It’s the eternal question: Is this is a book club that is nerdy or a club for nerdy books?
I don’t have the answer, but either way I do have the old space joke books you’re looking for.
And a story to go with it.
A story about a very very bad year in elementary school made better by one, random, silly, infinitely nerdy book finding it’s way to a classroom bookshelf and then into my nerdy little hands.
Classroom bookshelves are their own special kind of magic. I can’t quite explain it. I mean, right down the hall is a much bigger library with so much more to choose from.
But, of course, the classroom library is a concentration of books chosen by a teacher as especially wonderful… or maybe not.
Maybe one of those books is just a random book, left behind by a kid last year.
Maybe it’s a book club order that the buyer read too fast to take home so they passed it around.
Maybe it’s a joke book with jokes so terrible that no one was willing to claim it.
Maybe it’s 101 Outer Space Jokes.
Maybe it’s Spaced Out Jokes.
Maybe it’s… Star Jaws.
And maybe it’s exactly the book that some nerdy, weird kid needs.
There are a lot of maybes in this story, because it happened over 40 years ago. But, through the mists of time, I do remember one thing with absolute certainty: Fourth grade was almost absolute misery.
I was an undiagnosed autistic kid in an experimental hybrid class with a lot of fifth graders. (It was a failed experiment.) The teacher absolutely did not know how to deal with a kid like me. No one did.
As you can guess, books were the perfect escape and I read and loved a million of them that year.
And then there was a book I didn’t necessarily love… but it may have been what I needed. And it may be what set me on the road to drawing my own cartoons.
The reading teacher had a classroom bookshelf and on it was a book of space-themed joke cartoons.
Maybe you know the kind I mean: a UFO ordering food at a drive-thru, aliens are having a moon picnic but are bothered by tiny ant-like astronauts, R2D2 thinks a fire hydrant is his mom.
I have no memory of what the book’s name was. But it’s very likely one of the books created by Will Eisner and Co. These books have zero pretensions. They exist to give kids cheap laffs and the artists a chance to have a blast drawing aliens.
Will Eisner is much more famous for his books for adult nerds. These books pushed the boundaries of what comics could do artistically and intellectually.
His joke books for kids didn’t.
And I didn’t need them to.
What the books did was celebrate/rip-off/mock the space movies of the day in the silliest ways possible.
Here’s an example: Two scruffy-looking aliens sitting at a table in what is clearly the Star Wars cantina. “You can talk freely, … we’re alone,” says one, but the reader sees that the table is itself an eavesdropping alien.
Not silly enough? How about a doctor accusing a droid of eating “junk food” or a chicken sitting on an asteroid that hatches or Spock sharpening his ears with a pencil sharpener?
A memory that I cannot confirm is that one of the books showed an astronaut encountering a giant space amoeba. Not sure if that was the whole joke or what.
But a memory that I can confirm is that I became obsessed with drawing giant space amoebas, coloring them exuberantly with those classic chunky Crayola markers. I drew a lot of them. I colored a lot of them. I even randomly gave one to a rich art collector and the story goes that he “hung it in his bathroom with his Picasso.”
So, flash forward all these years and here’s my chance to make a book for today’s kids. A book that’s full of cheap laughs about the stuff we all love, which still includes Star Wars and sharks but has expanded to the whole multiverse: mermaids and Doctor Who and reaction videos and random things being turned into musicals and on and on.
Two-Headed Chicken is a nerdy book for nerdy book readers that’s a love letter to the nerdy books that helped this nerdy book reader get through the fourth-grade.
And maybe it will end up on a teacher’s classroom shelf where a bored kid will find the silliness they need.
Tom Angleberger is the author of more than 30 books, including the Origami Yoda series. His decades-long dream of writing and drawing a comic book is finally coming true with “Two-Headed Chicken.”