Is the process of publishing comics for kids different from publishing them for adults?
FM: With adults, as long as the work is clear you can ask the reader to follow along with something that may be unfamiliar. With comics for kids, the artist has a somewhat different task. He has to be just as clear, maybe even more so, but he shouldn’t presuppose, “Oh well, they’ll know what I mean.” In the Toon Books we go out of our way to intertwine the two spirals of the visual and the word narratives. First of all we vet the vocabulary to make sure to use words the kids know or would be able to decipher. When there’s a word that they don’t know, we subtly illustrate it in a way to allow them to learn that word. And then so much information is carried in the facial expressions, in the staged play, that you don’t need the words to understand that part of the story, so you can use the words to carry something else. It’s like writing a symphony. You don’t have the oboe and the violin play the same score because you don’t need to. Here you have many instruments and they complement each
