Little Lit, the comics anthology edited by Art Spiegelman and Francoise Mouly was one of the best-selling books of the last holiday season at a number of pop culture stores (see 'Little Lit Sells Big').  Little Lit was a great collection of comics that managed to appeal to kids without patronizing them -- a trick that made the anthology one of the most interesting books published last year for comics fans of all ages.  This year Spiegelman and Mouly have done it again with a sequel to Little Lit--Strange Stories For Strange Kids--another great collection of short comics with a very broad demographic appeal.  The formula remains the same -- get notable children's book illustrators to try their hands at comics (Maurice Sendak's uproarious 'Cereal Baby Keller'), revive a classic story from the 1940s (Crockett Johnson's Barnaby), and mix in works by a diverse group of contemporary comic creators (Jules Feiffer, Jacques De Loustal, Kaz, Spiegelman, etc.).

 

With both Little Lit and Strange Stories for Strange Kids available for this holiday season (from FM International, Diamond Comic Distributors, or Harper/Collins), pop culture retailers now have two books to recommend to precocious kids and preoccupied parents.  In order to insure the future of comics, it is crucially important to provide kids with enjoyable and challenging experiences reading comics -- to open their eyes to the enormous and varied potential of this form of illustrated literature.  There are a number of comics with a strong appeal to young readers, ranging from Asterisk and Archie, to Sailormoon and the Simpsons, but there are no better comic books to recommend to precocious readers than the two volumes of the Little Lit series.