four of five more of these Boy books by Rogers and they could be bundled together into an epic tale of their own.

you probably want to see this bigger, too

The last lingering element that was hard to place was Rogers visual language. It is a comic format but something keeps me from calling it a graphic novel. It isn't simply length, there's something that taps into something I couldn't place for a long time until I studied the poses of the characters, their lines of action while standing still, their contrapposto if you will. One thing computers haven't managed yet is the ability to search for sense connections beyond words, those memory senses of image and smell and touch that can't be entered as a search term. In the end I finally made the connection: Sergio Aragones, the "marginal" artist from MAD magazine whose linguine-legged people and wordless comics are echoed in Rogers' storytelling. The actual influence may not be there at all, but the fluidity of moving through these visual ideas is there, it's a shared vocabulary of images. I think if you know both artists works it's easy to see the connection, even if they are only distant cousins half a world apart.

As a final thought, based on a conversation I had yesterday, one of the great things about picture books like this without words is that it allows "readers" to provide their own dialog, their own interpretation of the story. It's malleable or it can become firmly fixed, but in keeping with the "picture worth a thousand words" Rogers books contain millions of words... but no text.

2 by Suzy Lee

 Mirror  
Seven Footer Press  2003  
Shadow  
Chronicle Books   2010  


A pair of wordless picture books with similar themes from an artist I like to think of as the Master of the Gutter.  That's a good thing, I'll explain.  

In Mirror, a sullen girl notices the mirror she is slumped near and makes a series of poses, modifying and monitoring her image.  Slowly she begins to dance with her reflection, a pas de deux of opposing joy.  Then the drifts into the mirror, literally split into two not-quite-matching halves in the book's gutter (the technical name for central fold where the pages meet the binding). Once she's crossed over her reflection is no longer interested in following.  Once she's noticed the girl becomes angry with her reflection, smashing the mirror, leaving her to return to the floor and her previously sullen state, this time without reflection.

Shadow finds our heroine in a basement where the light and her imagination see a collection of junk transform into a veritable jungle full of creatures and things with minds of their own. Slowly the transformed items -- a ladder, a vacuum, a bike -- become an elephant beneath a moon and tropical trees.  As the imagination takes hold, the original items disappear leaving only their fantasy shadows behind.  All of this takes place safely on the other side of the gutter until a wolf appears and leaps out from the imaginary and into the "real" half of the book.  The girls flees across the gutter and together with her creations they manage to scare away the wolf.  The call to dinner -- the only words I've ever seen in a Lee book -- breaks the enchantment of the imaginary and returns the basement to its collection of junk until the light goes out and from the darkness the imaginary becomes real again, this time without their creator.

I think that from the words needed to describe these books you can see what Lee's messages are : image, reflection, mirror, crossed over, light, shadow, imagination, transformation, imaginary, real, enchantment.  There's no small collection of studies to be made on the psychology of these books, but those are no longer for me to write. I've already done my time in those salt mines.  


Back when I was working on my MFA I wrote a critical essay that compared Suzy Lee's Wave (Chronicle 2008) with Mercer Mayer's A Boy, A Dog and a Frog.  In particular, I was noting how these books used the gutter as an imaginary wall between the scenes on either side that was "broken" midway to silently mark the emotional changes that took place within the narrative.  This has become Lee's territory with her books, this dance that takes place on opposite sides of the gutter that must be traversed and broken for growth to take place. (For those who insist that Wave contains a "flaw" spread where the images run into the gutter in a way that makes it seem like it was badly designed I'm going to counter-insist that you look at all her books and see how Lee has done this repeatedly and suggest that it was deliberate.)

In all the books mentioned, the gutter is a little like the border between panels in a cartoon or graphic novel.  There is a psychology of "between," the message that is conveyed in the mind of the reader when reconciling the two images.  Each side isn't simply a reflection of the other (though they are that) they are a pair of images that inform one another in progression.  Reading left to right we see each side as an A + B that yields a C of personal meaning that in turn can send us back to A to reevaluate the information and assumptions we've made previously.  It's almost like reinforcing or "proving" the theory in our minds.  We look for clues in the visuals and these contextual clues reinforce what we think, see, feel.   

Okay, that got a little heavy there, but the point is that what these books do, and do well, is train young readers the language of visual sequential storytelling.  Whether on their own or guided by parents, Lee's stories have a surface level of narrative (a girl dancing, a girl imagining shadows) and a psychological level of narrative (the emotions generated between the facing imagery) that are told through a sophisticated use of the same between-the-panels emotional editing that, if we really want to get technical here, comes straight out of the montage theory of film editing.  No, I'm not kidding.  

