Art Spiegelman tried to ditch the family Thomas the Tank Engine books
“I guess I don’t subscribe to the twee school. I remember trying to lose our copy of Thomas the Tank Engine before I had to read it again. Life is a more dimensional and interesting affair than vestigially Victorian notions of childhood. I was trying to make something substantial, something to be read and reread.”
— Art Spiegelman
Art Spiegelman’s diss of the Thomas the Tank Engine books appeared in a fairly short New York magazine piece published in 2008.
I get it, although I should note that both Thomas volumes and Spiegelman’s work, especially Maus and its siblings, were books that our kid Nick read, obviously at different points of their childhood. I can’t actually see a straight line there, all these years later, but Nick’s curiosity took them around a lot of shelves in libraries and bookstores.
Like a lot of toddlers and preschoolers in that era (Nick was into all things Thomas in the early 2000s), Nick was drawn to the plucky steam engine and his veddy British friends: proud Gordon, impetuous James, childlike Percy, all of them trains eager to please the people of the fictional island of Sodor. (It all comes back to me fairly quickly.) The books were complemented by the TV series, which we bought on DVD and absolutely put on to ensure 15 quiet minutes while we hustled up supper out of thin air.
Nick at three was obsessed with trains: we bought little Thomas and other toys, and Martha became adept at sourcing used wooden track. A story for another day is how I, uh, assisted Santa in mid-December one year to procure an add-on set called Percy’s Chocolate Crunch.
Later on, at some point after Narnia and before Lovecraft, Nick got into graphic novels, especially Maus. The era of reading to Nick aloud had come and gone by then, but I was happy to return to the saga (a devastating account of the Holocaust) myself.
In the end, I can’t agree wholeheartedly with Spiegelman here. I read and re-read small Thomas books (including the very pious original books by Rev. W. Awdry) to Nick, with no regrets. And I was delighted to see them find works like Maus on their own.
A life of reading should certainly allow for the twee, the wee, and the greats.