10/28/2023 0 Comments Highlight magazine gofus and gallant![]() “The feature is designed to be a part of our work to help kids become their best selves,” Christine French Cully, Highlights’ current editor in chief, told me. That philosophy remains, and is perhaps most obvious in Goofus and Gallant. A flyer tucked into a 1948 issue at the Library of Congress explains to parents how the magazine can be used for the “home training of the child.” “Character building threads through the book from cover to cover,” it reads. The magazine’s tagline is “Fun with a purpose,” and many issues over the years have included guides to its contents for teachers and parents. They chart the shifting freedoms and boundaries of childhood, and illustrate how adults’ expectations of kids have changed over the decades. ![]() I recently spent a day at the Library of Congress, reading Goofus and Gallant strips from over the years, and found that the panels are remarkable windows into history. But in another sense the characters sprang directly from the moral compass of society. The higher power that created them was Garry Cleveland Myers, who first wrote a version of the strip called “The G-Twins” at the magazine Children’s Activities, before he co-founded Highlights with his wife, Caroline Clark Myers. What can they do but play the roles that were laid out for them? Their essential nature was preordained by a higher power long ago-Goofus forever doomed to be a screwup, Gallant to be a smug little do-gooder. In every issue, they play out a sort of Calvinist destiny. Goofus and Gallant are symbols more than characters. Are they twin brothers? Friends? The same kid in alternate universes? Or is it more of a Jekyll-and-Hyde situation? Though the style of their illustration has changed over the years (they were briefly elves with pointed ears before transforming, unannounced, into human boys), they have always been essentially identical to each other. The boys are prepubescent, but their exact age is unclear, as is their relationship to each other. On the right, Gallant does the correct thing. On the left, Goofus does the wrong thing. ![]() The premise is as simple as it is effective: two panels, side by side, depicting two approaches to the same situation. Since 1948, Goofus and Gallant, the stars of their eponymous comic strip in Highlights for Children magazine, have taught generations of kids the dos and don’ts of how to be. Sign up for it here.įor more than 75 years, the boys have been boxed in. This article was featured in One Story to Read Today, a newsletter in which our editors recommend a single must-read from The Atlantic, Monday through Friday.
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