Time to revamp this websty I mean website. I know some HTML, but not enough. Who wants to trade their mad webpage making skills for an art commission, or some combination of cash plus art? Gimme a holla, we'll talk.

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Exquisite Things. Go read.

And this. Doy.

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CADDIE WOODLAWN is not a LITTLE HOUSE ON THE PRAIRIE spin-off, but for all intents and purposes it might as well be. Back in the day that I first read it, it had this cover.

Later in life it was released with this one. The former is the work of the luminous though perhaps batshit crazy Trina Schart Hyman, whose illustrated books I've been collecting since childhood. The other-- hard to see because it's so tiny, I know-- is a throwaway illustration.

Similarly, this is Harriet the Spy, as drawn by her original author.

This, apart from being an image burned into my soul, like a branding iron on my tender bits, is an advertising image.

Both types of character depiction do one of the things they're meant to do: decorate a cover.

Character illustration tells you what to expect from the protagonist. In the case of Caddie Woodlawn, Trina Schart Hyman gave us a drawing of a kid from the inside. She looks young, but she looks how she THINKS she looks-- no particular age, intelligent, awake, reactive. That's what it feels like on the inside. So, so many good books starring kids fall flat when translated from prose to movies or comics because you forget, once you're into the book, to judge them as kids. God bless Wil Wheaton, but "Suck my fat one, you cheap dimestore hood" made me yodel like a hyena in the theater but shut me right the hell up on the page. Your eye says 'kid.' You're taken out of the character and the drama because your eye says 'kid.' Neither Wil playing the role nor the character he played on the screen thought of themselves as kids. It's a man's line, and a man's throwdown.

The teeny image of Caddie is a cute li'l urchin, smirking at the viewer. She's gonna have some cute adventures. She's what an adult sees when he or she looks at a kid: someone who can't do things, and for whom an adventure is falling in the hog trough. That other image of Harriet is a sweet li'l cocker spaniel who says cute sassy things. BIG BLONDE PIGTAILS, for Christ's sake. That's a porn star Lolita hairdo. Harriet is an ur-geek, a flat-affect little Vulcan who observes the bizarre behavior of the drama queens she happens across, rich or poor. If anyone had ever done her hair like that, she would have had a hell of a journal entry about it, to be sure.

Now... these two cover may well do one thing: sell the books to parents. But it won't be to parents who read the books and were fond of them back in the day. These images are only reasonable depictions of the characters on Bizarro World. And if you're an arteest and you're ever called upon to draw similar versions of child characters in comics, they will fail to engage the reader-- as protagonists. They make perfectly good adorable little urchins, but they are useless as main characters or even secondary characters. I couldn't bring myself to use such ah- DOOOR-a-ble designs for any character unless she was meant to be, say, a six-year-old serial rapist or some such. Something would have to balance all that cute.

Don't get me wrong. I think my own kids are cute. I frequently don't throw rocks at other people's children. I love to hear the carefree laughter of happy children; it sounds so sweet if you're not close enough to hear what they're actually saying. "baby ate a spider, baby ate a spider" runs top of the list in my house. If you want to preserve the illusion of cuteness in your writing, it's best not to get too close. But if you want people to get into their heads and be able to identify with them, the illusion of cute is something you have to get away from. Nobody's cute from the inside, and if you're presenting people with a drawn image, cuteness can be a terrible barrier. And yes, the little girl who played Harriet in the movie did grow up insanely hot. Yes, yes, I know. That's a whole nother blog post.

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Last night was just popcorn: WHAT THE WITCH LEFT by Ruth Chew. Good old Scholastic... Ruth Chew worked back in the sixties and seventies popping out the middle-school fantasy books by the handful. They're all basically the same: Hi, we're ordinary kids, we have a weird relative or we went into the funny-smelling antique store. All her Magic People are tall skinny old bats who have green eyes and wear black.

They're generally about an inch deep, in terms of content, but they're still the kind of little adventure that had me daydreaming for weeks when I was eight or nine, and I still have a bunch of these battered old tin tiaras on my bookshelf. They're full of weird old homeless dudes who turn out to be personified oak trees, or silver polish that will make salt shakers turn into real birds which lay eggs in your coat closet, seven-league rubber boots. Tunnels under islands in the park. Stuff like that. There's an art to writing for the early chapter-book crowd, and Ruth Chew knew it upside down and backwards. If her books were formulaic and repetitive, she still laid the groundwork for my love of SANDMAN and PROMETHEA and all the other books that have that turn-the-corner weirdland feel.

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I am bad at Being Interesting when it comes to blogging. The empty Twitter box, the open blog-enty box, these are the ultimate blank page for me. I can talk your leg off in person, but faced with a keyboard, I'm all like duhh.

So. New idea is simple: what am I reading? Sometimes it'll be prose novels, sometimes pop science, sometimes comics. But I'll post something about what I'm reading (or re-reading) and what I think about it.

First: Rereading, for about the fortieth time,NOBODY'S FAMILY IS GOING TO CHANGE, by Louise Fitzhugh. Fitzhugh also wrote HARRIET THE SPY, ur-geek of my generation. Louise Fitzhugh was an esacpee from a rich family, a lesbian writing children's books back in the sixties, a realist, a humanist, an individualist who wrote about the pressures to conform that we notice and some that we don't-- the comfortable cage is the hardest to escape.

NOBODY'S FAMILY is very hard to locate, but I urge all of you to do so. "They ***** you up, your mum and dad; they may not mean to, but they do." Not her words, but that's basically the book. Even a well-meaning parent can define you in ways that you may not be able to break out of easily. Even a comfortable home can hurt you. Even people who want the best for you can ruin you.

NOBODY'S FAMILY is about Emma Sheridan, who is eleven, fat, and black, in no particular order. She wants to be a lawyer when she grows up. Her father is a lawyer, and he thinks no woman should be one. It's also about Emma's brother, Willie, who is heart and soul a dancer. This book was written during the civil rights era, and their father breathes fire at the idea of his son going into any form of entertainment-- to him, dancing is Uncle Tom. It's Willie's duty to get a starched-collar job, whatever Willie really wants or where his talents lie. Easy to spot a villain, right? Real simple story? Well, yes. The deftness of Fitzhugh's writing is that you always know where you are with the story-- it's what she leads you to understand about the story that will stun you. Emma's great realizations-- and they come thick and fast near the end of the book-- are sharp as razors. The insights presented in this book belong to literature. Emma sees the older generation reiterate their own patterns, things that set like concrete from early ages, and understands that it happens to everyone, and only the individual can take those first, faltering steps out of the cage he or she finds herself in.

There are more recent edition of this book available; I chose this one because I know it presents Fitzhugh's character designs. Louise Fitzhugh was One Of Us at heart, in my opinion. Ignore any editions of her books with cute urchin covers. Her kids are not urchins and they are not cute. Her own drawings of Harriet and Sport and Beth Ellen Hansen and Emma are far, far better impressions than anything else that's ever been commissioned as a cover illustration. She knew what she was after when she created a character drawing, and it's too bad she never drew comics.

Wikipedia her up, folks. She's incredible.

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