With the approach of the holiday season, I found appropriate entertainment by going to see the Walt Disney Company and producer Cameron Mackintosh’s new Mary Poppins stage musical, which opened in London in 2004, and which arrived on Broadway at the New Amsterdam Theatre this fall. Based on both P. L. Travers original Mary Poppins books and the 1964 Disney movie, the stage musical is another retelling of the tale of the proper but mysterious nanny with supernatural powers who takes charge of the children Jane and Michael Banks.

As I did with Disney’s Tarzan Broadway musical (see “Comics in Context” #133), I used the occasion of attending the Mary Poppins musical to finally read P. L. Travers’ first Mary Poppins book, originally published in 1934. I expect that by now far more people know Mary Poppins from the Disney movie, which I’ve seen several times, most recently the ABC Family Channel telecasts on December 11, than from Travers’ six books about the character.

But I have long been aware of the recurring complaint about the Disney film: that Walt Disney, actress Julie Andrews, and their collaborators, turned Travers’ severe and rather forbidding Mary Poppins cheerful and sugary sweet. Cultural critic Edward Rothstein reiterates the point in his article in The New York Times (Nov. 20, 2006), pointing out that Travers’ Mary Poppins “often had a look of ‘fury,’ who ‘snaps,’ and ‘sniffs’ and ‘retorts.’ That Mary Poppins ‘never wasted time being nice.’” In her article about Travers in the December 19, 2005 issue of The New Yorker, Caitlin Flanagan writes that Mary Poppins “is, in fact, very often ‘angry,’ ‘threatening,’ ‘scornful,’ and ‘frightening.’” On the other hand, Disney’s Mary Poppins announces early on on the film that she is “never cross.”

So I watched the Family Channel telecast with this in mind. For most of the film Andrews’ Poppins is haughty and strict, as the character is in the book. Disney’s Poppins does not behave quite as unpleasantly as Travers’ can. The book states that Mary Poppins is “frightening” (Odyssey Classics paperback, p. 12), and at one point Mary Poppins “regarded” her young charge Michael “with something like disgust” (p. 116). But, for example, consider the scene in the movie in which Mary Poppins visits her Uncle Albert, who levitates to the ceiling when he laughs. Mary Poppins’ friend Bert and the two children she is nannying, Jane and Michael Banks, find his laughter contagious, join in, and are soon levitating upwards as well, while a severe Mary Poppins seethes with disapproval at this supposedly improper behavior. This scene is adapted reasonably faithfully from the first book, and here Disney’s and Travers’ versions of Mary Poppins exactly coincide. (This scene, and its memorable song, “I Love to Laugh” are not in the Broadway musical, perhaps because it would require five people in flight harnesses at once, or perhaps because it would dilute the theatrical impact of Mary Poppins’ flying at the end of each act.)

The reputation of Disney’s kinder, gentler Mary Poppins seems to me to be founded on three key sequences, which are all so memorable that it’s not surprising that they eclipse the scenes in which Andrews performs more in Travers mode. First, there’s the song “A Spoonful of Sugar,” which, as the lyrics say, helps the medicine go down. This too turns out to be based on an incident in the first book, in which Mary Poppins administers medicine to Jane and Michael, which turns out to taste delicious. But whereas in the book Mary Poppins wears a “stern” expression and gives Jane “a warning, terrible glance” (p. 12), in the movie Andrews’ Poppins is smiling and beaming with happiness as she sings. Her manner fits the point of the song, and, actually, there seems to me to be a contradiction in the book between Travers’ sweet-tasting medicine and the sour temperament of her Mary Poppins. If medicine should have an appealing taste, then why shouldn’t a nanny have a pleasant disposition? By the same logic, wouldn’t that make the children more willing to obey her? Or is Travers making a more complicated point with the medicine? Is she saying that just as something necessary but unpleasant, like medicine, should paradoxically taste good, then Mary Poppins, who takes the children on wonderful adventures, should have an unpleasant manner in order to create a kind of balance?

Rothstein insightfully pointed out that Travers’ Mary Poppins “is a caricature of the most authoritarian form of adulthood” and that “In part this reveals how children perceive adulthood.” He explains that children must obey their parents, and yet the children recognize that with adulthood comes a “realm of magical freedom” they do not yet have. I compare this to the theme of maturation in the superhero genre: for example, the boy Peter Parker, who is dutiful to his aunt and must obey his tyrannical boss, becomes Spider-Man, with superhuman abilities that give him a freedom to rise above society’s restrictions.

