With the success of the first Little Lit volume, immaculate reputations, money, a good publisher and a sizeable contact list, Spiegelman and Mouly had one potential stumbling block when it came to editing the second volume of their children's comics anthology: The ability to truly "edit," to chop and to cut and to refuse without severely offending. In essence, do you ask Paul Auster and Jacques de Loustal to contribute something and proceed to tell them that their story is average and really not a very good children's story? Do you ask an old friend, a distant contact or an artist whose merits equal or exceed your own to remove, redraw or otherwise completely alter a story which he has worked long and hard on? Was it within the abilities of Spiegelman and Mouly to edit, strongly direct and advise on their contributor's works? Did they even want the chance to exercise this ability? I don't know. If they have had this opportunity, then their collective "taste" is wholly culpable in the debacle that is Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids. If not, they have knowingly succumbed to the pitfalls of the "strong" contributor list. The latter is the lesser of the two evils but the editors remain guilty of producing a very mediocre book in what can only be described as the optimum conditions.

Let us begin with Spiegelman's story, "The Several Selves of Shelby Sheldrake," a clear indicator that he is ill-suited to the production of children's comics. How is it possible that a man who has thought so long and hard about comics for children and the elements that make up his chosen art form could produce something so woefully inadequate?

Spiegelman's story is about a boy and his mother who suddenly begin to blow aspects of their personalities out of their noses. It is a story in which the names that children are called by their parents and the insults hurled upon them in day-to-day living are made flesh by a sneezing fit. Any semblance of an engaging plot is suffocated by Spiegelman's rough, unfinished line and flat, frigid narration. His desire to amuse his young readers with a repetitive, claustrophobic explosion of imagery is both ill-judged and tedious. Our eyes glaze over with disinterest upon encountering each monotonous page of this four-page offering.

Where Open Me - I'm A Dog succeeded to a certain extent as an amusing novelty book, Spiegelman's children's comics are hampered by overportentousness and his unwillingness or inability to change his drawing style to suit his purpose. His story in the first Little Lit ("Prince Rooster"), for example, replaced fun and excitement with unleavened lessons for the day. One does not question the right of an editor to include his own stories in his own book, but I do wonder what hidden forces compelled him to place his middling stories at the forefront of his collections not once but twice. The utter lack of insight in this respect from someone so experienced is astonishing.

More importantly, Spiegelman should eradicate his delusions of grandeur about producing comics for children in a day and age when no one is producing comics for children. Spiegelman and Mouly appear to have so distanced themselves from comics in the intervening years since the publications of Raw and Maus that they no longer have a feeling for or knowledge of the various delightful children's comics that have surfaced in recent years.

As if to prove my point, the pair of tales that bookend Little Lit II are an example of the worst kind of children's comics. The calamitous closing tale ("The Day I Disappeared") is by two otherwise exceptional talents, Paul Auster and Jacques de Loustal. It is a metaphorical tale of how a man loses and then finds and saves himself in the course of a day. Auster stubbornly refuses to abandon his roots in existentialism and adult fables for the sake of a "mere" children's comic and Loustal, for his part, struggles gamely along, creating art perfectly compatible with Auster's very dour purpose. In truth, Loustal cannot be blamed for his writer's ultimately disastrous foray into the realm of the gravity laden children's story. As a fairy tale for adults, "The Day I Disappeared" is remarkably shallow compared to any of Auster's existentialist tales in The New York Trilogy and yet almost certainly beyond the comprehension of young children. It lacks the swift movement of plot requisite of children's stories and fails at every turn to produce the careful and uncluttered delineation of emotions, replacing this with drawn out, silent, morose exposition.

In truth, the distinguished contributor list of Little Lit II is nothing more than a mirage; a whispered hope and a ceaseless dirge that masks the tepid quality of the book. Jules Feiffer, a wonderful writer and artist, produces a story that I would not put beyond the worst of Marvel hacks. One does not suspect some sudden emasculation of his artistic prowess but a failure to undertake a proper and recent review of children's comics and literature. "Trapped in a Comic Book" is about a child who encounters and annoys a cartoonist only to be sucked into the very comic the cartoonist is drawing. Feiffer adopts a tonal dot pattern to indicate that we are deep within a comic page, blowing up the printing deficiencies of the four-color world of comics. It is a deadly common trick -- which is not a criticism in itself, since it would be too much to ask every artist to create elements of daring innovation every time they produce a new comic. Yet Feiffer's art is inadequate to the job of conveying the fantasy he means to communicate. His harried linework (so essential to the meter of his cartoon strips) has a severe distancing effect here in view of its lack of clarity both narratively and figuratively. It is a defect further exacerbated by the flavorless narration of a trite plot.

