By Rutu Modan (Toon Books/Raw Junior)
ISBN: 978-1-935179-17-7
Win’s Christmas Gift Recommendation: open this one well before Xmas dinner to let everybody digest fully… 8/10
Perhaps better known for her incisively mature comics material such as the phenomenal and evocative Exit Wounds, Israeli cartoonist, editor and publisher Rutu Modan has also illustrated many works by other writers. However, even though her self-penned newspaper serial The Murder of the Terminal Patient, autobiographical webcomic Mixed Emotions, and a numerous short works in anthologies such as Jamilti and Other Stories, have perfectly showcased her broad graphic talents, until the release of Maya Makes a Mess, she had never written and drawn a comic for young children.
Born in 1966 in Tel Hashomer, Modan moved with her equally multi-talented and over-achieving family to Tel Aviv in the mid-1970s. After graduating from the Belazel Academy of Art and Design, Rutu co-edited the Hebrew iteration of Mad Magazine, before forming comics company Actus Tragicus with fellow Mad alumni Yirmi Pinkus.
This particular tale has a delightfully faux-English ambiance to it and apparently stems from a hard-learned lesson in etiquette and table-manners involving the internationally acclaimed multi-award-winning author and her young daughter Michal…
It opens when Mummy sternly tells little Maya to stop eating her pasta with her hands and continues as the little tyke endures a torrent of unnecessary orders such as “sit up†and “use a napkinâ€. When she tries to feed the dog a titbit her Father further admonishes her and asks how she would behave if she was eating with The Queen…
Just then there’s a loud ring of the doorbell and an elegant footman enters, blows a trumpet fanfare and delivers a formal invitation. Maya’s presence has been requested at a Royal Dinner Party that very night.
Too rushed to even put on a party frock, Maya is hustled into a jet in the garden and flown off to the Palace. Soon the little girl is crammed into a grand ballroom setting with lots of fancy dishes on posh tables being delicately consumed by dull Dukes and dry dowagers, glowering generals and diffident debutantes. Even the Corgis at her feet are snooty.
Faced with too much cutlery and suspicious looking stuff she probably doesn’t like, Maya asks for pasta and ketchup and, since there’s no spaghetti fork, is advised to eat it like she’s used too…
The entire room is stunned by her splashily bare-handed response and the Queen, utterly aghast, enquires why the little girl eats like that. When Maya responds that it makes the food taste better, the stately royal matron can only try it that way herself.
And what the Queen does, everybody else must also do…
This is terrific tome for those just starting to read on their own, delivering deliciously anarchic, amusing antics from a fantastically forceful but likable little lass successfully striking back against all those stupid grown-up rules. Moreover, rendered in a delightful digital and lavish adaptation of Hergé’s classic and miraculously effective Ligne Claire art style, this is also a beguilingly seductive visual experience for bookworms and browsers of any vintage.
Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly set up Toon Books/Raw Junior as an imprint of the groundbreaking and legendary alternative comics magazine, designed to provide high-quality comics stories in formats that would entice pre-schoolers and beginning readers into a life long love affair with strips in particular and reading in general.
Their 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 supplements their releases with on-line tool TOON-BOOKS.com which offers follow-up such as interactive audio-versions in many languages and a “cartoon maker†facility enabling readers to become writers of their own adventures about the characters they have just met in the printed editions.
Most books also include a page of tips for parents and teachers on ‘How to Read Comics with Kids’…
© 2012 Rutu Modan and Raw Junior, LLC. All rights reserved.