Book Reviews
Sarah Morean •
Jun 14, 2012 
Freddy is a kid who is lucky to have a lot of caring adults in her life but who, unfortunately, has very few friends. “Freddy Stories” is a collection of short, slice-of-life vignettes that captures this girl’s young experience, created by cartoonist Melissa Mendes.
Freddy is a scruffy oddball who enjoys being active, messy, daring and imaginative. Her parents may be separated but her home life with mom and their dog Frank is happy enough. She sees her dad occasionally and spends a lot of time with her neighbors who care for her while her mother is working.
Freddy is very resilient child and this comes off as maturity in the book. She’s not overly fussy and never lets herself be too sad — any problem she faces is easily solved through creativity or directness.
For a kid, she seems to have a lot of pride, a good sense of right and wrong, and clearly knows herself quite well. You feel pretty good about her as a character through and through, she seems strong. She has a good head on her shoulders and you rally for her because this girl, you think, has potential.
Immediately after finishing “Freddy Stories,” I felt alright about it. On its surface, the text and themes are not challenging. It’s easy enough to like. It didn’t become a brain teaser until later when I had to wonder, well, what was it even about?
“Freddy Stories” is cute and the art is clean and sweet. It’s very accessible and seems fun because the vignettes are light and unexpected. Freddy is always on the go — exploring new spaces, biking, collecting, building, and able to make her own fun happen anytime, anywhere. She seems very capable. Someone you’d want to be. However, in a lot of ways, Freddy is a pitiable and unrealized character with an uncertain future. Her story here feels very unfinished and unsatisfying as a result.
Because, once you realize that all there is and was to Freddy has lived and died on these pages, it’s incredibly sad to think that this kid with so much potential has completely failed to develop as a person through the course of her own story. She is the same person at the beginning of this book as she is at the end. Her life on its pages was brief, oddly repetitious, and over before it ever really began. In a sense, Freddy and her life were actually boring.
The most significant part of the book is what’s lacking: a strong mentor for Freddy. This girl is free in many ways to explore her world, but she doesn’t have anyone useful to advise or guide her. For someone so young, with so many adults available to her, it’s very odd that none of them make an effort to teach her anything and she never bothers to ask anything from them.
Her mom is gone a lot. When she’s with her neighbors, they let her do whatever she wants, which is cool, but she only ever wants to do the same kind of stuff: eat, collect, ride, build. And it never leads to anything life-changing. She doesn’t have peers that are enough like her to be challenging or sharpen or push her to become her real, adult self. She’s, maybe, 8 years old and already in a rut!
We are left to believe that Freddy has already evolved to become her true self, as complete as she’ll ever need to be to her author. As a result, Freddy may be sweet, but she’s certainly not dynamic.
Freddy is caring and seems eager to create friendships but we see her make only one friend, a boy who is very into dirt. At school she’s often teased and misunderstood because she’s regularly confused for a boy. It’s rough, but evidently not life-changing rough.
Endlessly faithful to the idea that Freddy is static and unalterable, she never even changes her clothes for the whole book, insisting to wear her hoodie even at the beach.
“Freddy Stories” is a 112-page black-and-white square-bound book with a full-color cover. It measures 6″x8″ and was published with assistance from the Xeric Foundation, a charitable non-profit that has offered grants to comic book self-publishers. It costs $10 and is available through author Melissa Mendes’ online store: http://www.mmmendes.com/store/
Dear reviewer,
I don’t know that you understand the concept of an non-developing character. We’ve had these types of characters show up in some of the most popular media for a while now. A nice example of this in comparison to Freddy, while not similar entirely, is Calvin of Calvin and Hobbes, the fantastic long-running comic strip by Bill Waterson.
Calvin is a ridiculous character. He’s a young boy of about six with a runaway imagination and an endless desire to search for excitement in both the physical and imaginary worlds. HIS best friend is his stuffed tiger, Hobbes, who, by the time the strip ends, the reader is still completely unsure whether he truly can talk and move or not.
What makes the strip interesting isn’t that, as Calvin grows older (which he doesn’t), he starts to understand that his imagination is separate from the real world and begins to leave it behind for ties to friends and his parents (which he doesn’t.) Calvin remains the same character, often going on philisophical and nearly suicidal wagon rides which bear an artistic semblance to each other but have a different conversation each time. By your analysis methods posited in this review, Calvin is an extremely intelligent young boy with the ideas of and engineer, but who wastes his talents with a complete apathy for work. This is entirely not the point.
What DOES make Calvin and Hobbes an interesting strip is that Calvin’s endless imagination makes a possibility for fantastic art as Waterson explores this young boy’s mind and brings his imagination to life on the strip. It’s the endless nostalgia of childhood that we all so dearly crave. It’s the irony that Calvin’s insight into the world seems dead on, despite one might think that he’s too young to understand it. But if you begin to think Calvin is setting himself up for failure, with a mind of genius quality that’s wasted on complete disconnect from reality, almost to the point of insanity, you’re setting yourself up to hate it.
The point being, what’s so incredible about Freddy is her independence and her ability to enjoy life as it comes to her. She lives as the free spirit we might all dream to be. Yes, perhaps she has no ambition, but that allows Mendes to retain Freddy’s character while being able to stick her into whatever situation she desires. Were Freddy to develop as a character, it would force her to grow in age, and eventually put an end to the comic strip when her development has finished.
The world of strip comics is very different from that of the graphic novel, for instance. Freddy Stories may be an awful example of a plot-based action-packed gut-wrenching graphic novel. But it isn’t. It’s a beautiful collection of strips.
