In a follow-up to his piece for the Harrisburg Patriot-News, Chris Mautner posts the full text of his lengthy interview with TOON Books Editorial Director Françoise Mouly to his Panels and Pixels blog.
I just felt the best way to make my point was to actually make something that hasn’t actually been done, which was to make comics at the point where the child is learning to read, where the vocabulary would be looked at and controlled and the story would be appropriate for a six year old.It’s a very hinge age, because you’re too big for picture books and you’re not fluent enough for Harry Potter. When you actually have kids you realize there aren’t that many books published for that moment because kids are not into books. They don’t know how to read. They’re a little too big to be read to so there’s a kind of giving up on this.