The Concrete Jungle Book

[Dave Monroe]

'The Concrete Jungle Book': A different animal
Trevor Hunnicutt
Thursday, July 3, 2008

Artists have used mixed media with great success to push the
boundaries of art. Picasso's use of collage, for instance, helped
develop methods of expression in Cubism.

In an effort to push book publishing into the 21st century, a writer,
a schoolteacher and a graphic artist have joined forces in a
mixed-media project: a retelling of Rudyard Kipling's classic "The
Jungle Book" that combines scrapbooking, graphic art, prose
storytelling and pages based on the collaboration of readers online.

Doug Millison, an author of "The Concrete Jungle Book," an unpublished
graphic novel, says the use of mixed media helps tell the story
through the eyes of the book's protagonists: Little Mo, an autistic
boy living in the concrete jungle of Dallas, who is forced to contend
with his parents' murder at the hands of a vicious gangster; the
gangster; and the heroes who help Little Mo.

In the model of Kipling, those characters become anthropomorphized
animals in Little Mo's mind. One is called Akela the Wolf, who helps
Little Mo craft his revenge, and Shere Khan the Tiger, who attempts to
kill him.

"There is a realm of experience that's closed off to us because we
don't want to consider it," said Millison. By using multiple media,
the book can show readers how animals and an autistic youth think
about the world. Animals, Millison said, consider themselves in a
state of warfare with most people in competition for environmental
resources.

Millison, an El Cerrito writer, and Steve Porter, a former middle
school teacher in Texas, say they were inspired in part by a
high-performing but developmentally disabled student in Porter's class
who demonstrated a mastery of the class material despite concentrating
more on drawing pictures in his notebook. They believed a novel
showing the world from his perspective would be more vivid and
accurate in mixed media, and a novel showing the perspective of
animals would make more sense visually than textually. Srayla Tip
designed the art in the book.

The project's use of new media and the Internet comes into play with
TheConcreteJungleBook.com, where readers can add words and art to the
book and share them over the Web using blogs, social-networking sites
and other technologies. When the book is published, the best
contributions will be added to it. Millison hopes that the use of
online contributions will improve the project and inspire reader
engagement.

"The Web itself is a creative tool, and we hope to exploit the native
ability of the Web that lets the readers become co-creators of the
book," he said.

For more, go to http://www.theconcretejunglebook.com.

http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/c/a/2008/07/03/NS2V11EUE2.DTL

The Concrete Jungle Book

http://www.theconcretejunglebook.com

http://comicater.com/tcjb/default.aspx