Oh, and by the way, if you really want a depressing, unrealized character, go read the comic strip “Gil.” It’s not funny or amusing, it’s really just sad.
Glad you were able to find enjoyment in the work.
I need to point out though that you are confusing the idea of a daily strip, which is serialized regularly and collected occasionally, and a comic book that uses slice-of-life-style experiences or vignettes to tell a story, like we have here in “Freddy Stories.” Daily strips have a schedule to knock out. “Freddy Stories” did not. The author had time from concept to execution to produce a complete work and made choices throughout that process that would define her work, its purpose and its meaning — which is where “Freddy Stories” fell short of its potential.
Also the connection you’re making from this book to the Calvin and Hobbes daily strips is really thin.
Having young and imaginative main characters is not enough to link them. Nor are those things, in a vacuum, enough to build an interesting as a character. For instance, though Freddy was imaginative, she was also twee, dull, inoffensive and somewhat lifeless when confronted with conflict — when she often retreated into herself. On the other hand, Calvin is outspoken, rowdy, dangerous, elastic, smart-mouthed and otherworldly. The two are different. What they have in common, roughly, is age. I also think the panel structure is confusing you — because they both use their own boxy grid — but that’s certainly not enough ground to make a meaningful comparative connection.
One of the things that made Calvin and Hobbes so great is that Calvin had real conflict which exercised his imagination — his parents trying to make him a normal kid, which he’d never be, among other things — so he shoves his weirdness in people’s faces, always managing to top himself. The potential for that character to express himself and develop his imagination in new ways was limitless and Calvin’s creative author was able to play with that potential, daily, with much success, for many years.
By contrast, Freddy’s story happens over just 112 pages. And where is her conflict? She gets mistaken for a boy and fumes inside, she gets mistaken for a boy again so she whispers to her teacher that she’s not, she gets mistaken for a boy a third time so she says out loud she’s a girl. This is how conflict escalates for Freddy — she is very quiet until she is very direct. But that’s not her exercising her imagination, it’s learning to speak up for herself. And while we see that one slow climb (my example with the gender confusion) that should begin to define her responses to similar conflicts, there isn’t a clear moment after that when she just knows to speak up for herself, when we have proof that she’s learned how to do it once given the opportunity to rehearse her skill. That action could have had a point, but it didn’t. So instead it was about exhaustively telling the reader that Freddy is usually confused for a boy. You see what I mean?
So it’s things like that, for Freddy, that prove this book has very little going on. She shies away from conflict when it comes, they are just speed bumps in her life, and she reasonably slows to go past them or swerves to avoid them, and that action in itself never invites important conflict. By contrast, for Calvin, everything he encounters is a mountain — and if it’s not literally a mountain he’d make it a mountain. A kid could be accused of weirdness (Freddy might be weird) and not be as weird as Calvin. He’s a maniac, and Freddy is just a girl who basically behaves herself but likes to ride bikes and touch dirt.
One doesn’t need to be the other to be a good book, that is not what I’m saying. I’m just noting the real differences, because you seem confused. And if you like Freddy on the strength of liking Calvin, maybe you should re-examine what you like about both things. They are two unique characters with completely different strengths and purposes.
“Freddy Stories” is fine enough, and I can see why it’s likable, I said so in my review, but I just got the sense that Mendes was working out something in this book that didn’t form solid by the end. She toed the line of possibility but didn’t reach either side to either fail or achieve. She just hovered on “okay.” The plot and execution came off as shy, like maybe the author was afraid to speak her mind through the work. I don’t know why this would be, exactly, but I suspect it had something to do with the timing of the grant, which I’ll get to.
Story-wise, I would think that in absence of strong parenting, Freddy might become more parental of others, growing up in that way before her time. She does a favor for a kid at the fair, she’s on that path, but that idea never goes anywhere, it just dangles, like the gender thing, and I saw enough of that throughout the book to be disappointed. Instead she picks up weak ideas and revisits them (Freddy likes to mess around with stuff she finds, resulting in many filthy leaves) rather than developing ideas that would be interesting (Freddy is mature beyond her years in ways you wouldn’t expect). You see my meaning?
I think with time, if Mendes continues to write about Freddy, she could create enough pages to make a book that really said something about her character and made for an interesting collection, but this particular publication was brief and repetitive with an unrealized purpose. I believe if she wants to develop the character further and take Freddy to those places on the horizon, I disagree that successive Freddy books should be burdened to achieve what could have been handled in a single, longer, more carefully developed tome. I sense that this book was “rushed” into production somehow, probably thanks to the grant. If it hadn’t been awarded the Xeric, I wonder if Mendes would have taken more time to work on and develop a more thoughtful representation of Freddy, taking her character where she needed to go, and hearing enough criticism along the way to shape it into a more meaningful piece of work.
The art is utilitarian, giving the story and themes an opportunity to shine — but there was no real story and very weak themes — what we are left with is an introduction to a person, Freddy, whom we like. It’s a start but it’s not enough.
I feel like I “get” Freddy well enough by the end of the book to understand who she is, but because there was no story arc, no real challenges for her, I still feel like I didn’t get to meet her in a lot of ways. My ideas about her weren’t challenged or confirmed at all. And so she feels flat.
“Freddy Stories” could have been better. I understand you not wanting to agree on this, but the book was sent to me, which is an implication that I’ve been asked to think my thoughts, and that’s what I think.
If you’d like to see a set of comic vignettes handled well, you should check out Disquietville by Daniel Spottswood: http://danielspottswood.com/