Graphic Novels: The Innocent (1954) That "Constructive and Creative Forces in

Download as pdf or txt
Download as pdf or txt
You are on page 1of 15

font to shape the letters from each animal’s name into a pictorial

representation of the animal named.


In Vectorpark’s digital app Metamorphabet, users tap, drag, tilt or
spin each of the 26 letters of the alphabet. Each letter transforms
multiple times into a word that begins with the letter. For example,
“A” grows “antlers,” then forms an “arch,” and then begins to move
around in a leisurely “amble.” A narrator reads both the letter and
the words they spell. An app like Metamorphabet evokes the
traditional abecedary, or alphabet book, but adds digital sound, and
the ability to trigger movement of the images onscreen.

GRAPHIC NOVELS
Charles Hat eld and Craig Svonkin argue for reading comics and
graphic novels alongside other illustrated books for children, noting
their shared qualities and appeal to young readers: “Both picture
books and comics participate in children’s culture and literacy
learning. Both are popular forms of imagetext (to use W.J.T.
Mitchell’s in uential term) which build narratives visually as well
as, or sometimes instead of, verbally. Both allow for varied ratios
and relationships between image and text, yet o er their readers
compellingly if not dominantly visual (though sometimes also tactile
and multisensory) experiences” (431). Hat eld and Svonkin observe,
however, that while picturebooks have been authorized by adults as
proper childhood reading as a means of literacy instruction, comics
and graphic novels “are often seen as fugitive reading” that is more
about pleasure than instruction (431). Some adults have actually
considered comics dangerous to children, most famously the
psychiatrist Frederic Wertham, who warned in his book Seduction of
the Innocent (1954) that “Constructive and creative forces in
children are channeled by comic books into destructive avenues”
(94). Wertham’s book was part of a broader hysteria over the
dangers of comics that culminated in 1954 with the formation of the
Comics Code Authority, which issued a strict set of guidelines about
what could be shown in comics. Both the popularity of comics
among child and adolescent readers and the fears this popularity
inspired among some adults testify to the importance of this artistic
form in children’s culture.

A Brief History of the Graphic Novel

Graphic novels are not, strictly speaking, children’s or young adult


literature. Like folk and fairy tales or chapbooks, most are not
intended speci cally for young readers. The prominence of
superhero comics as the popular face of graphic narratives may
contribute to the impression that such works are primarily for
children, since superheroes have been marketed to children,
especially in the form of cartoons and toys. However, even
superhero comics contain mature content and primarily target adult
readers. Nevertheless, like the crossover and mixed-audience works
discussed in Chapter 2, some comics and graphic novels are read by
both children and adults. Moreover, as visual texts, they share
qualities with children’s illustrated works and picturebooks.
According to Stephen Weiner, comic books, or magazines with
illustrated stories, emerged in the early 1930s, and the earliest
examples were collections of comic strips reprinted from
newspapers (2). When it became clear that a market existed for this
new medium, original stories and art were commissioned: “Early
comic book magazines consisted of genre stories told in comic book
format, including mysteries, adventure, and romance” (Weiner 2).
As Weiner explains, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s creation of
Superman in the early 1930s and his debut in the 1938 publication
of Action Comics #1 helped propel comics to popular success. Scott
McCloud de nes comics as the juxtaposition of “pictorial and other
images in deliberate sequence intended to convey information
and/or to produce an aesthetic response in the viewer” (9). In other
words, comics combine image and text, visual and verbal
information, presented sequentially to tell a story. Starting in 1950,
the Belgian artist Hergé published his Tintin comics in a series of
“comic albums,” or large-format collections, which were immensely
popular across Europe and eventually translated into English and
published in the United States by the same company that produced
the Little Golden Books. Experiments with longer visual narratives
continued between the 1940s and 1970s with a variety of terms
suggested for these works: picture novels, picto-novels, novels in
graphic form, graphic stories, and graphic novels. The latter term,
which eventually prevailed, was coined in 1964 by comic-shop
owner and publisher Richard Kyle and was popularized in the late
1970s by comics pioneer Will Eisner. Eisner used the term to market
A Contract with God (1978), a book-length collection of stories in
graphic form, and he sought speci cally to di erentiate graphic
works with literary aspirations from the more popular, mass-
produced comic books (Arnold n.p.). Weiner de nes graphic novels
as “book-length comic books that are meant to be read as one story”
(xi). The term is now used indiscriminately to refer to literary works
telling a single graphic story, collections of reprinted comic books,
and manga.
Works that would now be called graphic novels preceded Eisner’s,
but the late 1970s and early 1980s saw increased attention to the
literary possibilities of graphic literature. Art Spiegelman published
the rst volume of Maus: A Survivor’s Tale in 1986, followed by a
second volume in 1991. Spiegelman’s Maus depicts his father’s
experience as a Polish Jew during the Holocaust and his eventual
deportation to and survival of Auschwitz, with di erent types of
characters represented by di erent animals: mice for Jews, and cats
for German soldiers and Nazis. The two-volume work was awarded
the Pulitzer Prize in 1992, making it one of the most distinguished
graphic novels ever published. Other landmark graphic works
include Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen (1986–87) and
Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns (1986), both of which were
initially published serially as monthly comics before being collected
in single volumes. They re ect a much darker perspective on
superheroes, combining the fantastical elements of superhero comics
with the grittier realism of young adult and adult literature, and
they have proved enormously in uential on the direction of comics
since their appearance. Originally published in French, Persepolis
(2000) by Marjane Satrapi tells the story of her childhood in Iran
after the 1979 revolution; because of its focus on childhood, it has
drawn the attention of children’s literature critics. Gene Luen Yang’s
American Born Chinese (2006) engages with the themes of
immigration, cultural hybridity, self-acceptance, and the corrosive
impact of racial stereotypes using a unique blend of fable, fantasy,
and realism. American Born Chinese received the Printz Award as the
most distinguished work for young adults in 2007. Alison Bechdel’s
Fun Home (2006), although not for young adults per se, details the
childhood and young adulthood of its lesbian protagonist and her
relationship with her gay or bisexual father. The graphic novel has
been adapted into a Broadway musical, and some called on it to be
banned based in part on fears that children would read it (Sims
n.p.). The US Congressman John Lewis’s graphic novel trilogy March
(2013–16), cowritten with Andrew Aydin and illustrated by Nate
Powell, details his participation in the Civil Rights Movement of the
1950s and 1960s as a young man. The third volume was honored
with the National Book Award for Young People’s Literature, the
Coretta Scott King Author Award, and the Printz Award. These are
only a few of the most critically acclaimed graphic novels, many of
which have become crossover hits with children and young adults, if
not published speci cally for them.
Illustration from American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, 2006.
Graphic Narratives and the Child and YA Reader

