CSotD: You’re just in time to hear a story …
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Here's a chance to get in at the start of a new adventure on a relatively new comic.
"The Lost Side of Suburbia" is a clumsy name that doesn't address the topic or voice of Kory Merritt's strip, but it's worth putting that aside and plunging into a storytelling strip with some appeal.
LSoS is a Monday-Friday strip that uses a large panel and a fair amount of text woven around the illustrations, to tell stories in a traditional style. I'd say "kids' stories" except that it is old-school in the sense that the main character can be a Jack-like trickster, and most modern kids' stories are all lollipops, roses and fair play. And no thorns on those roses.
Well, this isn't the land where everybody gets a trophy, but JK Rowling didn't sugarcoat her Harry Potter stories, either, and she seems to have done alright with the kids.
It's no small factor, nor is it common enough that it doesn't stand out.
A friend from college was just forced into retirement by a cost-cutting school after 30 years of teaching high school English, and his Facebook page has been full of sympathetic comments from former students. While there has been quite a bit of responses-to-the-responses in which people compliment the literacy of his students and the frequent mention of how he awakened their curiosity and love of literature, what I found striking was the number of students who said, "you never spoke down to us."
Kory Merritt is an elementary school teacher and fairly new in his field. It being, in this day and age, a pretty safe bet that not many cartoonists get to quit their day jobs anymore, even if they want to, and, it also being a pretty safe bet that this cartoon mirrors his attitude towards dealing with kids, I wouldn't be surprised if, a quarter century from now, his retirement, too, is marked with regret and good memories by students to whom he did not speak down.
It's also worth observing that what we call "fairy tales" (a large number of which don't include any fairies) were not created exclusively for children in the first place. These were stories told around the hearth and, while some of them embodied morals that were, indeed, being passed down to the younger generation, they fulfilled more the role of the Sunday sermon, which also contains morals that children should absorb but is not aimed solely at their improvement.
Both the Grimm Brothers and Joel Chandler Harris collected folk tales in an early version of anthropology, with the Grimm Brothers tales used to create a common cultural image to unite the diverse kingdoms and duchies of what would become Germany, and Harris's stories intended to preserve the dialects and folk traditions among African-Americans just released from slavery.
Similarly, at the start of the 20th century, Frank Bird Linderman published a collection of "Old Man Stories," in which, just as Harris sought to preserve the traditions of black storytelling, he worked to record the stories and narrative style of the Chippewa, Cree and Blackfoot storytellers he had known in Montana during his prospecting and trapping days.
In the introduction to his first volume, he tells of sitting in a storytelling session with what he thought was an attitude of solemn cultural respect, and being asked why he did not laugh at the mad goings-on of the trickster hero and buffoon, Old Man.
“We always laugh when we speak of Old Man," the Chippewa storyteller assured him. "He expects it and laughs with us from the past.”
Well, a new adventure is just beginning at LSoS, and so it's a good time to jump in and see what Kory Merritt's got, and if it includes a few laughs.
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