ABSTRACT
Children themselves hold a kind of power over many adults, and not exclusively women despite the strength of biological and cultural forces. In terms of comic writing, the most obvious contemporary genre is that of ‘the school revolt’. The child-centric focus of the comic world becomes very clear: it takes possession of the whole text, as if the means of production has finally slipped into the control of the younger generation itself. The image of the child as a member of a captive nation is a powerful one for both tragedy and comedy. The Australian Comedy Company team exploited it in several episodes with a floppy puppet baby boy on its back in a crib, being cooed at by its adults. The post-feminist writing of Rosalind Miles urges anew the importance of the task of child raising, and canvasses some of the causes of evident misery and stress amongst the current generations of children in industrialized societies.
