Comics for Christmas

>> A Disney antidote, Little Lit's got art and stories for all ages

by JULIET WATERS

Even if Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's Little Lit weren't full of gorgeously illustrated and brilliantly perverse folklore and fables, the book would be worth buying just for "Fairy Tale Road Rage."

This pull-out board game designed by graphic novelist Chris Ware bears a very slight resemblance to that old standard, the Game of Life. Except that the pit-stops are places like Jack's Beanstalk strip club, The Enchanted Forest planned community and The Princess Pea's Natural Shoppe. The goal of this game is to complete a story board with chits that allow you to make up a fairy tale as you go and then invent a moral at the end.

As explained in the instructions: "The smart child will note that each storyboard is arrayed with a number of blank circles, and that these circles are coloured in a corresponding manner with 70 little circular 'chits'... The smarter child will note that the game board is coloured with an exactly matching assortment of shades, as well. The smartest of all children will then deduce that, due to the similarity of these colours, some sort of relationship exists between the playing pieces, the spaces on the board, and the spaces on the storyboards. This child should be immediately excused from play and signed up for top-level government service, as he or she is obviously more gifted than the adults who currently hold such positions."

Sadly, by the time that child opens this book, let's say as a Christmas present, he will have missed his chance to become an election officer in Florida. But by playing "Fairy Tale Road Rage" he can still learn a lot about absurdity, moral relativism and the often-random art of storytelling by reading and re-reading this uniquely fabulous collection of stories by some of the best North American adult comic artists and illustrators.

"Comics--they're not just for grown-ups anymore!" announce Spiegelman and Mouly on the back cover. Spiegelman is of course best known for his Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel Maues. Along with Mouly, his wife, he has arguably done more than anyone to legitimize adult comics in their RAW anthologies. So it makes sense that they would be the ones to bring adult comics full circle.

A smart kid getting this very un-Disney-ish Christmas present could learn a lot. From Dan Clowes' re-telling of the 17th-century French sequel to Sleeping Beauty, he'd learn that even if your mother tries to eat your wife and children before drowning herself in a vat of vipers and toads, that you still might miss her for a while. Or he could learn that it was a dumb idea for the King to think that horses could put Humpty Dumpty back together again, when what was really needed was a glue gun and someone good at jigsaw puzzles. Or he can learn, from Spiegelman's version of an old Hasidic tale, that just because you think you're a rooster doesn't mean you can't act like a man.

Great for the child in every adult and the adult in every child, about the only person who might not appreciate this book would be a picky feminist. Good women are few and far between in this collection. Children's book illustrator Barbara McClintock is the only female contributor. But because much of the feel of Little Lit is akin to what would happen if the dwarves and ogres got hold of the pen for awhile, the boy-centricity seems more forgivable.

In an era so obsessed with the lack of literacy that pregnant mothers read to their stomachs hoping this will inspire an interest in books, Little Lit does more than just drum sanitized versions of fairy tales with Phil Collins soundtracks into bored little minds. It cracks open the old stories, teaches children the art of story making, story re-writing and story re-inventing. Plus, the book is so big that it will make any grown up feel little again.

Little Lit, Eds Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, HarperCollins, hc, 67pp, $29.95