In contrast, Posy Simmonds produces a charming tale about Jack Frost ("Mr. Frost"); although it is, like the Feiffer piece, mildly derivative in its plot device of having Jack Frost visit a pair of children, it's also exquisitely told and beautifully colored. With years of experience in both children's books and comics, she puts Feiffer to shame in a matter of pages. Simmonds has an ear for children's patterns of dialogue and fills her allotted space with generous plot turns, adopting a fine conspiratorial tone children everywhere enjoy.

Still, it must be said that even the most seasoned practitioners in children's stories do not always live up to expectations. Barbara McClintock's charmingly drawn "Runaway Shadow" (which concerns a shadow's desire to free itself of its owner) is readable but seems far too slight and short to capture the imagination of young minds. McClintock clearly understands the rhythms of narration and dialogue essential to children's stories but there is a lack of fruitful engagement in her narrative. "Runaway Shadow" contains the skeleton of a story endeavoring to stretch its wings to fill an entire illustrated children's book.

David Sedaris and Ian Falconer's "Pretty Ugly," on the other hand, is good news for the modern child. The final page recalls John Stanley's famously rejected Little Lulu story, "The Bogyman," which Bruce Hamilton (writing in the Little Lulu Library Volume 5, 1986) felt "wasn't appropriate as a mass-market story in 1950" and which he believes still "isn't now either." But Bruce Hamilton was wrong. Falconer and Sedaris satisfy every child's well-known appetite for the grotesque in this tale of how an ogress learns the true meaning of inner beauty by pulling herself inside out.

Kim Deitch's "These Cats Today" concerns a race of supercats who once created and lived in the city of Katropolis which is run by "the combined might of a million dogs." The story is laced with typically exuberant imagery and lovingly drawn with an obsessive attention to detail. While it may be taken as the ultimate insult, the story probably has the appeal of a book by Richard Scarry with its compulsive exposition and its concern with the intricate minutiae of Katropolis. All this is delivered in Deitch's patented early animation style which might distance a number of children from the work.

Some of the other editorial choices also help to lift Little Lit II beyond the zone of death. Richard Maguire produces a technically interesting "Can You Find" activity page filled with twisted shapes and unusual perspectives. Lewis Trondheim's amusing cartoon maze is a few minutes of harmless entertainment which is bound to generate more neural connections in the minds of young children, and Fran¨ois Roca makes a good, if somewhat traditional, account of himself with a surreal "Can you Spot the Mistakes" page. Claude Ponti also delivers the goods in his pleasantly related story of "The Little House That Ran Away From Home," a tale filled with touching pictures of a house weeping and other worldly Dr. Seuss-like creatures collecting "happy sounds" and "smoke-plumes-that-rise-in-the-distance." To cap all this off there is a well known introductory tale from Barnaby which appears to be slightly edited when compared to the first Barnaby collection published by Henry Holt and Company.

Only time will tell if the series has sufficient weight to generate the clouds of nostalgia that inform an appreciation of a Barks Duck story, a Stanley Little Lulu or a Lee and Kirby story from the Silver Age. I would suggest, however, that one hardly needs to journey to the island of Patmos to discern that Little Lit will not be looked upon (if at all) with kindness in ten years' time.

Children are not a very demanding audience but they are terribly exacting in their requirements. In the case of Little Lit, Spiegelman and Mouly have subscribed to the ultimately false and futile values of choosing the most "name" artists they could muster in order to produce a children's book which is, simply put, merely lukewarm water meant to be spat out.

They have declined to look beyond an artist's past laurels and hence blinded themselves to those with less prestige but proven abilities in a combination of both comics narrative and the children's story. This is ultimately the path of safety. There is a sense of security inherent in such a position; a feeling of warmth and comfort in the nebulous cloud of quality inherent in the flock of "names" surrounding your project. But it is not necessarily the path to artistic success. With all the resources eminently at Spiegelman's and Mouly's disposal, no excuses are sufficient to justify such a failure.

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