Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

You are a human animal.

You are a very special breed.

Or you are the only animal.

Who can think, who can reason, who can read.

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I am so happy today because, you know, around once a year, we visit with Art Spiegelman and

Francoise Mouli to see what they have been doing.

Art is, of course, famous for Mouse.

Francois has edited with him Raw Magazine in the past and Little Lit.

She is the art editor of the New Yorker.

And together, they have put together an amazing book, the tune treasury of classic

children's comics. And I'm in love with it. And, you know, I'd always known and had as a favorite,

not the virilities of the superheroes, but for me, comic books were Little Lulu and all of the

other half pints, Dennis the Menace. My mom had a private brief that Dennis the Menace was my

negative role model who taught me to be disobedient, and Art and Francoise have gone

burrowing through the thousands and thousands and thousands of comics between 1930 and

1960, the early 60s, to find classic children's comics.

Now tell me, Art, what were the criteria?

Well, so the comics really started making their own original material in the mid-1930s, starting out as a medium that reprinted comic strip.

So one of the most basic sets of criteria was we weren't going to take comic strip work,

but the things made for that lowly pamphlet entity, the comic book.

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