From USA Today‘s interview with Jeff Kinney, author of the DIARY OF A WIMPY KID series:
For the cover of the first book, its main color — burnt red — was chosen to match the cover of J.D. Salinger’s Catcher in the Rye, which also has a discontented narrator, if older and more jaded.
“Greg is like Holden Caulfield,” Kochman says. “What he doesn’t like in others he’s guilty of himself. Kids recognize that. And when you identify with something, you can rise above it.”
Kinney’s humor is gentle, compared with the Cartoon Network. But some of Greg’s vocabulary — “morons,” “booger” and “farted” — isn’t on school spelling lists.
From The Comics Journal‘s new interview with Italian cartoonist Gipi about his graphic novel GARAGE BAND:
“Youth is war. At least it was in my case. A war against your own family, to become an individual. A war against society, so full of hypocrisy and intolerable for a teenager’s purity-thirsty eyes. Of course, I am talking about my experience as an Italian teenager during the ’80s. I don’t know if this feeling could be shared on the other side of the ocean nowadays. For me, it was a real battle. Nothing around me pleased me or even satisfied me. Not the politic, social, economical or religious systems I grew up in. It wasn’t a coincidence I was the singer of a punk hardcore band.”
Posted by Aaron Humphrey.
Gipi is exactly right about being a teenager. It’s true on both sides of the ocean and in any era.
Conflict, maybe, but “war”? It’s bad enough without the hype.