Rothstein argues that “Discipline is required for the magical realms to be revealed; it is what makes freedom possible. Without the one, there is meaningless fantasy; without the other, there is heartless rigidity.” Here too there is a similarity to the superhero genre, in which, traditionally, the protagonist has both a “civilian identity,” in which he is a part of society and accepts its restrictions on his behavior, and a superheroic one, in which he has abilities and freedom exceeding those of ordinary people, but nonetheless devotes them to the service of society. The most famous of the superheroes is both Superman and Clark Kent. To be only Clark Kent would doom him to a life of “rigidity” he could not transcend; to be only Superman would mean leading a “meaningless fantasy” life without grounding in everyday humanity. Mary Poppins has extraordinary magical powers, and yet she works as a nanny, using them in caring for children. Similarly, her friend Bert, as we shall see, may have magical powers of his own, but instead devotes himself to art (in the book, movie and musical) or to serving society as a chimney sweep (in the movie and musical).

Although Cameron Mackintosh promised P. L. Travers before her death that his stage version of Mary Poppins would be truer to her character, if you have a singing, dancing Mary Poppins, then the battle to make her consistently stern and authoritarian has already been lost. The other two sequences in the movie that present a sunny, cheerful Mary Poppins are the adventure in the world within Bert’s sidewalk painting, full of singing and dancing (with the songs “It’s a Jolly Holiday with Mary” and “Supercalifragilisticexpialidocious”) and the “Step in Time” song and dance number with Bert and his fellow chimney sweeps on the rooftops of London.

The “Jolly Holiday” sequence is surprisingly faithful to a chapter of the book, in which Mary Poppins and Bert do indeed enter a world within his painting, find themselves dressed in fancy clothes, and are served tea in the woods by a waiter (but not by penguins, which Walt Disney contributed to the film). Moreover, in Travers’ book Bert is clearly Mary Poppins’ boyfriend, and their adventure in this alternate world is just as clearly a date. My biggest surprise is that in this chapter, which is only the second in the book, Travers has Mary Poppins’ stern persona entirely melt away. She speaks “softly” (p. 18) and “brightly” (p. 19); she is described as “pleased” (p. 23). Even the book’s insistence that Mary Poppins is rather plain (and therefore does not look like Julie Andrews) is undercut in this chapter by Bert’s awestruck reaction to her in her new finery: “Then he gulped and said: ‘Golly!’” (p. 22).

There has been some controversy in the New York City media about the end of Act I of the musical, in which toys come to life and menace Jane and Michael, who have been naughty. I don’t know how I would react to seeing this if I were a small child, but from my adult perspective it didn’t seem at all disturbing. What I found strange was the musical’s treatment of “Jolly Holiday.” Mary Poppins, Bert and the children do not enter Bert’s painting, presumably because that would be a hard thing to stage. Instead the park transforms into a more colorful setting, Mary Poppins and Bert reenter in handsome new costumes, and statues in the classical style, including one of the god Neleus, come to life and join in the dancing. (Neleus’s statue is from one of Travers’ later Poppins books.) The strange thing is that Neleus and the other statues are virtually nude. (They’re actually in skin-tight costumes and body paint, and naughty bits remain covered, but the effect is still that of semi-nudity.)

Perhaps this wouldn’t bother Travers. In the first Mary Poppins book a star named Maia appears on Earth as a human child, and Travers emphasizes that “the child had practically no clothes on, only a light wispy strip of blue stuff that looked as though she had torn it from the sky to wrap round her naked body” (p. 183). Mary Poppins is started by the sight, but Maia is unconcerned by her near-nudity, and perhaps Travers means us to be unconcerned as well.

It seems weird and perhaps a little disturbing to watch performers in Edwardian costumes cavorting with semi-nude figures in front of an audience full of families with small children. But, as I said, Mary Poppins and Bert are obviously on a date of sorts, so I suppose that Neleus and the semi-nude female statues provide a libidinous subtext.

