AJ has spent a substantial part of his weekend working on a comic book. The comics are called The Adventures of Pie "and my book," AJ has informed us, "is The Collection of The Adventures of Pie." I admire his foresight at beginning with a collection. It saves time later.

Pie is a stick figure with a face shaped like, well, a half-eaten pie. Most of Pie's adventures take the form of some kind of game versus his arch-nemesis Zob, a stick figure with a regular face and usually a grumpy expression.

Pie is an optimist who tries hard, but he doesn't always win. And yet his sunny demeanor always triumphs in the end. In the first episode, Pie is playing baseball against Zob and his team. Pie gets to bat and swings and hits what he thinks is a home run. But Zob tags Pie as he gets to home plate and Pie loses the game. The penultimate panel shows Pie looking sad standing in front of a scoreboard that reads, "ZOB 100 PIE 98." But in the last panel, Pie is smiling once again. After all, it is only a game.

My favorite Adventure of Pie, though, is one that does not feature Zob. Pie seen with a smile on his face going for a walk. He comes to a rock and jumps over it. He comes to another rock and jumps over it. He comes to a third rock and jumps over it too, smiling all the while. Then he comes to another rock, an enormous rock. A rock bigger than Pie. He looks perplexed for a panel, and then, smiling, jumps over it too. The last panel shows the giant rock and Pie's feet, barely visible, at the top of the panel. Pie has done the impossible just because he tried.

It's no surprise that AJ has taken to comic drawing. His interest in Calvin and Hobbes, which has been sustained for nearly a year, has bordered on obsession. And while we were on vacation, he discovered my brother's old stash of Tintin books at my parent's house. We came home with a couple of them. But AJ doesn't seem to particularly like drawing. He is not interested in the fine details of style and technique. He is much more interested in the story each comic tells. And because he still gets bogged down with spelling, the comic is freeing him to tell stories in his own way without having to do it the way grownups tell him to. Without AJ's attendant translation, it might be hard to figure out what's going on in each comic. But it doesn't really matter, because AJ loves to tell you about them. He doesn't even need an audience. "I just love reading my Pie comics," he observed with satisfaction from the back seat of the car, where he had been chuckling over his sheaf of papers yesterday afternoon. "I never get tired of reading them."

Everything about the Pie comics is messy. They're drawn on lined paper torn out of a spiral notebook (even though AJ has plenty of pristine drawing paper available to him). His handwriting, usually controlled, is messy. His spelling, usually good, is best called creative. Something about the process of drawing the Pie comics allows AJ to break out of his good boy routines. He's setting his own rules and I'm trying hard not to intervene or even comment too much. I've got my own spaces to work The Adventures of Pie are entirely his own. Everyone needs a space where they can make a mess of their own and see what happens.

In an episode drawn this morning before AJ left for skating lessons, Pie and Zob were playing hockey. For the first several frames, a smiling Pie successfully kept the puck away from a grimacing Zob. But then Zob whacks Pie in the shins in a desperate attempt to gain control of the puck. Pie spins around rapidly in a massive scribble in the middle of the page, a Pie-centered tornado, and miraculously spins the puck right into the goal. Zob's underhanded attempt to control the game has backfired. The last frame shows a smiling Pie in front of the scoreboard. He has won the game 1-0. I almost cheered. But AJ's favorite part was not the winning. It was the spinning. "I scribbled to show he was going around in circles." And then he looked at me for an okay, because at school he has been told not to scribble. I want to say that it's sometimes okay to break the rules, but instead I tell him that it looks great. "Pie really looks like he's spinning." AJ smiled and stroked his paper. "I know."

[A latish entry yesterday, part two of a review of Dr. Geek's harri3t mix]

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