By Geoffrey Hayes (Toon Books/Raw Junior)
ISBN: 978-0-9799238-0-7
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: a perfect way to keep adults quiet whilst opening world of adventure for youngsters… 10/10
Once upon a time – and for the longest time imaginable – comics were universally denigrated as a creative and narrative ghetto cherished only by children and simpletons. For decades the producers, creators and lovers of the medium struggled to change that perception and gradually acceptance came.
These days most folk accept that word and pictures in sequential union can make stories and tell truths as valid, challenging and life-changing as any other full-blown art-form.
Sadly, along the way the commercial underpinnings of the industry went too far.
Where once there were a host of successful, self-propagating comics scrupulously generating tales and delights intended to entertain, inform and educate such specific demographics as Toddler/Kindergarten, Young and Older Juvenile, General, Boys and Girls periodical publications, nowadays Britain and America can only afford to maintain a few paltry out-industry licensed tie-ins and spin-offs for younger readerships.
The greater proportion of strip magazines are necessarily manufactured for a highly specific – and dwindling – niche market, whilst the genres that fed and nurtured comics are more effectively and expansively disseminated via TV, movies and assorted video and interactive games media.
Thankfully old-fashioned book publishers and the new graphic novel industry have a different business model and far more sensible long-term goals, so the lack has been increasingly countered and the challenge to train and bring youngsters into the medium taken up outside the mainstream – and dying – periodical markets.
I’ve banged on for years about the industry’s foolish rejection of the beginner-reading markets, but what most publishers have been collectively offering young/early consumers – and their parents (excepting, of course the magnificent efforts of David Fickling Books and their wonderful comic The Phoenix) – has seldom jibed with what those incredibly selective consumers are interested in or need.
In recent years however the book trade has moved with the times and where numerous publishing houses have opened comic medium divisions, one in particular has gone all-out to cultivate tomorrow’s graphic narrative nation.
Toon Books/Raw Junior was established by Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly as an imprint of the groundbreaking alternative comics magazine to provide high-quality comics stories which would entice pre-schoolers and starter-readers into a lifelong love affair with strips in particular and reading in general.
Their burgeoning stable of talented creators have produced a wealth of superbly superior comic tales in three accredited educational standards (Level 1: First Comic for brand new readers, Level 2: Easy-to-Read for Emerging Readers and Level 3: Chapter Books for Advanced Beginners) and the company even supplements their publications with an online tool.
TOON-BOOKS.com offers follow up such as interactive audio-versions read by the authors – and in a multitude of languages – and a “cartoon maker†facility which allows readers to become writers of their own adventures about the characters they have just met in the printed editions. Many books include a page of tips for parents and teachers on ‘How to Read Comics with Kids’…
Benny and Penny in Just Pretend is part of an on-going multi-award winning series of tales starring a typical brother-and-sister act of (occasionally) wayward suburban mice.
Author Geoffrey Hayes is a veteran of the children’s entertainment scene, having written and/or illustrated more than 40 books (including Otto and Uncle Tooth, Bear by Himself, the Patrick Bear series and Margaret Wise Brown’s When the Wind Blew among so many others) and proudly affirms that all of Benny & Penny‘s engaging anthropomorphic exploits are drawn in coloured pencil.
Here the boisterous argumentative tots are playing in the garden when Penny realises she cannot find her brother. An increasingly frantic search reveals him lost in dreams of being a pirate, but he’s so wrapped up in the game that he refuses to play with her and a fight inevitably starts…
As the regulation spat escalates tempers fray and eventually Mommy has to intervene. Forced to play with his little sister, Benny suggests Hide and Seek and, when Penny is safely lost, “forgets†to look for her…
Eventually, however, he starts to worry. She’s not making any annoying noises and soon Benny is really hunting for her with growing panic. He’s really worried and not so keen on playing on his own anymore…
So when Penny at last turns up, Benny is happy to pretend Penny isn’t always annoying and soon sees that she makes a pretty good pirate too…
Aimed at the four-and-above age-range and released as a child-sized (236 x1 62mm), gloriously evocative, beguilingly beautiful 32 page full-colour hardback, Benny and Penny in Just Pretend is the kind of pictorial treasure that kids and their minders will be drawn back to over and over again.
© 2008 Raw Junior, LLC. All rights reserved.