My initial reaction to reading this chapter was that it gave Walt Disney all the justification he needed to presenting the merry, beautiful, singing and dancing Mary Poppins of the “Jolly Holiday” sequence. Since this is how she behaves around her boyfriend Bert, then it would also make sense that his presence would induce her to join in the merriment in “Step in Time.” Watching the movie again, I noticed that after engaging in dancing in “Step in Time,” Andrews’ Mary Poppins abruptly and amusingly reverts to her usual staid persona, holding up her hands and turning her face in exaggerated disdain when the other chimney sweeps offer to keep dancing with her.

My second reaction was to realize what the difference is between Travers’ and Disney’s versions of the “Jolly Holiday” sequence: in Travers’ version the kids aren’t there. Travers makes the point that this happens on Mary Poppins’ day off, so she has dropped the staid, stern persona she otherwise uses in her dealings with the Banks family and virtually everyone else.

So why did Travers do this as early as Chapter Two? Presumably it was to alert the reader that there was more to Mary Poppins’ personality than the strict disciplinarian in the rest of the book. To build upon Rothstein’s reasoning, this chapter speaks to children’s partial awareness that adults have a side to their lives apart from dealing with kids. To continue my analogies with the superhero genre, it shows that Mary Poppins has a “secret identity” of sorts. Actually, she has a multi-leveled identity. Mr. and Mrs. Banks, and the world at large, think of her as an ordinary woman, with a proud, severe manner. She allows the children to see that she has magical powers, but, in the book, does not allow them to see more than the strict authority figure side of her personality. Bert gets to see a softer side of her personality, and notice that Mary Poppins’ other self comes complete with a fancy costume. And then there are suggestions, as we shall see, that Mary Poppins is something other than human.

This reminds me of one of my favorite characters in Charles Dickens’ novels, though one who I think is generally overlooked: Mr. Wemmick from Great Expectations. At the office Mr. Wemmick has a grim, severe, emotionless manner, and characteristically keeps his jaw locked in an unpleasant expression. At one point Mr. Wemmick brings Pip, the protagonist, to his home, and Pip notices that with every step they take away from the office, Mr. Wemmick’s jaw loosens by another degree, and his demeanor and facial expression become more relaxed and sunnier: he transforms into a different, happier, more outgoing self. His home looks like a miniature castle, and it’s like a playhouse where he lives with his Aged Parent. Staying with the Wemmicks is like one big party, but when Pip and Mr. Wemmick head back to the office, Pip observes that with every step Mr. Wemmick’s face and demeanor settles back into the rigid persona he uses in the business world.

Rothstein asserts that Jane and Michael “learn that ‘Appearances are Deceptive.’ They learn, that is, that there is a split between the inner life and outward appearance, between the magic of Mary Poppins and her thoroughly adult facade.” As Rothstein points out, after they have one of their encounters with the supernatural, Mary Poppins continually insists to the children that no such thing happened. This happens in the book, the movie, and the musical. The children are puzzled by Mary Poppins’ denials, but perhaps the point that she is trying to make is that they should not tell the adults what happened. It’s like the way that in her Harry Potter books, J. K. Rowling’s wizards hide the existence of the supernatural from the ordinary people, the “muggles” (see “Comics in Context” #148).

Like the secret identity motif in the superhero genre, this “split,” as Rothstein calls it, reflects the truth that an individual can have a public side and a private side to his personality. Justifying such a split, as Rothstein does, can have negative effects. It could provide a rationale for people who belong to one ethnic minority to try to “pass” as members of the majority, or for gays to remain in the closet, or for anyone to refrain from challenging the opinions of the majority. When Stan Lee wrote The X-Men, being mutants was the title characters’ secret “inner life”; they posed as ordinary humans in their “outward appearance,” their everyday identities. When Grant Morrison took over X-Men, he “outed” Professor Xavier and the others as mutants; the new idea was that mutants should no longer hide what they were, but be proud of their “inner” selves. (See “Comics in Context” #28.)

I find Travers’ attitude towards the “split” somewhat disturbing. She seems to be not only defending the stereotypical British emotional reserve, but taking it to an extreme. Why shouldn’t Mary Poppins express affection for the children in her care, or even smile at them? It’s as if Travers was justifying adults’ emotional withdrawal from their children, as long as they can tell themselves that their “inner selves” actually care about them.

