Ten-year-old Alexa Kitchen, the world’s youngest professional cartoonist, has inked an agreement with Hyperion/Disney that will result in the publication in 2009 of a collection of cartoons entitled Grown-Ups Are Dumb (No Offense).  The precocious cartoonist wrote Drawing Comics Is Easy (Except When It’s Not) at the tender age of 7 and the book resulted in her receiving Eisner and Harvey Nominations, making her by far the youngest cartoonist to receive such accolades.  Her work has been praised by major talents including R. Crumb and Neil Gaiman, and she has been the subject of flattering profiles in the New York Times and The Boston Globe.

To the sharp perceptions of a smart little girl (long celebrated in literature and film), she brings a drawing talent that clearly benefits from an appreciation of the great tradition of cartooning (Ernie Bushmiller’s Nancy and Bill Watterson’s Calvin and Hobbes are among her favorites) that no doubt results from the influence of her father Denis Kitchen, a cartoonist who founded Kitchen Sink Press and is now a literary agent. Lest anyone think that her success is the result of some form of nepotism, simply reflect on baseball, another realm like cartooning (either its funny and perceptive or its not) where success (either you can hit the curve ball or you can’t) has to earned rather than bestowed—and note how the combination of genetics and environment (nature and nurture) has resulted in so many examples of successful offspring (Ken Griffey Jr., Prince Fielder, the Alous, etc.).