THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 71

One of my favorite children’s book series is Mercer Mayer’s Little Monster. Published from 1977 to 1980 & overshadowed by the success of his far inferior, ignorable Little Critter series, Little Monster books are amazing. It might seem weird to have a favorite children’s author, but that was one of the possible uses for my art I thought of when I was younger. I might try some in the future too. My mom curated a fantastic selection of books for me growing up. This period of consuming them went on longer than usual because my brothers were 3 & 6 years younger than me. I then turned around & worked in the Oakland Public Library Children’s Room for a few years around 1999 & onwards. I learned there that most children’s books were terrible & that the books I was raised on were the best of the best. This brings me back to the Little Monster series. If you note that early Sesame Street featured kids playing in abandoned construction sites & the countryside. The show was launched with a cantankerous asshole that lived in a garbage can, the seventies were just different, that active disintegration & hands-off parenting really created a generation & its culture. Now, the dissolution is palpable & has been continuous & there is so much less left to dissolve. The collapse was happening faster in that time, but there was just more to collapse. Little Monster is a product of this, a 70s update of Maurice Sendak. Taking the island of monsters Where The Wild Things are & making everyone be the monsters. The Muppets represented a step further making the Monsters just another group of characters, in the same way as we view races today, but Little Monster pushed it further, Monsters were the majority, living in a shabby, but beautiful world.