CSotD: Curious George Gets Deconstructed
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"Sheldon" is so often spot-on about literature that Dave Kellett has released a book of strips entirely on the subject. Well, a lot of the strips are about "Lord of the Rings," but that's as much literature as "Curious George" or "Moby Dick."
I'm not trying to start out the post with a product-plug, but it is relevant to note that one of the benefits of web comics is that they can address a niche audience and not be bound by the limitations of newspaper reach. That is, theoretically, you could do a web strip about oboe players and connect with oboe players all around the world, even though there aren't enough oboe players in any one place to justify running the strip in a newspaper.
That's theoretically. Practically speaking, most successful web comics tap into something already identified as niche-y and popular, like science fiction. Or, um, "Lord of the Rings." Which may be why Kellett can get away with being so intelligent and still attract a substantial audience.
I suspect that part of this is expectations. Oboe players don't expect to find a comic strip about their favorite instrument on line, so they don't look for it and so it never achieves the kind of mass where it rises to the top of search results, though, if one of them found it, it might get mentioned on his oboe player Facebook page, and, if any other oboe players happened to look in the 24 hours before it disappeared permanently into the bowels of the FB beast, there you'd be.
(Facebook is replacing email, they tell me. Or I think someone told me. I don't remember. Nothing that happened more than about eight hours ago matters anymore.)
Which means that, getting back to "Curious George," as one does, there is something odd about a duck reading the original "Curious George" books. Logically, the duck would be watching "Curious George" on PBS, where he has been reduced to the kind of jolly, harmless, pointless stories that Arthur was expecting from the books. And also 30 minutes of phony "ooo-ooo-ooo" "eee-eee-eee" monkey sound effects, which make "Curious George" the most annoying program on all of television, or, at least, the most annoying I've seen in the last eight hours.
Meanwhile, like Sheldon's grandfather, I remember when children's books had a little more heft. Not only was "Curious George" frequently on the brink of destruction, but even the older Seuss books carried some of the weight of the world — Thidwick and his whole crew were at risk of being shot by hunters while Horton held the fate of an entire world in his hands. Or the tip of his trunk.
And then came the "I Can Read" books, and the big risk was that a cat would mess up your house.
There has been a theory for a decade or so that one reason kids have problems with the switch from middle school to high school is that elementary and middle school curriculum is largely lterature-based. So, instead of having a social studies book that tells you facts about South America, you get a social studies book that tells you a story about Jose and Maria who live in South America. Instead of a science book that tells you how to conduct an experiment, you have a science book in which Billy and Susie go visit the kindly man in the lab coat.
Then the kids get to high school and suddenly they're expected to be able to read and understand books that don't contain stories about other kids.
I wonder if they go through a similar shock when their literature changes from nice books about multi-cultural kids playing in the snow and puppies going for walks to stories like "Hunger Games" and Harry Potter, where kids their age are facing death, horror and destruction on a daily level?
Do your kids a favor. Buy them some old, classic kids' picture books and start scaring the crap out of them a little at a time each day. They'll thank you when they recover from adolescence.
Well, they won't actually thank you. But they'll "like" something vaguely relevant and, if you happen to be checking Facebook at the right moment, you'll know.
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