Last week, I finally finished Donald Sturrock’s Storyteller: The Authorized Biography of Roald Dahl. I highly recommend it. In addition to being well-written and carefully researched, it’s a heck of a story. In it, you’ll encounter such facts as these: During World War II, Dahl was a spy. (This has previously been documented in Jennet
“Barnaby exclusively in the Chicago Sun!” Here’s a photo of a Chicago Sun delivery truck in the 1940s. The occasion for sharing the photo is the quest for original Barnaby strips! Â As readers of this blog know, Eric Reynolds and I are co-editing The Complete Barnaby for Fantagraphics. Â We’re currently working on gathering strips from
On the BBC’s Faulks on Fiction this week, Martin Amis said, “People ask me if I ever thought of writing a children’s book. I say, ‘If I had a serious brain injury I might well write a children’s book’, but otherwise the idea of being conscious of who you’re directing the story to is anathema to
What would Kansas be like without Langston Hughes, William S. Burroughs, or The Wizard of Oz? Â What would Kansas be like without art? Â That’s what the blog Imagine Kansas Without Art is considering, in light of Governor Brownback’s order to eliminate the Kansas Arts Commission (which, if approved by the state legislature, will go into
Last Friday, in my English 703: Critical Approaches to Children’s Literature class, the students and I spent 5 minutes talking nonsense. Â We’d been reading theories of nonsense, and Lewis Carroll’s Alice books – I thought it would be both fun and educational to put those theories into practice. So, based on our readings of Tigges,
While he was contributing to the New Yorker as Syd Hoff, he was also contributing to the Daily Worker and New Masses as A. Redfield – the pseudonym he adopted for his radical work. The Ruling Clawss (Daily Worker, 1935) collects his cartoons originally published in the Communist daily. Contrary to what all published biographies
In a tribute to the Barnaby fan clubs of the 1940s, Del Rey created its own “Barnaby International Fan Club” – or, at least, the laminated plastic card announcing such a club – to promote the six Barnaby volumes it published in 1985 and 1986.  Here’s the front of the card: Here’s the  back: Del
As we celebrate the birthdays of Mozart (255th) and Lewis Carroll (179th) amidst threatened cuts to arts funding, we might re-read Yuko Takao’s A Winter Concert (1995; English translation, 1997).  Rendered in thin dark lines on a white background, mice walk to a concert. As the pianist begins to play, colored pointillist shapes rise from
This appears in the 1969 catalogue for Weston Woods Studios. As far as I know, Crockett Johnson said these words on no other occasion. He did, in 1943, tell journalist Charles Fisher, “I don’t draw or write Barnaby for children. People who write for children usually write down to them. I don’t believe in that”
If you’ve played the Rovio game Angry Birds for any length of time, you’ll know Ari Pulkkinen‘s catchy theme. Indeed, the music is almost as addictive as the game –Â as some of these cover versions indicate. The Genevieve Trio‘s performance brings out a certain olde-worlde-folk-music quality that I really like. Accordion, upright bass (not pictured),