We here at the Family Valued monochromatic bathhouse, mobile restaurant, and misinformed press room have randomly selected a ten-year-old from among the one immediately available.

When I was a youth, we had something called Classics Illustrated — comic versions of great literary works.
Yeah. Graphic Classics are these books of really good stories by really good writers and they’re excerpts and they’re cool. I’ve read two of them and I have one here from the library. I had never actually read some of these authors’ stuff, so now I like them. I already liked H.G. Wells because I’ve seen the movie War of the Worlds — the old one. There’s this one where they exorcised this old mummy’s spirit and it’s really cool. The Hound of the Baskervilles had this big dog and it attacked people.

When I was your age, we heard tell that people would read the comic versions instead of the originals of some of these books.
The originals actually have more flavors to them and more feeling. You can imagine them a lot better that way.

But you like the Graphic Classics?
Because they have good stories. Now I like Bram Stoker a lot. For the Lair of the White Worm mostly just because it was so awesome. It was about this worm/snake monster and it ate people.

There seem to be a lot of large monsters consuming people.
Maybe people are just scared of those things. But I like being scared. I’m a big fan of horror and science fiction. I really want to get the other Graphic Classics, like Adventure Classics and Horror Classics and Mark Twain and Robert Louis Stevenson. I really want to get a lot of them.

April, 2006