Wednesday, March 07, 2007

Gracias, Kibix

"Kibix" is a Web-based children's magazine published in Mexico (and in Spanish, naturally), whose editor contacted me several weeks ago asking permission to use some of my art in an article about Mom's Cancer. The March Kibix just came out, and I think the piece looks great:


My impression is that Kibix is aimed at the same cohort that Nickelodeon reaches elsewhere, and I also gather that this "Creators" ("Creadores") section is a regular feature of the magazine. Other features touch on health, ecology, and so on.

A couple of things about this recognition strike me as interesting. First, there's no Spanish translation of Mom's Cancer on the market yet, so I'm especially pleased--if a little puzzled--that a Spanish-language magazine would feature it. Second, as I've written before, I'm bemused to see my book getting some notice as literature for children and young adults. I wasn't aiming for that.

However, I was very careful to write and draw Mom's Cancer so it'd be accessible to the widest audience possible, from children to grandparents who'd never read a comic book or graphic novel. I made choices in language and artistic style with that priority in mind. (Maybe someday I'll share the extraordinary profanity Mom was capable of that didn't make it into the book.) It's really nice to see that those choices worked, even if in a way I didn't intend.
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3 comments:

Radharani said...

congratulations!!! its glad to read a good new!
send you a big hugh

Anonymous said...

Muaha! Cool, Spanish! I would almost be able to read it if the images were bigger!

Mike said...

I would hope a Spanish translation would be in the works, but it's good to see a magazine hip enough to realize that, given the media impact of the Global Village, kids in Mexico are going to be accessing media in other languages, particularly English. How many foreign rock bands perform in English? One of the artists I work with lives in Malaysia, and she reads comics and even Harry Potter in English -- imagine reading the Half-Blood Prince in a second language! It's hard to appreciate in this country, where we not only don't teach languages effectively, but assume that kids want dumbed-down, unchallenging stories to read. (Having just read an exchange about an educational newspaper feature for kids on Darfur in which many pros in the business felt it was "inappropriate" to teach kids about things like that.)