tough guys have feelings too by keith negley

The children in the ink, paint, and collage digital spreads show a variety of emotions, but most are happy to be at school, and the surroundings will be familiar to those who have made an orientation visit to their own schools. While the days are given ordinal numbers, the song skips the cardinal numbers in the verses, and the rhythm is sometimes off: “On the second day of kindergarten / I thought it was so cool / making lots of friends / and riding the bus to my school!” The narrator is a white brunette who wears either a tunic or a dress each day, making her pretty easy to differentiate from her classmates, a nice mix in terms of race two students even sport glasses. The typical firsts of school are here: riding the bus, making friends, sliding on the playground slide, counting, sorting shapes, laughing at lunch, painting, singing, reading, running, jumping rope, and going on a field trip. Rabe follows a young girl through her first 12 days of kindergarten in this book based on the familiar Christmas carol.

Though it doesn’t exactly topple stereotypes or delve deep into questions of gender identity, Negley’s debut is nonetheless sincere. The figures have varying skin tones, and while in some contexts “guys” is not a gender-specific term, everyone here reads as male, which is probably OK and no doubt intended.

The front endpapers show the boy in all of these guises, while the back endpapers show him in each role with his dad. In the end, it is all about the father and son, curled up together on the bed, reading together. Everyone has feelings, says the text-well, almost everyone, as the robot clipping and smashing flowers with a grim expression on its metal face indicates.

These tough guys are shown at emotional and sometimes scary moments: the astronaut floating in space holding a photograph of his wife and child the superhero eating his lunch alone atop a building the tattooed biker weeping over a dead squirrel in the road. There are a lucha libre wrestler, two ninjas, a knight, a cowboy, and more stereotypically manly men. These tough guys are rendered in simple lines and shapes and colored in black and white, red, blue, and yellow, but they represent a broad range of virility.

Tough guys have feelings too by keith negley