Max Bitterman Bitterman itibaren 32141 Pereda, Ourense, Hiszpania itibaren 32141 Pereda, Ourense, Hiszpania

I sought this book out after reading The English Patient. It had a lot of similarities to The English Patient and even shared some characters. It is another long love story intertwined with bits of real history. Many scenes in this book are set in Canada around the turn of the (twentieth) century.

Found it for real cheap at my local branch of Powells -- yes! The best part of the book is it is huge -- way too big to fit on any of my bookshelves, but perfect for gazing into the big comic panels. It was published for thirty-some weeks by the editors of the Chicago Tribune, who were evidently as short-sighted one hundred years ago as they are today, because they cut the comic off just as it was getting up a good head of steam. I love that the snotty WASP editors dreaded the idea of sullying their pristine pages with as vile a genre as comics, but were forced into it by the success of the Hearst papers. It's interesting also that it represented a bit of ethnic outreach on their part, trying to tap into the huge German community in Chicago with German artists like Feininger or Fred Opper at Hearst. To me The Kin-Der-Kids are almost more dream-like than Little Nemo in Slumberland, with the extremely odd-shaped characters, unreal landscapes, and the distorted sizes of everything. Gigantic fish, massive hats, absurdly long and slender badguys like Auntie Jim-Jam or Mr. Pillsbury, a massive family bathtub in which the kids navigate the world's oceans, absurdly bony wolves and dogs like Sherlock Bones, blocks of color that made the characters look as if they were cut out of construction paper and pasted onto the page...it all has this crazy, chaotic pastiche feel. Where Winsor McCay had an amazingly precise drafting style that always distorted in meticulously geometric ways, Feininger's drawings are much more suggestive, grotesque, or silly. I wonder which ones kids liked more...hmmmm. If I was going to be trapped on a desert island with only the comics of one of the two, I'd probably pick McCay, just because there was so much more of Little Nemo published and you can get so much more lost in his vertiginous, insanely detailed drawings. But "Your Uncle Feininger" would come in a close second. The story is a great fantasy: a group of care-free kids and their dog adventuring around the world, on the run from dour, ugly grown-ups who want to dose them with "Olio Castoricum", the dreaded castor oil. The strong kid spears hostile whales, the hungry one eats everything, the smart one thinks them out of tight spots. And when things get too dangerous, like when a waterspout sucks their boat into a whirl, Mysterious Pete shows up to save the kids by shooting the twister with his six-gun (obviously). Although Pete also set Auntie Jim-Jam and Cousin Gussie off in pursuit of the kids, so his role -- antagonist or ally -- is unclear. Who would have thought that a character named Mysterious Pete would have obscure motivations? I adore the weird, grim color tones that the comics from that era have, I wonder how they got them. Were they color Zip-a-Tone stencils or something else like that? It makes the world of the comic -- particularly in dark scenes at night or inside dank Russian dungeons -- seem especially threatening and ominous. There's at least two comics where blood spills across the page, as when Daniel Webster guts a gigantic fish with a ridiculously huge knife and when Strenuous Teddy spears a whale, causing the whale's water spout to run red. Sweet, dude. Sunday comics used to be sooooo metal. It's also funny how word bubbles are still developing in this era, that they've been drawn in (sometimes) haphazardly, with a bubble on the left responding to a statement in a bubble to the right; in other words, backwards order. Says one fish: "WON'T THEY!" And the one next to it: "MY! WON'T THEY GET WET!" Or there will be bubbles that don't really say anything at all, just "My my!" or repeat something already said, as if the artist first drew in a word bubble and then decided later what should go in as text. Funny note: when they're in Russia, nearly everything the Russians say (it's in English of course) is suffixed with -ski or -off. "SURRENDERSKI!" shouts a bomb-throwing Russian soldier. Haw! It's also interesting to see how he transcribes his idea of a "British accent" into print. Angela says I'm Daniel Webster -- the little boy who's really an old man dressed like Little Lord Fauntleroy. Thhhppppttht to her. If I were an academic, I'd probably write something in here about how Japansky (the clockwork "waterbaby" whose paddlefeet run the boat and dogsled) is an apparently racist depiction of an Asian laborer, mute and wordless but doing all the work for the white immigrant children. I'd link that to the anti-Japanese and anti-Chinese immigration legislation sweeping the nation at that time and thoroughly explore the ironic metaphorical dynamics of the robot Japanese boy character. But I'm not an academic, so I won't.