How do you teach ethics and philosophy to kids? Comics, of course.

There's a long history of this. Superhero comics are, in their very DNA, morality tales. Modern superheroes are obsessed with what it means to be upstanding in your community, and then be pushed to the limit and challenged in your beliefs.

Peanuts, of course, and Calvin & Hobbes, Nancy — they all deal with the choices their characters make, how their personalities, desires, and circumstances drive them, on the way the three or four panel gag.

Laura Knetzger's Bug Boys, which just gained a national publication from Random House after first being published in 2015 by Czap, is a comic that neatly fits into this tradition.

I first talked about Bug Boys after meeting Knetzger and taking a chance on the title at Short Run in 2015. I was taken with her work, to say the least:

This is a big collection of episodic comics about a friendship between a stag beetle, Stag-B, and his best friend, a rhinoceros beetle, Rhino-B. Knetzger has weaved a complex, rich world for these bugs, who pray (and debate the value of praying) to a chrysalis that may contain a corpse; interact with humans they can’t understand; live in mushrooms in a bug village; hitch rides on the backs of furry dogs to go to the beach and surf and find treasure; meet a spider librarian who tells them that many of their favorite stories were, in fact, human stories that were translated by bugs who snuck into human’s houses, and then re-wrote and re-contextualized them so that they’d make sense to bugs.

Because it’s utterly charming, and richly philosophical in a way that kept the attention of both the parent and the kid, and that’s a tall order. The stories never go where you expect, and the bug friendship is sweet, but also thoughtful and sophisticated, despite feeling pared down and seemingly straightforward.

I also noted that my son, then five, took to the books immediately. After I sat and read the book with him, he took on the persona of Stag-B and started calling me Rhino-B. The day before, he had been Darth Vader. I thrilled that a small indie comic about thoughtful, feeling beetles could win his heart so handily against a large corporate vision of wars in space.

Bug Boys didn't win me just because it was good for kids, though, it won me because it was so damn earnest and sweet, so direct, so creative. Knetzger's art is straightforward, with clean lines and direct composition, with a huge amount of personality and inventiveness.

It won me because it grappled with authentic feelings that felt visceral, immediate, and real — and, as if they were taken seriously for what they are in the moment. It recognized the kind of emotional validity and value that is so important to kids, whose feelings are often minimized by adults when they are inconvenient.

Frustration with being small, and told your feelings don't matter, can be expressed as a superhero with bulging muscles and physical power, or as small bugs who take the time to actually listen to each other's thoughts and emotions. Both are valid, but the first narrative is the common one. It is, in fact, the large overdone cultural cliche, and rests on solving problems through violence.

Bug Boys is a completely different approach, and works on the simple premise that acknowledging each other can be a powerful way of learning about ourselves and our world. This direct and earnest power comes from Knetzger's own story, as she wrote in the introduction to the Czap version:

I call this period in my life "The Bug Boys Summer" because it was a very peculiar time. I had just turned 21. I had been rejected from all the internships and jobs I applied for. I was desperate to prove myself as a real cartoonist, as an adult, anything. I drew all day and stayed up late feeling like a failure. I was starting to be able to put into words some of the heavy questions that had been following me. Was I really an artist? Did I really have things to say?

Could someone else do a better job making my comics? Am I contributing to the world? What's the right way to live? In a time of uncertainty, making Bug Boys felt like I had unearthed an ancient civilization built by my previous lives.

We don't, of course, ascribe the author to the fictional works, but Knetzger's pen is close to the mettle, here, and it imbues the work with a distinct and necessary verisimilitude — there is absolutely no irony to chip away here, no winks to the adults, no tacit admission that something can't be meaningful to young and old together. It's just stories of two bug friends having adventures, processing them in very different ways, and listening to each other because their friendship is based on value and excitement for what they love. As opposed to the more common witty belittling each other, which seems to be the only sanctioned way to express affection in today's world.

Those two characters are Stag-B, bookish and more reticent, and Rhino-B, a bug of quick actions and emotions. The new book has eight stories (a few less than the Czap book, but there's a teaser for volume two in the back, coming next year, so we can't be upset about that) which take them on a variety of adventures.

The hardbound volume is also in full-color, which was a nice treat. The lettering has been redone, with a thicker, darker line. I miss some of the calligraphic flourishes Knetzger brought to the original comics, but the new style is more legible and will appeal more broadly, I suspect.

It's a handsome small volumes, and existing Bug Boys fans will be happy to know there's a how-to-draw section at the back so you can learn to make both of the beetles.

Now that it's in wide release, I can offer a challenge to you. Wander into your local bookshop — I picked up my copy at the Queen Anne Book Company, but all local shops should have one in stock — and read the first three comics. It won't take you long, they are short and move fast. If you have a young person to read to, that would be nice, but even you, adult reader, should do this on your own.

If you can put the book down after reading those stories (it only took the first for me: the treasure map, the discussion of the chrysalis and Rhino-B's patience with Stag-B for wanting to pray there, the mishap with the frog), then you are released from the challenge, and perhaps this is not a comic that will speak to you.

But you may just discover yourself with it at the front counter (and, blessed are the children's imprints, because the price is $13.99 for a full-color hardbound book!), and you may find yourself, like me, letting yourself be charmed by something that feels immediate, real, and deliciously alien.

Reading Bug Boys, for me, is almost like a meditation. It takes my mind to somewhere much clearer than the current chaos of the news cycle. It takes it to somewhere not less complicated, but more direct: it focuses on the bottom of one's emotional Maslow pyramid, and when I look up from the page, I feel calmer, and more focused on something that is important in life.

That's how you teach philosophy and ethics in a smart way. You just put it on the page as a narrative, and hope the audience will find it. Knetzger has a powerful talent that, I feared, in our age of super-packed jokey ironic commercialized work might be overpowered. But then, I remembered my son putting down the lightsaber and picking up the love of these two beetles, and that gives me so much confidence in finding the important through-line in our complicated society, and that speaks to our ability to weather challenges.

Maybe that's a tall order for a comic, and maybe your experience won't be like mine. But if it is, why would you want to be without this gift of a book on your shelf so that you can share it with someone else who might find it as powerful as we do?

It's been five years since I first read Bug Boys. My son, who still does love them and read this book, doesn't pretend to be bugs anymore, his interests have mostly turned to other things. But, I'm still as eager a fan as I was when I first read it. Now that my son has stepped aside, I'll just own up that I was using him as a shield: Bug Boys spoke to me in a deep way. I hope this series is long lived, and Knetzger finds great success with it.