As visual, relatively inexpensive, and popular texts that tell exciting


tales of horror, adventure, or heroism, comics and graphic
narratives have been commonly perceived as children’s or YA
literature. Moreover, the content of comics storytelling—issues of
identity, transformed or mutated bodies, and stories of
empowerment and adventure—resonates with the concerns and
experiences of young readers. For instance, some of the most
popular comics heroes, such as Superman and Batman, are orphans,
and in Superman’s case, his biological parents were important
gures on his doomed home world, in contrast to his humble
adopted family in Kansas. This origin story sounds like what Freud
calls the family romance in which a young person fantasizes that he
has been adopted and that his “real” parents are actually much
more important than his known ones. One of the consistent themes
of Superman mythology is his experience as an alien out of place on
earth. He is surrounded by much weaker earthlings and must decide
how he will t in with them and what he will do with his powers.
This character, who is both di erent from and more powerful than
those around him, represents an attractive fantasy for young people
who may similarly feel alienated but disempowered. In many cases,
comics heroes are physically or temporally displaced from home.
Buck Rogers, whose comic strip appeared in 1929, is a man who
awakes from suspended animation hundreds of years in the future.
Flash Gordon, the eponymous hero of a comic strip that debuted in
1934, must travel to a distant world to save the earth. The comic
character who nds himself far from home becomes the outsider
who must adjust to or conquer an alien environment before
returning, replicating the home-away-home structure that Nodelman
sees as characterizing children’s literature. Many comics heroes have
strange, mutant, or transforming bodies, echoing the physical
experience of childhood and adolescence. The Fantastic Four (1961),
Spider-Man (1962), and the Hulk (1962) all feature characters whose
bodies are transformed by freak accidents and who must contend
with their strange new bodies and powers. This changing body also
appears in the Ms. Marvel series, which features Marvel comics’ rst
Muslim heroine, Kamala Khan. The rst ve issues were collected in
the volume Ms. Marvel Volume 1: No Normal (2014). Kamala is a
teenaged Pakistani American from New Jersey who idolizes the
previous Ms. Marvel, Carol Danvers. Kamala learns that she has
shapeshifting abilities and embraces the role of Ms. Marvel, with
some trepidation. For the mutants of the X-Men comics, the
emergence of their powers actually coincides with adolescence,
making the direct parallel between the sometimes monstrous or out-
of-control bodies of superheroes and those of children and
teenagers. Graphic novels build on these traditions of comics and
comic strips.
Given that graphic novels occupy the boundary between
children’s and adult literature, one must also be attuned to how they
address, imply, or construct their audiences. Yang’s American Born
Chinese, for instance, uses the graphic form to address the concerns
of young adults, juxtaposing and overlapping the movement from
child to young adult—the experience of adolescence—with the
movement from China to the United States—the experience of
immigration. Both situations involve a kind of hybridity that is
explored both visually and verbally in the work. Vera Brosgol’s
Anya’s Ghost also explores the immigrant experience, tapping into
the gothic roots of graphic novels in horror and crime comics. Anya,
a rst-generation Russian immigrant, is struggling to t in at her
American high school when she falls down a well and encounters
the ghost of a girl named Emily, who died nearly a century earlier.
Anya’s own life as a contemporary teenager is contrasted with
Emily’s simpler farm life, and the ghost appears to become
increasingly corrupted by her exposure to teen culture. Anya must
eventually contend with the increasingly threatening spirit, which
represents the worst in herself. In Lila Quintero Weaver’s graphic
novel Darkroom (2012), Lila and her family emigrate from Argentina
to Alabama in the early 1960s and experience life as Latinx