In her New Yorker article Caitlin Flanagan describes Travers’ “formidable maiden great-aunt, Helen Morehead. Aunt Ellie, as she was called, bossed everyone around, but her fierceness disguised a kindness she would have been embarrassed to admit.” Aunt Ellie is an obvious model for Mary Poppins, but the original book never suggests that Mary Poppins feels embarrassed about admitting kind feelings towards the children; only at the book’s end, when she leaves presents for them before flying off, does Travers imply that Mary Poppins feels any fondness for the children. Notice that Flanagan also notes about Travers’ story meetings for the film with songwriters Richard M. and Robert B. Sherman, “Travers, whose youthful self-confidence had gathered over the years into an oppressive self-righteousness, interrupted, corrected, bullied, and shamed them.” Sound like anyone we know?

On the other hand, there are other ways in which a “split” between one’s public and private personas is natural, harmless, and even good. A lawyer or a doctor might well be, say, an amateur rock musician or even a comics collector in his or her spare time. A husband and wife have to be proper and respectable when they are working in the office, but may well have a passionate sex life at home that is no one’s business but their own. So Mary Poppins insists that the children behave in a proper manner in their everyday life, but also enables them to experience an “extraordinary adventure,” as Travers calls it (p. 187) from time to time.

In various classic children’s stories there is a threshold that one must cross to travel from the real world from the fantasy world. Hence Alice tumbles down the rabbit hole or passes through the looking glass; Dorothy is swept up by a tornado that deposits her in Oz; Wendy joins Peter Pan in flying from London to Neverland; the Pevensie children enter the wardrobe and exit into Narnia. Some more recent examples of fantasy tales don’t draw such a sharp boundary between the real world and the fantasy world. Neil Gaiman’s Neverwhere (see “Comics in Context” #18) exists within London; even so, most of it seems to be out of sight underground, notably in London Underground stations. In J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series wizards and witches are an unsuspected part of the general population, and the supernatural can manifest itself in the everyday world. (Take, for example, the magical night bus at the beginning of Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.) Even so, Rowling also follows the convention of separating the real and fantasy worlds. Hence, in the first book (and film) Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry and Hagrid pass through a secret entrance into Diagon Alley, a shopping and banking area for wizards that the non-magical people, the “muggles,” know nothing about. Similarly, in a train station Harry has to run straight at–and into–a post to emerge on the platform for the train to the wizards’ school, Hogwarts, a platform that seems to lie in some other dimension. Of course, the Rowling books mostly take place at the isolated location of Hogwarts, and although there are various means by which wizards can get there (the train, a flying car, etc.), as yet there is no indication that it is accessible to any muggles. The teleportational “portkey” in Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire serves as another means of transcending the boundary between the real and the fantastic.

Mary Poppins–the original book, the movie, and the musical–also makes use of the magical threshold device in the form of Bert’s sidewalk painting, through which Mary and Bert magically travel into the world it pictures. But this is an exception. Otherwise Poppins makes the point that there is no division between the real and the magical, and that most people are simply unaware of the marvels around them. Mary Poppins acts as the children’s guide to these wonders. She brings them to visit her Uncle Albert (in the book and movie), who levitates himself when he laughs, and (in the book and musical) to visit Mrs. Corry, who is apparently thousands of years old, both of whom live right in London. (In the book, however, Mrs. Corry’s shop disappears as soon as the children leave it, suggesting that they had crossed some sort of magical threshold without knowing it.) Statues in the park come to life (in a later book and in the musical). Animals, such as the dog Andrew (in the book and movie) speak their own language, which Mary Poppins understands; in the local zoo (in the book) the animals can even speak English (but don’t do so in front of people other than Miss Poppins and her charges). As noted, in Chapter 11 a star, Maia, one of the Pleiades, appears in the form of a human child and goes Christmas shopping in London. The title of a new song in the musical, “Anything Can Happen,” is entirely appropriate.

The world within Bert’s painting, in the book and movie, challenges conventional notions of reality. Here is a world imagined and portrayed by an artist, which Mary, Bert and, in the movie, Jane and Michael, can physically enter; it is literally an alternate reality. Presumably Bert’s other paintings are also portals into different fantasy worlds. The “real” world, therefore, is only one of many.

