Children's and Young Adult Comics

Gwen Athene Tarbox

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350009219
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

A complete critical guide to the history, form and contexts of the genre, Children's and Young Adult Comics helps readers explore how comics have engaged with one of their most crucial audiences. In an accessible and easy-to-navigate format, the book covers such topics as: - The history of comics for children and young adults, from early cartoon strips to the rise of comics as mainstream children's literature
- Cultural contexts – from the Comics Code Authority to graphic novel adaptations of popular children's texts such as Neil Gaiman's Coraline
- Key texts – from familiar favourites like Peanuts and Archie Comics to YA graphic novels such as Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese and hybrid works including the Diary of a Wimpy Kid series
- Important theoretical and critical approaches to studying children's and young adult comics Children's and Young Adult Comics includes a glossary of crucial critical terms and a lengthy resources section to help students and readers develop their understanding of these genres and pursue independent study.

1

Introduction: “Comics Are the Language of the Future”

The Educative Potential of Comics

In May 2017, John Lewis and Andrew Aydin, coauthors of the award-winning March graphic novel series (2015–17), stood in front of a capacity crowd at the Rockefeller Chapel on the campus of the University of Chicago, engaged in a question and answer session regarding the process they developed, along with artist Nate Powell, to create a graphic novel account of the Georgia Congressman’s early years in the civil rights movement. Lewis began by describing how a comic book, which he read as a teenager, Alfred Hassler, Benton Resnik, and Sy Barry’s Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story (1957), inspired him to pursue social activism. Addressing the young people in the audience, Aydin seconded Lewis’s assertion about the power of the comics medium, emphasizing that “comics are the language of the future. You all have grown up on the Internet … You all speak in words and pictures. What is a comic book panel but a meme? It’s how you communicate, so if we are going to teach you everything that we need to, we are going to have to do it in your language” (Hill 2017).

Aydin’s statement captures concisely the evolution of a medium, once solely identified with popular culture, but now a mainstay of children’s and Young Adult (YA) literary production. For over ninety years, professionals involved in the development and distribution of youth literature have emphasized the educative potential of traditional literary forms such as poems, plays, and novels, but it has not been until the twenty-first century that most librarians, teachers, and publishers have agreed that the comics medium is an aesthetically and a pedagogically valid form of expression. A number of factors have fueled that assessment, including the incredible popularity of comics geared toward a youth audience. As the fastest growing category of the comics trade, bringing in over $100 million in sales in 2015 (Griepp 2015), comics for young readers are also bolstering the traditional book trade. For instance, in September 2016, Graphix, an imprint of Scholastic Books, ordered an initial print run of half a million copies for Raina Telgemeier’s graphic novel, Ghosts, an incredible achievement for any book, let alone a middle grade graphic novel. To put Ghosts’s print run into perspective, literary agent Jane Dystel reports that, on average, “a sensational sale” in today’s publishing marketplace “would be about 25,000 copies” (Neary 2015).

While Telgemeier’s 2016 sales were exceptional, comics creators who published that year with Graphix, as well as with other firms dedicated to producing comics for young readers, were also achieving critical and financial acclaim. Gene Luen Yang, author of the YA graphic novels, American Born Chinese (2007) and Boxers & Saints (2013), was serving as the Library of Congress’s National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature and had just won a MacArthur Foundation Genius Grant. Lewis, Aydin, and Powell’s March, Book Three (2017) won the National Book Award, the Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Comic, and four American Library Association Awards, including the Michael L. Printz Award for achievement in YA literature. In the realm of mainstream comic books, G. Willow Wilson and Adrian Alphona saw their Ms. Marvel series (2014–17), featuring Kamala Khan, a Pakistani American superhero, win legions of new fans. Thus, Telgemeier’s success with Ghosts was only one indicator—though an emphatic indicator—that the second decade of the twenty-first century heralded a new popularity for children’s and YA comics.

Of course, long before 2017, the comics medium had been associated with children, teenagers, and their reading habits. The first North American comic strips launched in newspapers at the turn of the last century, including Hogan’s Alley (1895–8), The Katzenjammer Kids (1897–2006), and Little Nemo in Slumberland (1905–26), featured child characters, and the advent of the comic book in the 1930s ushered in an era of creativity—and profitability—as children’s comic book sales in the early 1950s exceeded the sale of traditional children’s books by a staggering 500 percent (Schutte 2013). Even during the latter decades of the twentieth century, when comics industry executives and independent comics publishers attempted to enhance the reputation of the medium by courting adult readers, children not only read mainstream comics put out by DC and Marvel, but they also turned to manga in droves, inspired by the popularity of anime series such as Dragon Ball (1984) and by the success of Original English Language (OEL) manga texts, commissioned and distributed by Tokyopop and Seven Seas Entertainment (Reid 2011).

As stated earlier, despite the enduring popularity of children’s comics, it has only been in the last two decades that mainstream children’s literature publishers, librarians, and scholars have begun to accord comics the attention that other media, including children’s text-only narratives and children’s films, have experienced for nearly a century. Writing about the state of children’s comics in the North American academy and among mainstream publishers, Charles Hatfield observes that “until recently the sustained aesthetic study of comics alongside, rather than in contra-distinction to, children’s books has been neglected. This represents not simply a blind spot in the field of children’s literature studies, but arguably one of those constitutive absences around which the field has built itself” (2006: 346).

