There are no words in these colourful and simple comics that are conceived and studied in detail, cartoon after cartoon, according to a precise direction of reading, in order to initiate children to books, beginning with images.
These comics are objects too! Their design is meant to be appreciated by adults but above all by young readers.
The layout is simple, the story is funny.
Mamut comics is a Spanish publisher based in Barcelona, conceived and run by four young men.
This is all but a random choice. Maxi Luchini, art director, explained me that Spain lacked wordless comics, whose target are children aged 3 that still can’t read. They believe it is important to design a product that can raise future comic book (and more) readers. Children’s bookshops sell illustrated books; parents buy illustrated fairy tales but no comics because they don’t see them as books. They forget that images can be read too. Furthermore, if we make a survey of the strong readers of today and yesterday, and ask them what they used to read during their childhood, we will discover that most of them have started with comics.
And Mamut comics isn’t just a publisher! They also organize workshops to teach children how to make comics: children learn to develop characters, create the settings, and build the plot; they discover how cartoons work.
People always have a positive reaction, especially children.
Maxi Luchini smiles and tells me that he would like to live on the job he loves and in the meantime to help doing other things, such as:
training (comics and books) readers;
opening the field of reading to other universes such as cinema, comics, novels;
free children with reading problems from any kind of complex in order to help them to grow up better, without preconceptions or limits.
Why Mamut? They were walking through the Ciudadela Park in Barcelona when they saw a mammoth (“mamut” in Spanish). They were thinking of a name for their publishing house. And they thought: “Mammoths died out, but the process took a lot of years.” Mamut comics will be at the BilBolBul festival from the 21st to the 24th of February 2013. They will reinvent the exhibition room of the Cineteca (film library), creating an interactive space deliberately conceived for the youngest, where they can plunge in the world and in the books of this publisher.