The Boy has gone through phases of being into many authors and fictional characters. Recently we've been through Sandra Boynton, Asterix, The Magic Treehouse and a few other things I can't remember. When he goes through these periods of being really, really into something, he wants to assign characters from the books to each member of the family, he asks me to look for coloring pages on the web and he writes his own knock-off versions of the favorite authors books.

Our house is littered with books in the "style" of beloved authors. We have a "Boynton-style" book called Snakey Achey. Several Asterix comics that would probably make Uderzo shudder and a few Magic Treehouse books too.

The Boy's latest craze is Peanuts. He reads and rereads all the comics he can get his hands on. We're all assigned Peanuts characters -- he chose to be Schroeder, which I find interesting. And now he's making his own "Peanuts" comic books. He told me, with all the seriousness a five year can muster, that he was very sorry to know that Charles Schultz was dead, but he guessed it was up to him now to draw the cartoons.

Those will be some big shoes to fill even if one ignores the very large copyright issues, but I think all this practicing and copying could lead somewhere interesting some day. Maybe he'll get a blog or something.