Sue Stauffacher’s Wireman’ is a huge hit with kids who had given up on reading

Photograph by
Mitch Ranger

Weren’t there other alternatives?
There weren’t very many of them. I’m also a children’s book reviewer—and have been since the early ’90s—so I started looking around for books that those kids would really want to read. But the things I saw weren’t very compelling.

Describe the children you’ve worked with.
I’ve worked with urban poor kids, primarily children of color, and I’ve also worked with rural white kids who are poor. As we know, illiteracy has no color. Of course, there are many poor kids who can read really well, but a significant number of them can’t. By the time these kids are in fourth or fifth grade, they’re really far behind in reading. They’re very bright, but they’re not motivated to read. How do we flip that switch?

What’s the answer?
When I was in the Grand Rapids Public Library with my friend Sarah McCarville, who is youth services coordinator, five or six young kids ran up to Sarah and asked, “Where are the comic books?” This was 10, 12 years ago, and we both looked at each other. We knew there was nothing for them.

So I started to make my own comic books. I had a friend who was an artist, and I wrote them like a primer: “Will he go? Yes, he will go.” The first one was called Bed and Bear and the Lost Cave.

Whoa! That’s pretty uncool.
Right. That was in ’97. But by 2001, I had the idea for Wireman, which was inspired by the story of the Philadelphia Wireman. He’s sort of a larger-than-life artist.

The real Wireman’s identity remains a mystery, and he’s not a well-known artist. How did you discover him?
I walked into the Akron Art Museum and I saw this bizarre little wire sculpture with a sign that read, “Philadelphia Wireman, circa 1983.” Many of my books start out with just that kind of click.

Talk about your experience with locked-down teens.
I worked for a year with incarcerated juveniles, 15 to 19. You know what was so exciting about working with them? These kids were so involved in the vision of helping other kids learn to read. I never had any discipline issues. I never had any problems. We would read the Wireman script aloud, and they would say, “Oh, no, no, no—that character wouldn’t say or do that.”

What was an idea of theirs that made the final cut?
I wanted to be sensitive, so I had probably used the word “heavy” to describe one of the characters. And the kids would be, “Oh, come on. Cut to the chase. Just say, 'Dude’s too fat to lift.’”

You received grant money to publish the first four issues, but you took out a home-equity loan to finance the next four. Why is this project so important to you?
I have a strong belief in civic democracy, but there are a lot of people who aren’t able to participate because they’re not literate. Those of us who are literate because of our socioeconomic status have an obligation to help others. It’s not fair to be born poor.