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Special Feature
The Christmas Albums Three gifted artists create the new chestnuts By Adam McGovern
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Did you know that comics could be for kids? With sensitive charm and engaging cartoon simplicity, the artists reviewed here are proving that the medium isn’t just for nostalgic fortysomethings and hip graduate students anymore. Okay, enough sarcasm – it’s almost Christmas! And well in time, HarperCollins’ !t imprint has sent three distinguished comic creators to the workshop on these lovely undersized hardcovers, with an old-school children’s-library design aesthetic and refreshing this-minute artistry inside.
The arboreal theme of The Fir-Tree is apt; like Tim Burton directing Sweeney Todd or Dan Slott writing marquee books about superheroes even the Marvel Handbook forgot, the outwardly whimsical, undercurrently melancholy Lilli Carré adapting Hans Christian Andersen is simply what nature intended.
The story of a self-sabotaging tree who craves the glamour of being decked out for Christmas and then pines (ahem) for its life back in the forest, the book is a great gift of storybook psychology in which both Andersen’s and Carré’s cheer and insight are well matched.
A sense of unrestrained possibility and expression unbounded by physical law, the dream-logic and storytelling requirements of childhood and vision, stretches Carré’s characters’ limbs in loops and arcs that sweep a calligraphy of expression across the page. A lovely cut-paper aesthetic layers broad shapes of color or artfully isolated narrative essentials as called for. Carré’s marionette-like anatomical style is the ideal medium for this enchanted diorama of a story, like an animated holiday shop-window you can carry around in a backpack or purse.
Like a reverse crystal ball showing us the past through a snowglobe, Joel Priddy’s vision of O. Henry’s Gift of the Magi opens with cameo-shaped painterly vignettes windowing fuzzy scenes of antique streets with his precise yet fluid cartoon figures foregrounding them. He’s the master of an uncloying charm and a minimal expressive spectrum, and the eloquent storytelling ingenuity, from the most literal progressions to the most logical yet imaginative symbolic systems, is quietly staggering. A handful of comics this year (though this few covers a surprising range, from Warren Ellis’ impressionistic Mary Shelley biography Frankenstein’s Womb to mpMann & A. David Lewis’ Noah/Katrina flood epic Some New Kind of Slaughter to the stageplay-like finale of the Mark Millar FF run) will make you cry at their substance and smile for the promise of the medium; Priddy’s Magi is one of them.
After the humble majesty of Fir-Tree and Magi Alex Robinson swerves the sled to show L. Frank Baum’s proto-blockbuster sensibility and smartly update his populist sense of vernacular smack-talk in Baum’s irreverent yet affecting yarn A Kidnapped Santa Claus. Robinson’s kids’-underground style, kinetic instincts and pyrotechnic Rankin/Bass staging are all great fun, though his compositions would work better on conventionally-sized comic pages and seem less mindful of the series’ format than the single-image or montage methods of Carré and Priddy (a bit old-fashioned-Christmas, since even the shrunken-down mobile apps Santa’s been bringing kids of all ages let you zoom in and pan around).
Kidnapped ends up a good burlesque of secular grabbiness, Fir-Tree and Magi great parables on what’s most worth having. And if, like me, you’re Jewish, don’t worry – I think that means they have to make us five more.
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