Little Island Comics Goes to University!

To the best of my knowledge, Toronto’s Little Island Comics is the only shop in the world dedicated exclusively to comics for children. In May 2014, I had the pleasure of attending the conference for the Association for Research in Cultures of Young People at Brock University on behalf of Little Island Comics. For the conference, we created a display of a wide variety of contemporary and classic graphic books for kids and spent the day sharing our experiences and expertise as specialty children’s booksellers with interested scholars.

Comics have long been seen (in the Anglo-American world, at least) as inherently juvenile, despite the diversity of styles and subject matter within the medium. In the 1990s and the early 2000s, in the wake of the publication of Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize– winning, two-volume book Maus, booksellers, critics, and the reading public began to speak differently about the medium. Although the term “graphic novel” itself was coined decades earlier, it gained currency during this period. On the one hand, the new, warm reception of comics in literary, educational, and academic circles was a breaking down of barriers, a once-misunderstood medium taking its place as the Ninth Art. On the other hand, the deployment of highfalutin phrases like “graphic novel” recreated and reinforced unfortunate distinctions between “high” and “low,” “serious” and “pop,” “literary” and “pulp.”

This post-Maus historical moment—the Rise of the Graphic Novel (capital R, capital G, capital N)—produced a paradoxical platitude, one that continues to be reproduced: “comics aren’t just for kids anymore!” First of all, this popular notion proposes that comics were once “just for kids,” which was never the case. But I think it is also interesting that at the same time as article after article marvelled at the maturity and literariness of “graphic novels,” graphic narratives in books for kids were still merely “comics.” Athough Maus may have been admitted as a cultural object worthy of academic and pedagogical scrutiny, the same was not true for “Calvin and Hobbes.”

Happily, the landscape continued to change. In 2005, Scholastic launched their Graphix imprint with the reissue, in full-colour, kid-friendly editions, of Jeff Smith’s multivolume Bone. Bone had not been conceived of as a work for children specifically and, indeed, contains several elements that may be considered impolitic for kids’ books (most notably, cigar smoking). The huge popularity of Bone with young readers caught the attention of publishers, creators, and booksellers, and it serves as a convenient marker for the beginning of the recent kids’ comics boom.

Figure 1.

Little Island Comics logo.

Since 2000, The Beguiling Books & Art, a renowned comic shop that has operated in Toronto for more than a quarter of a century, had been developing a library services business. Because they are often scrutinized by the public on the basis of their images alone and because they carry still the stigma of being “low” culture (i.e., works that cannot possibly have redeeming literary or artistic value), comics present many challenges for teachers and librarians. At the same time, as comics for young people were booming and demand for these material in schools and libraries was increasing, more Japanese comics (manga) were being translated and made available in English than ever before. Japanese comics in particular were and remain a huge hit with young people, not only because many of them are fast-paced and richly emotional but also because they are supported frequently by other media forms such as anime or video games. North American comics have been traditionally regarded as suspect material by North American libraries; Japanese comics were regarded so all the more. Cultural differences in representations of the body, sex, and sexuality, as well as different ideas about age appropriateness, meant that comics had become a minefield of difficult-to-curate content, and few librarians had specialist knowledge in this area. Over time, The Beguiling assembled a team of booksellers to address these issues, working consultatively with librarians to curate titles in this popular category...