Gateway strip

There's a substitute teacher at "Big Nate" this week, and not only that, but he's fresh out of teacher's college. Game on!

Or, as today's strip suggests, maybe not.

Nate leads a life of quiet frustration, though it's actually never all that quiet. Middle school boys aren't very good at playing their cards close to their vests. Add the fact that everybody in his class has better judgment than he does, and you've got the makings of a pretty funny comic strip, especially for other middle schoolers.

I've often defended the presence of "Garfield" as a bridge strip to get little guys to read the comics. Yes, it's simple. Yes, it's the same five or six jokes regenerated time after time. But kids get it, and they'll move on to more complex humor later on.

Well, "Big Nate" is what they'll move on to, and I think newspapers would do well to add it to the mix for that reason.

Middle school students are amazingly concrete in their thinking. Garfield smashing a spider they get. Anything more abstract and they get lost.

I know this from personal experience. I once tried to teach "Hamlet" to a group of bright eighth graders, and, while they understood that Hamlet hated the guy who killed his father, and they realized Polonius was a pompous bore, the rest of it just whooooshed over their heads.

I also used to lecture on political cartoons in the schools, and I could put an auditorium full of juniors and seniors in the aisles with commentary on cartoons by Nast and Mauldin and contemporary artists, but middle school kids didn't get it. It wasn't that they didn't understand the political issues. They just didn't understand metaphorical humor. For that age group, teaching political cartoons involves rote listing of symbols: "The bulldog is Great Britain. The bear is Russia." And the rest is simply beyond them. It's not an issue of intellect but one of emotional maturity.

Which brings us back to "Big Nate." Lincoln Peirce has built a mini-empire around the same kind of middle school humor that has propelled Jeff Kinney's "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" books into the stratosphere, with books and online games and a plethora of what Bill Watterson once referred to as "comic byproducts." It's not just an adult telling fart jokes to a roomful of giggling kids. (There are plenty of other people doing that.) It is self-deprecating, self-reflective humor delivered on an adolescent level. And it works.

And yet the comic strip also works for adults. It's an interesting balancing act, because he taps into the nostalgia we all have for those days, but the strip is not nostalgic. "Red and Rover," which I like very much, is nostalgia that kids can tap into, as is, in a different way, "Heart of the City."

"Big Nate," rather, is middle school humor that adults can also enjoy, and that's a big difference. It's a strip that could really help a paper start moving kids into the newspaper as their reading skills improve: "Garfield" to "Big Nate" to "Lio" to the sports page to the rest of the paper.

Of course, newspaper editors don't think about comic strips this deeply. But don't get me started on that.

Here's your vaguely relevant ear worm of the day:

 

Comments

[ronnie]

I hope Frazz is also one of the comics that Big Nate is a gateway to. I can see the path.

[Mike Peterson]

Actually, I'd say Frazz is at the other end of the scale -- I often have to read it twice before I burst into laughter. Jef Mallet has a subtle sense of humor and also is not above getting a laugh from an obscure reference. One of my favorites, but, over the heads of little guys much of the time. Over mine, some of the time.