Just as children of an earlier generation read and reread books like Louis May Alcott’s Little Women, said Art Spiegelman, children of the mid-20th century read and re-read Little Lulu, Donald Duck, and other children’s comics.

With The Toon Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics, published earlier this month by Abrams, Spiegelman and his wife, Françoise Mouly, are bringing those classics to kids of a new generation.

“Comic books were considered the most disposable ephemera, yet clearly those who grew up with them cherished them,” Spiegelman said. “It seems like some of the most important literature for children in the middle of the 20th century is in these comic books.”

Spiegelman and Mouly put together an advisory board, including Bone creator Jeff Smith, Nickelodeon Magazine editor Chris Duffy, and comics writer Jeet Heer, to help them select the comics, with most of the discussion occurring over the internet. “I felt very secure knowing that I was among people who really know their stuff,” Spiegelman said. “Take Donald Duck—there are people, including me, who have read it all but have different opinions—if you can only save one story from the fire, what would it be? That led to a feeling of security that this is not the only 350 pages, but it is an essential 350 pages.”

With that in mind, they want the book to feel special—like the bonus issues of comics that cost 25 cents instead of 10—but also to have an authoritative feel, like an essential reference book. “We wanted it to be like the Betty Crocker Cookbook, one of the basic features of your home,” Spiegelman said.

And many of those works had been in the mix from the beginning, Mouly said. They were the books the board members remembered from their own childhoods. “We discovered a few new things, but a lot of the oscillation had to do with the periphery, whether we would put in Harvey comics or not,” she said. (They didn’t.) “The core, after gathering a consensus with other people, validated what had been our gut feeling, and that was pretty much the comics that were formative for the cartoonists. That was one of the criteria: don't look it up, don’t overthink it. Which character, which story do you remember?”

Spiegelman is the creator of the graphic novel Maus, and Mouly is the art editor for The New Yorker and editorial director of Toon Books, a line of comics for beginning readers. Their previous anthologies include the famed alternative comics anthology Raw Magazine and the Little Lit series of children’s comics anthologies.

“Each issue of Raw had to have what I have since learned is a ‘good flip,’ where you feel good when flipping the pages but also rhymes and themes that recur so the whole should be greater than the parts that make up the sum,” said Spiegelman. “That’s the task of a well edited anthology.”

For the Toon Treasury, the editors also focused on children as their core readership. “Our ideal audience is a kid walking into a library or opening a Christmas present and having this wealth of materials he can dive into, the way Uncle Scrooge dives into his money,” Mouly said.

Thus, while the work of Barks, Kelly, Stanley, and Sheldon Mayer form the four corners of the book, Spiegelman and Mouly chose to organize it by theme rather than by creator. “Kids remember Little Lulu, but they may not know or care who John Stanley is,” Mouly said. For that reason also, they eliminated comics with potentially offensive content and those that were too outré. “With comics in general, the desire is to go for the strangest and most rule-breaking and boundary-shattering,” Mouly said, “but that wasn't really the task here. It wasn't to put together a collection of strangely artistic pseudo-comics. We had to be very disciplined that way.”

To get to that core, the editors read thousands of vintage comics, many in digital form. “Some were done by narcoleptic artists working at night, trying to get their pages in because there was an extra $20 bill in them,” Spiegelman said. “A lot were very formulaic. A lot were what they would call twee, well intended but an automatic case of diabetes came with it. I can imagine an anthology I would never want to open, also called the Treasury of Classic Children’s Comics.”

“At first I was really wondering how would we be able to tell a good from a bad comic,” said Mouly, “but you do very quickly in terms of the resonance—even that simple principle of whether you remember it after having read it.”

For Mouly, who grew up in France, some of the impetus for the anthology came from looking for comics for her own children and finding so few. “I found such a wealth of [American comics] in French, but so few here,” she said.

Spiegelman wanted to share the classic comics he grew up with—Little Lulu, the Disney titles, Sugar and Spike—with his children, and he also realized the influence they had on his work. “For many years, I was more consciously aware of the influence of the horror, sci-fi, crime, and satire, like Mad, had on me,” he said. “The other part was not exactly repressed, but it was sort of a given without me thinking about it. When I look back through Robert Crumb’s old work, the comics Uncle Scrooge and Donald Duck were basic to him as well. And the underground comics movement, we all read Little Lulu as well as the horror comics. Those were the best written.”

Superheroes, on the other hand, had little effect. “The core of this book’s kid comics are so well composed that they have a complexity where you actually believe in the character," he said. “You have to suspend a lot of disbelief before you have Spider-Man climbing up a building but none to enter Little Lulu’s universe.”

Mouly and Spiegelman’s work on the treasury coincided with their work on the Toon Books line. In both projects, Mouly said, the sense of the artist’s individual vision was paramount. “I think it distinguishes the hacks, the ones that will take a formula and then replay the same tune over and over again, and the ones who will have a unique personality and vision and that comes through in the work,” she said. In the earlier comics, publishers often had a house style, something that has been lost as publishers become small parts of large corporations. It’s something she is trying to recapture with Toon Books. “Jeff Smith and Art Spiegelman are different cartoonists, their work isn’t constructed in the same way, each has a unique approach to telling a story, but they each produce a great accomplishment in their own specific vision,” she said. “What I really am proud of is having a range of great comics for young children that are each as good as the next and all different from one another. And meanwhile there is still a house style, [although] it’s hard to define in words.”

“It’s defining the sensibility by putting pins in various places on a map and defining the boundary,” Spiegelman said.

The pair hope that the anthology, like the Toon books, will help children discover the pleasures of reading good literature that just happens to be in comics form.

“I think it is a very powerful experience for a kid to see the hand of the artist,” Mouly said. “That’s part of the reason comics are such a jolt: They see somebody making a story. It’s not quite the same thing when you read a story in type, you don't have as direct a sense. Almost all [children] will want to make their own comic story, and they don't have that reaction when they play a video game or are reading a book set in type. That is a very creatively rich moment, to realize that somebody made this happen.”