Just one (spring) day

DECEMBER IS TOMMORROW.

1. It’s overused and supports the current status quote of typical vampire supremacy:worshiping rich folk.

2. Vampires prey upon humans and therefore symbolize capitalists preying on the working class.

The stories are forever embedded in the American psyche, with iconic phrases from the books like “See Spot run” or “Fun with Dick and Jane” still being well-known enough decades later to be turned into movie titles.

Meanwhile, in the UK, the Ladybird imprint of the Penguin publishing house created their own version of Dick and Jane primers in 1964 called Keywords with Peter and Jane featuring a far more British family and their more British sensibilities. The series is still in print and has sold over 80 million books.

Both the US and UK books were often criticized for their not-so-hidden messaging. In the utopian vision of childhood they promoted, mothers wore high heels and stayed at home to clean clean clean, fathers went to work, people of color were invisible, poverty didn’t exist, and everyone everywhere was oh so cheerful and polite. While the US stopped printing Dick and Jane books just as the Civil Rights movement was gathering momentum, the UK has continued to create and publish these culturally out-of-touch books for decades, only occasionally updating egregiously racist or misogynistic images in response to public outcry.

Enter artist and satirist Miriam Elia. In 2014 she launched a successful Kickstarter campaign to create a satirical version of the Peter and Jane books called We Go to the Gallery (pictured above). As the book entered its second printing, Penguin sued her for copyright infringement. She promptly changed the models for Peter and Jane, renamed the characters John and Susan, created her own independent publishing house named Dung Beetle Books, and republished the book with new art to great commercial success.