Moreover, an artist can create one of these alternative realities. Bert thus represents P. L. Travers, or for that matter Walt Disney, or any writer of fiction, or any artist. On the literal level of the Mary Poppins story, I wonder if Bert is meant to have magical powers, just as the title character does. In the movie Bert attempts to transport himself and the children into his painting but fails; exasperated, Mary Poppins then transports all four of them into the alternate world. This suggests that Mary Poppins is the only one with magical powers. At another point in the film, Mary Poppins magically manipulates things in the children’s room to tidy it up, and Jane finds herself similarly able to levitate objects by snapping her fingers. So it seems Mary Poppins can enable other people in her presence to perform magical feats. On the other hand, the movie’s Mary Poppins scolds Bert for failing to enter the painting, thereby implying that he could do so but somehow did it wrong. In the book Bert transports himself and Mary Poppins into the world of the painting, and she is repeatedly surprised by what she finds there. This makes Bert a magician too. The musical endows him with magical powers too, enabling him to dance up the wall of the proscenium and, upside down, along its top during “Step in Time,” thereby reenacting onstage what Fred Astaire did (thanks to a set within a turning wheel) in the movie musical Royal Wedding (1951).

Watching the Poppins movie recently set me wondering. Leaving the “Jolly Holiday” sequence within Bert’s painting aside, it all clearly takes place not in the real London, or even on a backlot area designed to look like London, but very clearly on studio sets. When I first saw the movie, I probably just accepted these sets as reality; nowadays the artificiality of Disney’s Poppins world is all too obvious to me. How do most people who see the movie react? Do they notice the difference between these stage settings and reality? Are we supposed to? Are the settings of the Mary Poppins movie meant to look so theatrical, thereby providing a postmodern reminder to the viewer that this story is an artificial construct, a kind of modern fairy tale? As with all musicals, the fact that characters will segue from ordinary speaking to singing and dancing reminds us of the artifice. Moreover, in the movie (and again in the play) Bert acts as narrator, directly addressing the viewers with variations on his “Chim Chim Cheree” song. So there’s not really so wide a gap between Mary Poppins the movie and Mary Poppins the stage musical.

Something that fascinated me on viewing the movie again was the “Jolly Holiday” sequence, in which Mary, Bert and the children interact with animated characters. It’s always clear who’s real and who’s animated. But look at the settings in this sequence. Often I was not certain what was part of the set where the actors were performing and what was part of a painted background that the animation department inserted into the footage. The melding of the real and the unreal is surprisingly seamless; in fact the painted backgrounds here look more real to me than the stage sets in the pure live action portions of the movie.

The week before I had watched the Turner Classic Movies interview with Stanley Donen, director and/or choreographer for many classic movie musicals (including Royal Wedding), who, among other things, talked about asking Walt Disney to help create a sequence for Anchors Aweigh (1945) in which Mickey Mouse danced with Gene Kelly; Disney refused, so MGM’s William Hanna and Joe Barbera did the sequence with Jerry (from the Tom and Jerry cartoons) instead. Famous as that sequence is, I thought Dick Van Dyke’s dance with the animated penguins in the Poppins film topped it, and I wondered if Disney had consciously intended to outdo the Anchors Aweigh sequence. Then I realized that in having real people interact with animated characters in a “cartoon” world in Poppins, Disney had returned to the premise of his pre-Mickey silent series Alice in Cartoonland. With the “Jolly Holiday” sequence, Disney had come full circle in his career in animation.

So the segment of the book and film that takes place within Bert’s painting provides an alternate, fantasy world that is equally as “real” as the everyday world. But the book goes far further than the movie or the musical by suggesting that not only is there no division between the real and the fantastic, but that reality, as most people perceive it, is an illusion. It is the fantasy world that is the real one.

Chapter 9 of the book is “John and Barbara’s Story,” about Jane and Michael’s infant siblings. As in Sheldon Mayer’s Sugar and Spike, babies can communicate with each other in their own language, which seems to be meaningless gurgling to adults. Travers went further than Mayer: the babies can also talk with a starling, with the wind, and even with sunlight. Travers’ world is an animist one, in which it seems that everything is alive and sentient. This chapter makes the point that infants quickly lose the ability to understand the language of animals, the wind and the light, and even each other. The youngest babies are still attuned to the voices of the natural world; adults are separate from it. Mary Poppins, of course, can still communicate with the non-human world; she is, as the book puts it, “the Great Exception.” This “fantasy” world, in which everything is alive and talks, is the real one in Travers’ book; it is simply that adults, with that one Exception, can no longer perceive it.