Climbing back up (or down) to the book level, I think it's interesting that Lee has taken the same essential idea and made two different studies from it.  Her earlier book Mirror is a darker, moodier study that seems to explore the imagination as a place of refuge from a forced punishment, a place where reflection reveals a certain truth about the girl's behavior that causes her discomfort.  Perhaps she sees she was wrong (bossy?) and this is what brings her and her fantasy crashing back down.  It's a story simply told but perhaps a bit too subtle for younger readers; older readers might simply read the images too fast and not make the connection.  

But Shadow is more playful.  It takes the same point of imagination and allows the reader in, to take flight with the main character instead of simply observing.  This could partially be the function of the book's design as well; the shadows are, naturally, upside down in orientation, begging the reader to keep flipping the book back and forth to monitor and note changes.  The interactivity makes the reader an accomplice which in turn allows for a greater emotional investment.  So while I initially thought it odd that Lee was revisiting old territory I now think that Shadow is a refinement of the earlier book.  I like them both, but Shadow is the better of the two.  

Another visual component these books share is the Rorschach ink blot element.  Not necessarily in the literal sense where you can step back and view the reflected images for some personality rendering, but in that different eyes might add different details.  It could make for an interesting exercise to have older (middle grade, or even high school) students write out what they imagine the narrative of these stories might be.  Did the girl use her basement fantasy to get over a fear of the shadows in the dark? Did the "wrong"girl come out the other side of the mirror?  As with many wordless picture books and silent sequential storytelling (Sara Varon's Robot Dreams, Shaun Tan's The Arrival), there are probably as many interpretations as their are readers

The Boys

by Jeff Newman 
Simon and Schuster  2010

A Mid-Century Modern picture book valentine to the nature of boys at play, both young and old. 


On Monday the new kid moves to town.  On Tuesday he sets out to the park with his bat and ball to mingle with the kids of his new neighborhood but can't bring himself to join in.  He shuffles over to a park bench full of a quartet of old men who don't quite understand what's up with the kid.  On Wednesday the kid goes back to the park to feed the pigeons on the bench with the old boys who feel a little awkward that the kid has adopted them as his social group.  Then on Thursday the kid arrives wearing obnoxious plaid retiree pants and his hair slicked back and the old boys realize it's time to get this kid back on track.  Suddenly the kid is the grumpy old man on the bench yelling at the obnoxious old guys who are chasing the pigeons away on their bikes and making a ruckus at the playground.  In the end it is a game of baseball that integrates the kid with his peers and gives the old men someplace else to sit than the park bench.

That all of this is done without words is a good part of its charm. The mood on these pages is easily readable at a glance, very much character driven and clearly understandable.  This ability to portray emotions and tell stories with simple illustrations is key for younger readers to understand how to "read" pictures.  This is a key value in wordless picture books because being able to decode the language of illustrations and illustrated stories is as necessary as sight reading.  It also happens to be the element I find lacking in a lot of graphic novels put out by publishers of children's books, but that's a rant for another day.  

Newman's style of watercolor - the broad brush strokes that suggest more than they define, the bold swaths of muted color - would almost fit in with the style of the independent cartoons produced by the UPA in the 40s and 50s; cartoons like Gerald McBoing Boing.  Almost, not quite.  I think there are times Newman's brush is a little too large in the scene and distracting from the more controlled character work, but it isn't a deal killer.

2 by Gregory Rogers

It seemed impossible to talk about the most recent of Gregory Rogers wordless picture books without talking about the earlier book. Not that the two books can't stand on their own, but they also seem so much a part of one that I'm doing them together.

The Boy, the Bear, the Baron and the Bard
Neal Porter/Roaring Brook 2004 (US)

A Boy in modern England kicks a soccer ball through the window of an abandoned theatre. Once inside to retrieve his ball his attention is diverted by costumes, which he feels compelled to try on. He kicks his ball through the curtain and, going after it, finds himself transported onto the stage in Elizabethan England. The Bard in the wings, furious that his play has been interrupted by this rapscallion, gives chase.

From here out it's a Shakespearean action movie. While hiding out the boy befriends and frees a caged Bear and together they outwit and outrun the Bard, help an imprisoned Baron escape, entertain on a Lady's barge, and in the end go their separate ways. The Bear is set sailing down the Thames in a small punt while the Boy, at the last minute, is transported back through time to the modern day.

Midsummer Night
Neal Porter/Roaring Brook 2007 (US)

Picking up where the previous book left off, Bear is still floating down river, only now he is out of the city and into lush forest. A buzzing bee wakes the slumbering Bear, alerting and leading him to the presence of honey in a nearby tree. Chased by the angry hive Bear discovers a tree with a door in it and, after a cursory knock, barges through to a tunnel in the trunk. Coming out the other side Bear discovers he has been shrunk to the size of nearby mushrooms in a land of fairies.

