Fusenews: But What Would Waldo Twittr You About? “No, I’m not there.” “Not there either.”

• The panelists are rapidly being announced over at that thar Cybils blog.  If you signed up for a committee and want to know if you made it, check ’em out daily.

• A New Yorker’s usual route onto or off of the subway requires dodging those folks hired to hand out copies of the city’s various free publications.  I would have passed on this paper as well had it not had a gigantic image of Waldo of "Where Is?" fame.  Apparently Where’s Waldo turns 21 this year (feel old, yet?) and Candlewick is celebrating by giving the stripey dude a Facebook page, MySpace pace, Twittr account, and online photo hunt.  The article Where’s Waldo?  He’s Growing Up discusses how Waldo’s marketing team is targeting 20-somethings and also releasing Waldo’s The Ultimate Travel Collection.  The article include a list of other children’s literary icons getting older this year.  You know, Waldo and Carmen Sandiego should really team up someday.  Seems that they spend half their time hiding in crowds and around the world anyway.

• Well, I’ll be damned.  Lloyd Alexander and Hans Christian Andersen really do share some surface similarities about the old noggin.  Lloyd still comes off as the looker of the two, though.  This and a whopping 49 other deeply fascinating observations available, as ever, at Collecting Children’s Books.  Makes my Fusenews look like a pile o’ poo, it does.

• Good for Gopnik.  I’ve never liked the allegory that says that Babar has to mean naked elephants = African natives.  Now his piece Freeing the Elephants: What Babar Brought in The New Yorker says as much.  Thanks go Big A little a for the link.

Fabulous news for you design addicts out there.  A new Jim Flora collection called The Sweetly Diabolic Art of Jim Flora looks good to go from Fantagraphics in September of 2009.  See the Jim Flora blog for more info.

• Friend of mine from college asks me if I’ve heard of a book she read as a youth.  I get this a lot so I try to find said book for her (a dragon marries a fairy?).  I fail, but she manages to locate it on her own.  Funny thing is, it’s a picture book from her youth written by Walter Dean Myers.  Huh!  I am more than a little surprised, I admit.  Then she finds this description of the book on the Educational Paperback Association’s profile of Myers.  I thought I knew my way around controversial picture books, but clearly I missed this particular brouhaha.  Here’s what the site says:

• Daily Image:

The Kidlitosphere bloggers are meeting in Portland, Oregon this month (I got my shirt in the mail, so I’m set) but something else has been happening in that neck of the woods; Filming for Neil Gaiman’s Coraline.  Here are two things you can do with this film.  You can either view the groovy pictures from it here that look like this . . .

. . . . or you can watch a video of John Hodgman (a.k.a. the only pseudo-celebrity outside of the children’s literary world to ever link to my blog) who provides the voice of the dad in the film and is in this somewhat disturbing interview about his latest book. Who knew that our sanity hangs by such a delicate thread? Thanks to Educating Alice for the first link and Bookninja for the second.

Filed under: Fusenews