Tintin for all Ages

This great image is from the Garen Ewing, a writer and illustrator who is currently doing an A-Z of comic characters. Clearly a big Tintin fan, Garen is writing and drawing a strip cartoon very much in the vein of Herge’s Tintin. The Rainbow Orchid, inspired by authors such as Conan Doyle, Jules Verne, Edgar P. Jacobs and, of course, Hergé, has appeared in print but you can read the entire story (so far) online. I’m about to do that so there goes my work for the rest of the day.

On his blog, he has a good post on the current plan that all children’s books in the UK should be age banded, i.e. labeled with their target age range. This plan is worrying many children authors because so many books appeal across ages. The authors fear that labeling a book like Winnie-the-Pooh as 3 – 6 years or Philip Pullman’s Dark Materials trilogy as 10 – 12 years will put off children (and adults) outside of those ranges. As someone who came late to reading due to dyslexia and still regularly reads “children” books I think the authors fears are justified. All readers should be allowed to discover for themselves what is suitable and enjoyable to them without social pressure or fear of stigmatization.

For more on this, see Age Banding and look what image Garen illustrated the story with.