One might say that the book’s Mrs. Corry (who also turns up in the musical) is the world’s oldest woman, since she claims to remember when Columbus discovered America and to have encountered William the Conqueror. However, she claims to be ‘”quite a chicken compared to my Grandmother.” Even so, Mrs. Corry says, “I remember the time when they were making this world, anyway, and I was well out of my teens then” (p. 122). In Little Orphan Annie Harold Gray created a similarly long-lived character, Mr. Am, who with his long beard resembles Santa Claus and, perhaps, may actually be God. Maybe Mrs. Corry is divine, too. At her shop Jane and Michael obtain “slabs” of gingerbread, each with “a gilt paper star.” That night they watch as Mrs. Corry, her two daughters, and Mary Poppins glue gilt paper stars onto the sky. “What I want to know,” Jane wonders, “is this: are the stars gold paper or is the gold paper stars?”

Now this seems to contradict the Christmas chapter, in which Maia the star appears on Earth as a young girl. The idea of stars taking human form also turns up elsewhere. For example, in the 1980s Peter Gillis co-created Cloud, a now forgotten character for Marvel’s Defenders, who was actually a nebula who could take the form of either a teenage girl or a teenage boy. (As you can see, Cloud was a pioneering character for gender issues in mainstream comics.) So stars can be children as well as gold paper. But it seems that in the Mary Poppins book they are not what science tells us they are: massive balls of superheated gas many light years away. In our world science is real and magic is illusion; in the Poppins book it’s the other way around. The sky isn’t even that far above our heads: Mrs. Corry and Mary Poppins can reach the firmament by climbing a ladder!

And if Mrs. Corry and Mary Poppins can hang stars in the sky, does that make them goddesses? Does Mrs, Corry recall when “this world” was made because she helped make it? And her phrase “this world” implies that there are others. Perhaps Bert, who can create alternate realities, is a god of sorts. (In both the book and the movie, the world Bert creates is apparently destroyed when the rain washes away his painting. Is this like Noah’s Flood?) But goddess-like characters predominate in the book; Maia, Mrs. Corry, and especially Mary Poppins.

For those who know Mary Poppins from the movie, the strangest vision of her in the book comes in the chapter set at the zoo, when her birthday falls on the night of a full moon and the animals, who speak English, all leave their cages. (There’s a penguin in this chapter, although it seems from Neal Gabler’s biography that Walt Disney got the idea to put penguins in the movie because they reminded him of waiters.) Jane and Michael enter the “Snake House,” where “All the cages were open and the snakes were out–some curled lazily into great scaly knots, others slipping gently about the floor. And in the middle of the snakes, on a log that had evidently been brought from one of the cages, sat Mary Poppins” (p. 166). The largest of the snakes, a Hamadryad cobra, seems ancient, with a face “more wizened than anything they had ever seen,” is acknowledged as the king of the beasts (not the lion, significantly), and calls Mary Poppins his “cousin.” The Hamadryad slithers towards Mary Poppins, “And when he reached her, he raised the front half of his long, golden body, and thrusting upwards his scaly golden hood, daintily kissed her, first on one cheek and then the other” (p. 167). Now consider that snakes have a phallic shape, go back and reread that part about “thrusting,” and this scenario becomes even more bizarre.

The Disney movie may hint that Mary Poppins might be a kind of angel: she first appears seated on a cloud. But in the book’s zoo sequence, she seems more like a pagan nature goddess, surrounded by the beasts of the wild and consorting with serpents. The chapter is named after the full moon, suggesting a link between Mary Poppins and lunar goddesses like Diana or Hecate. Is the zoo after hours a latter-day Eden, with Mary Poppins as an Eve who chose the serpent as her companion? The Hamadryad’s references to her as his “cousin” may imply that she is somehow a serpent herself, or perhaps that she is a shapeshifter who can appear as a woman or as a serpent. In her New Yorker profile of Travers, Caitlin Flanagan pointed out that Mary Poppins first appears in the original book “as a shape hurled against the front door in the midst of a gale, [which] assumes the form of a woman.”

FOR MYSELF
As usual, “Comics in Context” takes a two week break for the holidays, and will return on the first Friday of January 2007. I will not only be writing more about Mary Poppins but also about “Cartoon America” at the Library of Congress. In the interim, if you want to read more about “Cartoon America,” check out my report for Publishers Weekly’s Comics Week (http://www.publishersweekly.com/article/CA6399160.html?nid=2789).
–Copyright 2006 Peter Sanderson

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