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We really need to talk about Cricket Magazine more than we do. We need to appreciate its commitment to class and polish, its all-star cast of authors and illustrators, but most of all I want to talk about its COMICS and how unique they are. (1/?)
I’m lucky enough to get to discuss comic strips, and their adaptions, in a thoughtful (if not always reverent) podcasting environment with @bitterkarella on a regular basis. The comics in Cricket, however, haven’t been adapted to anything (I think? There *might* be a record...).
Cricket has an entirely unique idiom of comics. The only thing I can compare it to is Sergio Aragones’ margin doodles in Mad Magazine, but Cricket takes that idea way past throwaway jokes.
Cricket, if you’re not already familiar, is a literature magazine for children. It actually has a number of spinoff magazines, like Ladybug for new readers, Cicada for teens, but Cricket covers the widest swath of ages... which means its readers’ vocabulary level varies wildly.
Rather than dumbing it down to the lowest level, or raising their age range, Cricket made their first innovation: the entire magazine, from letters page to endpapers, is ANNOTATED. Big, obscure, or hard to pronounce words have a definition in the margins.
This is where comics comes in. Welcome to Cricket Country. (It’s in the bottom margins.)
Cricket is home to a sprawling cast of 50-ish bug characters. They appear in the margins every issue to give those definitions for the hard words, in character!
Each issue also contains a half-page “Cricket and Ladybug” comic, wherein the titular stars (and anyone else who’s with them) have an adventure together. This is the most conventional form of comic in the magazine— but it’s only act two of a three-act story!
“Cricket and Ladybug” is the version I grew up with, by the way; in the current version of Cricket, the comic has been upgraded to a full page, and is now called Cricket Country. As you can see, it’s also in color now, just like the rest of the magazine.
Acts one and three of each issue’s comic story are situated in the margins beneath the Letterbox and Cricket League columns.
Look at this.
Have you EVER seen a story told in this format anywhere else?
Look at this.
Have you EVER seen a story told in this format anywhere else?
Each comic is a single large conversation between about 20 characters, each of whom only gets one line, and they typically speak in about the same order. There are no word balloons and there are no panel borders!
The Cricket Country characters were created by the late, great Trina Schart Hyman, a Caldecott-nominated titan of illustration. When she started contributing to Cricket, the characters were much less distinct, and the comics were more like super-sized annotations.
Ten years later, by 1983, the cast had expanded enormously, and the legions of anonymous crickets had been cut down to five named ones. By putting the characters in a generally standardized order, TSH was able to compress a huge amount of storytelling into such a small margin!
The use of bug characters enabled TSH other freedoms: flying characters like Pudding and Weenie were able to soar over the single panel border itself to create more space. Taller characters, like Sluggo and Zoot, could even serve as virtual panel borders.
On both of these pages, Sluggo serves to split the conversation in half, changing the subject to the scary eyes. Conversely, George and Tail, who are literally two ends of one earthworm, appear on opposite sides of him, tethering the story elements together.
Other characters create “bubbles” around themselves by normally appearing in pairs, like bad babies Philip and Sarah or the two “Aunts”. George and Tail appear on opposite pages frequently, but in the winter they scoot around on a saucer sled, giving them a bubble of their own.
This particular strip features another virtual panel border: Chester, a gigantic tarantula who’s too big for the panels! (And whom I had to include because he’s Mike’s favorite character... or maybe just the only one Mike remembers?)
(Thread continues as I dig through my box for more comic-focused issues)