The Boy appears, this time as a helpful sprite, offering to introduce him to his king. Once at the palace the Bard takes them to the court where he accuses them of some sort of treason. Imprisoned they find themselves in the same cell as the King and Queen (the Baron and the Lady from the previous book) and make a plan to escape. More chasing, some swordplay, and in the end the Bard is arrested for his misdeeds. Bear receives heroic honors from the King and Queen and is led back to his boat by the Boy where he is free to continue floating on.

Expertly paced, both books have true cinematic arcs to their storytelling that make them a joy to follow. That Rogers is using the same cast of main characters to tell these stories make them more like a repertory group putting on their latest production, which is hardly accidental. More only criticism happens in the first book where there is a clunky transition between the two worlds -- almost as if Rogers was unsure the reader would understand what was happening -- that he doesn't use in the second book, which I was happy to see. I think children can make a lot of solid connections in well "explained" pictures and Rogers has what it takes to make those connections visually smooth.

In the introduction to the first book Rogers admits that everything clicked for him the moment he discovered that Shakespeare's plays began at 4 in the afternoon, suggesting a late afternoon reverie. In the the more recent book he speaks to his love of Elizabethan costumes and that love is clear in both books.

In thinking about these books, and in similar books like Polo -- books with panels of action and no dialog, sequential stories -- I'm thinking we may need to consider coming up with a new term if not a new genre. It doesn't seem right to call them graphic novels when they're meant for the picture book crowd, no matter how appropriate the name may be. And to call them picture books seems to imply they aren't different from the traditional word-and-illustration books we understand to be the picture book. One thing is certain, they are a far cry from comic books and a far cry from the uncomplicated pre-reader picture and board books.

I guess if Rogers is keen on continuing with his company of players, the next ought to figure the Baron as the main character with the others in support, then the Bard in the last book. After that I guess we're on our own, which is sad in advance of the fact that there's no proof any further books are even being considered. And while I'm speculating, it would be nice to not only see a day with four books in print but of a single bound edition containing all-in-one.

I think if the world of book publishing is hoping to build a solid graphic novel base then they need to start weening their audience early on. More like this, please.

Rainstorm

by Barbara Lehman
Houghton Mifflin 2007

What a disappointment.

A bored, lonely boy attempts to amuse himself one rainy day when he discovers a key under the furniture. Trying all the locked places he can think of he eventually finds its mate is a trunk that contains a ladder that leads underground. Following the underground tunnel he emerges on an island containing a lighthouse and a group of children and sunshine. They play together, eat together, and let the boy take a turn lighting the beacon. At the end of the day he takes his leave and returns to his dull home life.

At night he can't shake the image of the day's events and the next morning he ventures back into the tunnel only to be met by the children from the island who dared to venture to visit him. They return to his home and in the end happily play in his room.

There is a very weird class thing going on here that makes me uncomfortable. The boy is shown eating alone at one point in front of a formally set table, servants at the ready, dressed in a tie and a little boy suit. He may be the classic boy trapped in the tower of luxury but in the end he doesn't escape, he merely invites he new (and always shoeless) playmates into his home. That the boy is white and the playmates are represented by minorities doesn't help.

The question is, if the tunnel has always been there, if these children have always had a way to escape the island, why didn't they find the boy first? Could these be the children of the servants? When you get a wordless picture book you get to make the story up yourself, but you must use the clues available to you. So what is it Lehman wants us to read into all this?

Where Lehman previously gave us the parallel universe of The Red Book it all it's wordless glory, and the Museum Trip gave is a magical daydream, Rainstorm gives us a rather dull tale of privileged boredom and no mystery or fantasy whatsoever.

I'm not just hard on the book in comparison to Lehman's other books; it's difficult to not set this up alongside recent wordless picture books that are more clever (Adventures of Polo) or more detailed in their fantasy (most David Weisner books, especially Flotsom). Fantasy and escape don't need concrete explanations, but the questions they raise should invite equally fanciful interpretation. There isn't a lot to hang onto here, much less interpret, beyond the little dot of a moon in the night sky that actually belongs to the beacon and is as easily missed as it can be ignored.

It also isn't a question of the fantasy, the pacing of the book feels labored and pointless. Easily a third of the pictures could be removed and the story would retain its integrity. But a book with one third fewer illustrations would be very thin, and the story's shortcomings would be readily apparent.

The exercise feels as distant, closed off and cold, sheltered and empty