We've been reading more comics around here lately. For me, it started with an urgency to get that first book of the year under my belt. For Sol, I think it's that after months of reading way above his “grade level” (a phrase that doesn’t really apply to us, but is kind of a lazy way to get at the point), he’s naturally gravitating to some lighter stuff. And by lighter I mean Calvin and Hobbes, Peanuts collections, and the Bone series. I’m familiar enough with comics to know that heavy on the pictures doesn’t necessarily mean light on the story. I just finished reading Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and was really amazed by the power of its simplicity.
This is similar to how I feel when Luna shows me her drawings. She does page after page of renderings of the people in her life. They are most always just faces, but with such detail and such emotion that they almost speak to me. She has recently been concerned with capturing the lines in the brow—some faces have more lines than others, and the shape of the lines can change with fluctuations in facial expression. She pays close attention to this. I wonder about the stories she is creating about her life, about herself, in these pictures. What does she make of this world?
Speaking of comics, and specifically Peanuts collections, I appreciated the post, "My First Lesson in Being Black" on Aunt Jemima’s Revenge. Professor Tracey writes about her identification with Peppermint Patty as a kid, and the fact that it never occurred to her that the character was white, and therefore somehow different from her, until she was criticized for “fixing” Patty’s skin tone in a drawing.
This really spoke to me because my son has spent almost half his life identifying with a character that could only really look like him with the help of Photoshop. Actually it would be more accurate to say that Sol believes he is Link from the Legend of Zelda Nintendo game series. He doesn’t just play the game, he lives it. In fact, he has spent more time being Link than he has playing Link. There is something about a young boy fated to save the world from evil forces that appeals to my young boy with a highly-attuned sense of justice. He’s a boy hero; a hero with a cool costume, a sword, and a shield.
So, what if the fair-skinned, blonde-haired, often-times-blue-eyed boy looks nothing like my bronze-toned, dark-haired, deeply-brown-eyed son? Does this even register for him? And if so, how does he feel about it? I haven’t figured out how to ask him these things without risking disrupting his play world. And maybe that’s the key: he’s playing, and as long as no one is telling him there is something wrong with the picture he is painting in his head, then it doesn’t matter what colors he chooses.
I have a friend who regularly shaded in the skin tone of the princesses that adorned her daughter’s clothes, books, and even shoes during a particularly avid Disney Princesses phase. I can’t help wondering what Link would look like if I “fixed” him just a little. I also can't help wondering why Link doesn’t look a little more like his creator Shigeru Miyamoto? It wouldn’t solve all my problems if he did, but it might help a little.
This morning while I was perusing Goodreads, as I often do these days, Sol came up and began reading over my shoulder, as he often does these days, and exclaimed, “F. Scott Fitzgerald?!”
“Yeah,” I said. “You heard of him?”
“Well, his wife Zelda inspired the character 'Princess Zelda,'” he said.
“What?" I asked disbelievingly. "Are you sure? Is that true?”
“Of course it’s true. I read it on Wikipedia,” he said. “Anyway, why are you reading about the man that was married to the woman that inspired a character in my video game?”
“Well, first of all,” I said, “everything on Wikipedia is not necessarily true. And secondly, F. Scott Fitzgerald is pretty famous on his own. He wrote some really good books.”
“Mmm-hmm,” he said, eyeing me skeptically before walking away.
