CSotD: The appeal of comic strips for young people is in Nate
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In Big Nate, Nate's soccer team has just lost 1-0 to a team that, up until this week, had lost 60 games in a row. He's not taking it well.
He's got a legitimate gripe. The only goal came on an uncalled hand-ball into the net. His net, that is. Nate is a 'keeper.
But, still, he needs to get a grip, and the strip has, to great effect, been playing off his reaction to the goal and subsequent loss.
The funny thing is, as a father, I usually played the Nate role, and my goalkeeper sons would be the ones reminding me that these things happen and that there will be another game Thursday and to just let it go.
To the point where I once brought up some particularly egregious officiating mis-step from some years ago and my son said, "Well, yeah, but that was the Drunk Ref."
Which is to say, he remembered it, too, and even agreed that it wasn't fair, but … wait … what?
"Yeah, we didn't know his name. We just called him the 'Drunk Ref.'"
Apparently, the guy always smelled of something, which my son only later discovered was whiskey. But, to the kids on the soccer team, he was the "Drunk Ref," and, when he showed up to officiate a game, they adjusted their style of play — or at least their expectations — accordingly, just as they would for a ref who consistently misapplied the off-sides rule one way or another.
That was the son who later became quite a successful middle-school soccer coach, and I'm sure that he, too, had to do a few of these post-game consolations with the various Nates on his teams.
I'm glad the rides home with Dad were such good preparation.
Lincoln Peirce has built "Big Nate" into something of a commercial empire, with books and a website full of other stuff in addition to the strip, and, whether or not it lures kids into at least flipping to the funny pages in their local paper, he has a sense of humor that appeals both to the kids going through middle school now and those of us who have been through it, particularly those of us who have been through it once as kids and then again as parents.
At some point, I want to do a piece on kids and comics, because there are several strips that appeal to younger readers and deserve credit for it, even though they don't particularly scratch the itch for me.
Meanwhile, there aren't a whole lot that appeal to both kids and parents the way Big Nate does. There are some that are charmingly nostalgic — Red and Rover in particular — but a lot of the charm of that strip is in looking back.
There are a boatload of strips that look back on childhood and laugh over the things we said and did, but those are very clearly an adult looking at kids and they maintain that adult perspective.
Not to say that they exclude kids, but, like the now-classic film, A Christmas Story, they contain enough winks and nods to the adults, as well as references to moments and attitudes of the past, that, while current kids really enjoy Ralphie's misadventures, you can tell Shepherd's story is primarily a nostalgia piece.
Big Nate may bring back memories for adult readers, but it is not nostalgia. It's particular strength is that Lincoln Peirce has been a middle-school teacher and I'll bet a popular one. His view of kids is much more up-to-date and ground level than average.
That is, kids will laugh at jokes about heavy backpacks and saggy jeans, but the tone and storylines in Big Nate are much more geared to their lives as they see them rather than as they are viewed from a distance by the grown-ups.
Truth is, I'm not sure the extent to which kids read the strip itself compared to reading the books alongside Jeff Kinney's similarly-based middle-school blockbuster "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" series or, for that matter, Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson books, which are quite different from the other two but have massive appeal to the same book-hungry audience of little people.
I'm basically thinking out loud here. Stay tuned.
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