The aim of this book is to address these absences by providing a revised history of children’s literature that moves comics from the periphery to the center of the discussion, where it becomes clear that despite medium-specific differences, comics and text-based children’s and YA literature share many thematic, stylistic, and socio-cultural elements in common.

The Relationship between Children’s Literature and Children’s Comics

Acknowledging that children’s comics are a major component of children’s literature involves the concomitant recognition that as an entity, children’s literature is an incredibly layered enterprise. Based upon his forty years of writing about the field, Perry Nodelman explains that “children’s literature is not simple. The most rudimentary of baby books comes to exist and has meaning only within a complex of assumptions about books, about babies, about books for babies, about language and visual imagery, about education, about pleasure, and about the economy and the marketplace” (2008: 245). Nodelman also argues that a children’s text, regardless of medium, reflects adult desires, anxieties, and agendas (2008: 341). Many of the features of nineteenth- and twentieth-century children’s texts accentuated the presence of the adult, including direct address by the author to the reader, the prominent presence of benevolent adult characters, and the depiction of idealized storylines that reified conventional morality vis-à-vis child behavior.

In recent decades, the adult presence has receded into the background of children’s and YA literature. Acquisitions editors and authors have sought to appeal to a media-savvy generation of young readers, gradually instituting changes to how children’s and YA texts are structured and written. The tendency in contemporary children’s and YA literature is to focalize texts through a young person’s point of view, to provide greater variety in terms of subject matter, to shift away from overt didacticism, and, increasingly, to feature the experiences of underrepresented groups. However, behind the façade of the first-person child or teen narrators and their up-to-date pursuits lies what Nodelman calls “the hidden adult,” the shadowy presence that, if examined carefully, reveals the text’s adult ideologies and prerogatives (2008: 341). What sets children’s and YA comics apart from traditional text-only narratives in this regard is the fact that comics creators convey meaning primarily via visual rhetoric, often bypassing language entirely to demonstrate a character’s epiphanies through elements such as color, line style, panel layout, and figural placement.

Visual rhetoric not only has the potential to impact readers’ perceptions of the world around them, it amplifies many of the problematic aspects inherent in contemporary children’s and YA literary production, including the scarcity of authentic portrayals of non-white and LGBTQ characters and the tendency of cultural outsiders to perpetuate inaccuracies regarding the practices of underrepresented groups. For instance, while Telgemeier’s Ghosts received positive reviews from mainstream outlets such as the New York Times and the Washington Post and won the 2017 Eisner award for the Best Publication for Kids, a number of academic reviewers and school librarians have noted that Telgemeier’s status as an outsider impacts the way she writes about the history of the California Missions and about culturally-specific customs such as the Día de los Muertos holiday. Referencing this outsider phenomenon, Clare Bradford (2007) explains that “most representations of Indigenous peoples and cultures in settler societies have been and continue to be produced by non-Indigenous writers and artists … [because] in these nations, it is the white, Eurocentric cultures whose practices, perspectives, and narrative traditions dominate literary production and representational modes” (71).

Laura Jiménez (2016), in her review “Ghosts: Swing and a Hard Miss,” begins by defining the term cultural appropriation as “privileged individuals using something from another culture without showing understanding of the culture or giving credit to that culture.” She goes on to observe that

For the people whose lives and histories have been taken and used for consumption, their culture is not exotic. They don’t need to be discovered because they are not lost, nor unknown. The argument that this white person (or straight person or male) is giving voice ignores the fact that people could learn about a culture by listening to the actual people of that culture.

Telgemeier’s choice to depict Mission ghosts as Spanish speakers, for example, erases the fact that the California Missions were established to convert Indigenous peoples to Catholicism, often by force; thus, as scholar and librarian Debbie Reese (2016) points out, “some of Telgemeier’s ghosts might have spoken Spanish, but it is far more likely that their first language was an Indigenous one.” Ghosts not only contributes to what Reese terms “the too-high-pile of problematic books” that either distort or misrepresent native cultures, it has also done so after moving through an editorial process that apparently did not include a thorough historical and cultural vetting. The depiction of the Mission ghosts as smiling, laughing Spanish speakers, arrayed in cultural markers of the Spanish in Mexico, should have been a cause of concern for editors, and given the potential for these stereotypical depictions to reach millions of children, their lack of vetting will have a significant impact. The We Need Diverse Books movement has grown out of concerns that the publishing industry needs to employ people of color and members of the LGBTQ community in greater numbers, as does the academy. My goal in this study is to introduce readers to a wide range of texts and to comment, as I have done here, when a popular text presents issues regarding cultural authenticity and accuracy.

Features of This Book

Taken as a whole, then, this volume provides students, scholars, and general readers with an overview of the significant historical, cultural, and critical concerns related to children’s comics, with a particular focus on how comics creators have sometimes mirrored developments in children’s literature and have sometimes introduced innovations in the comics medium that have been subsequently adopted by authors of mainstream children’s and YA literature. Since the advent of book publishing, children’s and YA literature has included illustra...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-title Page
• Bloomsbury Comics Studies
• Dedication Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Series Editor’s Preface
• Figures
• Acknowledgments
• 1 Introduction: “Comics Are the Language of the Future”
• 2 Historical Overview
• 3 Social and Cultural Impact
• 4 Critical Uses
• 5 Key Texts
• Glossary
• Resources
• Index
• Copyright Page