immigrants in the Deep South during the Civil Rights movement.
Weaver’s work suggests a way of thinking about the child or young
adult reader of graphic novels in that Lila is positioned in the text as
herself a keen reader of the world around her, though she
sometimes nds herself mysti ed by the tense race relations of her
small town.
With the association between images and accessibility or
simplicity, presumably stemming from the use of images to convey
information to illiterate people, graphic ction has been used to
appeal to youth while teaching them about literature, politics,
society, and history. Some of the rst long-form comics were
volumes in the Classics Ilustrated series that adaptated canonical
literary works such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe, Herman
Melville’s Moby Dick, and James Fenimore Cooper’s Last of the
Mohicans. Published by Albert Lewis Kanter between 1941 and
1971, the Classics Illustrated series originally comprised 64-page
comics published under the “Classic Comics” label. Each issue
included additional educational content and omitted advertisements
to appeal to educators (Jones 16). For instance, Willam B. Jones Jr.,
notes that the Romeo and Juliet issue contained “a description of
Elizabethan playhouses,” and most included author biographies
(16). The character of Wonder Woman debuted the same year as the
Classics Illustrated series. Created by psychologist William Moulton
Marston, Wonder Woman was meant to teach readers about the
possibilities of empowered womanhood. “Frankly, Wonder Woman
is psychological propaganda for the new type of woman who
should, I believe, rule the world,” Marston reportedly wrote (qtd. in
Lepore front matter). More recently, Roland Owen Laird, Taneshia
Nash Laird, and Elihu “Adofo” Bey’s Still I Rise: A Graphic History of
African Americans (2009) presents important moments in African
American history using the graphic novel form. The sophistication
of graphic novels—their mature content, the complex relationship
between visual image and verbal text—suggests the often-
overlooked sophistication of children’s picturebooks or comics for
younger readers. Placing graphic novels alongside picturebooks
prompts a reevaluation of each form and raises questions of how the
two di er, how they address di erent audiences, and how their
marketing a ects public perception of what they are and how they
work.

Reading Graphic Novels Critically

As with picturebooks and other visual media, reading graphic novels


critically requires the reader to attend to both image and text. The
content and style of the illustrations, their placement on the page,
the content and placement of the verbal text, and the interplay
between verbal and visual elements are all crucial features of
graphic literature. According to McCloud, the less detailed and more
abstract a cartoon, like a stick gure or emoticon, the more
ampli ed and general the message. For example, a simple smiley
face can convey pure happiness, and a broader range of people of
di erent backgrounds can identify with the more simple and iconic
face. For McCloud, this possibility for ampli cation and generality is
what makes comics so appealing and e ective for a broad audience.
Some of the concepts we have discussed in relation to picturebooks
will be useful for analyzing graphic novels, but the analysis of
graphic novels does require its own techniques and terms.
Illustration from Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White by Lila Quintero Weaver,
2012.

TERMS FOR THE ANALYSIS OF GRAPHIC NOVELS


TERM DEFINITION

Panel A panel is a basic visual unit comprised of a single


image, usually framed by a four-sided outline or border,
though some panels are round or lack borders.

Gutter The gutter is the space between panels. Usually action


is contained to a panel, but sometimes illustrators can
violate panel boundaries and extend action into the
gutter to communicate something extraordinary, like a
violent action.

Thought or Speech These white spaces filled with text usually float above a
Bubble character’s head and indicate dialogue or thought.
Bubbles that occur in a sequence of smaller white
circles, with the words printed in the largest circle,
usually indicate thoughts not spoken aloud.

