Your guide to activities and fun things to do with your preschoolers, toddlers and kids in San Francisco, CA

Like every kid, my 2-year old Fern has been trained to identify images that are meant for kids. She can easily delimit the tiny toy shelf at the drug store and on the bookshelf, she can find a kids' book easily by nothing the garish colors and cartoonish faces.

But in our society of adult children, there are many bright and shiny images that are not meant for children, especially in the vast world of adult comics. I'm not a connoisseur of graphic novels, but I do have a copy of Art Spiegelman's Holocaust memoir Maus on the shelf -- or I did, until Fern started showing an interest in the cute little cats. (The cats are Nazis during World War II: definitely not a book for toddlers.)

So I was intrigued to get a review copy of several children's books under a new "Toon Book" imprint. These are children's books, essentially, including one by Art Spiegelman himself, but done in a graphic novel format; you'd think of them as Captain Underpants primers except that the content is actually quite literary.

Fern's favorite of the ones we've seen is (not surprisingly) Stinky, by Eleanor Davis, a graphic novelist whose work -- rather dark musings on the alienation of daily life -- lends itself well to children's lit, the best of which is pretty dark itself, if typically redeeming. (Think most of Roald Dahl's novels, for example.) The title character is a swamp troll of sorts who fears and abhors everything clean -- until he meets a kid from the town and they find common ground over mud and toads. It's standard Beauty and the Beast fare, but without the morality tale: it's just a cute story. (There's probably a lesson in it somewhere, but as with all great kids' books, the lesson isn't the point.)

There are a passel of other -- what shall we call them, pre-graphic novels? -- in the Toon Books catalog and they're definitely off the beaten path and worth a look.