Lapp, Dave – Window #4

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Window #4

One subject that isn’t touched a whole lot in most mini comics is small children.  As they’re mostly made by people in their 20’s, this isn’t shocking, but I’ve really appreciated Dave’s stories of teaching and dealing with little kids.  It’s a perspective that I don’t get too often, and why read all these thousands of mini comics if I don’t get the occasional change of perspective?  The first story of this mini deals with three sisters (nicknamed pork leg, chicken leg and beef leg) and the youngest wants to go outside and play.  The oldest asks Dave what to do when a boy looks down her shirt when she bends over, but Dave didn’t seem to have a ready answer (I know I don’t).  The youngest goes out and comes quickly back in, crying.  Dave finally gets out of her the fact that an older boy was pulling her hair, but it turns out the older boy fell on his head at an early age and has trouble properly interacting with the rest of the world.  It’s a quietly effective that shows the lack of pat answers to kids, and once again makes me happy that I’m not a teacher.  Other stories in here include a dream of a tiger, an actual tiger (plush), and Dave’s dinner with a Vietnamese (?) family.  This dinner is more than a little awkward, as Dave has to break up an uncomfortable argument or two and has that socially awkward moment when he’s offered a tray of cookies and notices a cockroach crawling on one of them.  Is it condescending to consider Window a grown-up mini comic?  So many other offerings are at various stages of arrested adolescence, and there’s not a trace of that in these books.  As far as I know these are still hard to come by, and I am still planning on making these available once I start renting comics.  If you want to read these (and you really should). check back around in the coming months for your chance, OK?