Ms. Mendes has, with Freddy Stories, produced a collection of vignettes of life as seen and experienced from a child's perspective which are simply spot on, and demonstrate an abundance of sympathy for the condition of child consciousness.  Accurately recreating a child's state of mind and world view is especially difficult to manage in any medium, but comics' formal qualities have seemed to have provided creators with a toolkit well adapted for exactly this job.  Even so, the vast majority of comics deptictions of childhood are mawkish, simpering, sentimental and just plain wrong.  Here, in what is – sadly – one of the last books that will be funded by the Xeric Foundation, Center for Cartoon Studies graduate Melissa Mendes gets it right, and has produced a work that truly captures one of the most elusive of artistic subjects – the child mind.  See what we're talking by taking a look at this excerpt of the first few pages.