Caption Words that appear in boxes inside a panel or gutter


constitute a caption. Usually captions represent the
voice of the narrator, though if the text appears in
quotation marks it might represent a character’s speech
or thought.

Motion Lines Lines immediately adjacent to a figure within a panel are


used to indicate movement or feeling. For instance,
several lines might be drawn from a fist to create the
impression of the arm moving through space during a
punch, or several squiggly lines coming off a head could
convey surprise or confusion.

Symbols McCloud uses the general term “symbol” to describe


visual objects with culturally specific meanings. He gives
the example of a small pear-shaped object drawn on a
figure’s forehead, which could be read as sweat and
signify physical or mental exertion. Below the eyes, the
same symbol could be read as tears, indicating sadness
or grief.

Sound Effects Sound in comics can be represented textually, using


onomatopoeias like “pow” or “thud.”

Closure The term “closure” is borrowed from Gestalt psychology


and refers to the process of filling in missing information
to form a complete mental picture. Closure usually
occurs automatically and unconsciously as the reader
looks at a panel and moves between panels. McCloud
provides the example of a sequence of two panels with
a human figure and a top hat; in the first, the figure is
wearing the hat and touching the brim of it with his hand.
In the second, the figure is holding the hat above his
head. The viewer likely achieves closure by imagining
the action of lifting the hat off, though we only see two
static images. Sequential art relies on closure for
meaning.

We can use these terms to analyze a page from Weaver’s


Darkroom on which Lila’s young brother, having grown up in
Argentina, sees an African American man in Alabama for the rst
time. The man appears in a borderless panel occupying the full
vertical length of the page, with Lila’s brother, Johnny, seated in the
background playing with his toy dump truck. Johnny is also
depicted in two much smaller panels to the left of the man. In the
rst, his whole body is shown seated, his face looking up and
alarmed. The second panel is a close-up of his face, his eyes wide as
he calls out to his father. The three gures of Johnny indicate
movement in time, since he does not notice the man in the rst
panel and then transitions from being silently alarmed to calling
out. Because of Johnny’s movement, the reader experiences the
closure of imagining the man walking, though his singular image is
static. Moreover, the man’s eyes are closed. We assume he is
blinking, not that he is walking with his eyes closed, but the
juxtaposition of his closed eyes and Johnny’s wide open ones makes
clear that Johnny is the one looking and that the man is the object
of Johnny’s gaze. Because the reader also looks at the man who
cannot or does not look back, the page creates equivalence between
Johnny and the reader and privileges Johnny’s perspective, and
ours, over that of the African American man in a way that could jar
the reader. The images and their arrangement on the page mean
something, and we would miss those meanings if we did not think
carefully about the form of graphic narratives.
Reading
Children’s
Literature
A CRITICAL INTRODUCTION

Carrie Hintz
and Eric L. Tribunella
[SECOND EDITION]
BROADVIEW PRESS – www.broadviewpress.com
Peterborough, Ontario, Canada

Founded in 1985, Broadview Press remains a wholly independent publishing


house. Broadview’s focus is on academic publishing; our titles are accessible to
university and college students as well as scholars and general readers. With over
600 titles in print, Broadview has become a leading international publisher in the
humanities, with world-wide distribution. Broadview is committed to
environmentally responsible publishing and fair business practices.
 

© 2019 Carrie Hintz and Eric L. Tribunella

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, kept in an


information storage and retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any
means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
except as expressly permitted by the applicable copyright laws or through written
permission from the publisher.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Hintz, Carrie, 1970-, author


Reading children’s literature : a critical introduction / Carrie Hintz and Eric L.
Tribunella. — Second edition.

Includes bibliographical references and index.


ISBN 978-1-55481-443-5 (softcover)
 
1. Children’s literature—History and criticism. I. Tribunella, Eric L., author II.
Title.

PN1009.A1H56 2019    809.89282    C2018-906322-X

Broadview Press handles its own distribution in North America:


PO Box 1243, Peterborough, Ontario K9J 7H5, Canada
555 Riverwalk Parkway, Tonawanda, NY 14150, USA
Tel: (705) 743-8990; Fax: (705) 743-8353

You might also like

pFad - Phonifier reborn

Pfad - The Proxy pFad of © 2024 Garber Painting. All rights reserved.

Note: This service is not intended for secure transactions such as banking, social media, email, or purchasing. Use at your own risk. We assume no liability whatsoever for broken pages.


Alternative Proxies:

Alternative Proxy

pFad Proxy

pFad v3 Proxy

pFad v4 Proxy