Young Adult Comics and the Critics: A Call for New Modes of Interdisciplinary Close Reading

In her 1996 essay "Young Adult Literature Evades the Theorists," Caroline Hunt identified the lack of cross-disciplinary communication as one of the reasons that a sustained body of criticism on young adult literature had yet to materialize in the North American academy (6). Ten years later, Charles Hatfield extended Hunt's concern to scholarship related specifically to children's and young adult comics. In the essay "Comic Art, Children's Literature, and the New Comic Studies," Hatfield observed that scholars of children's and young adult literature "ha[d] been slow to put aside assumptions about the Otherness of comics vis-à-vis literary theory," thus perpetuating "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" (364, 378). The issues raised by Hunt and Hatfield now seem even more relevant, when over a third of comics published in North America are marketed to young readers (Griepp). In addition to considering how the medium of comics is shaping the contemporary young adult category, this essay advocates for new modes of interdisciplinary close reading, joining pivotal aspects of young adult literature scholarship to interpretative moves practiced by comics theorists who study narrative form.

Contemporary young adult comics emerged out of a North American comics tradition that originated at the turn of the twentieth century with daily newspaper comic strips such as Harold Gray's Little Orphan Annie (1894–1968) and Richard F. Outcault's The Yellow Kid (1895–96), followed by the advent of the comic book in the late 1930s. While these artifacts often featured teenagers, they were initially created for a general audience. However, by the 1950s, a number of social commentators attempted to draw a link between juvenile delinquency and the consumption of comic books. In Seduction of the Innocent (1954), psychiatrist Fredric Wertham argued that a young person's emotional and intellectual development could be compromised by reading comics, especially those in the horror and romance genres. Though his research was later called into question, Wertham's testimony before the United States Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency in the summer of 1954 set the stage for a complete overhaul of the comics industry (Tilley 385). By the mid-1950s, those comics publishers and syndicates remaining in the marketplace had toned down content and limited the thematic scope of North American comic books primarily to a genre thought to be acceptable for young readers: superhero comics (Brenner 259). By the 1980s, eager to expand beyond a child audience, the major US comic book publishers DC and Marvel fostered the work of comics creators writing expressly for adults, including Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons (Watchmen, 1986) and Frank Miller (The Dark Knight Returns, 1986), a marketing decision that would remain a guiding principle into the twenty-first century (Brenner 260). Young people growing up in the 1970s and '80s were still regular readers of superhero comic books, teen humor/romance comic books such as the Archie series, and popular comic strips, but traditional text-only literature far outpaced comics in terms of editorial commitment and sales to young readers.

The primary catalyst that would lead to a resurgence of children's and young adult comics came from outside North America in the form of Japanese cartoons (anime) and comics (manga). Both the Pokémon and Sailor Moon anime series, which were among hundreds of youth-oriented comics and cartoons produced in Japan during the 1980s, were broadcast on North American television and set the stage for VIZ Media and other small publishers to translate manga serials into graphic novels and offer them for sale in the US and Canada, relying upon word of mouth to attract a preteen and teenage audience (Reid). Inspired by the style and storytelling patterns found in manga, North American comics creators Barry Blair (Samurai, 1986) and Ben Dunn (Ninja High School, 1987) developed what came to be known as Original English Language (OEL) manga that were published only in English and that garnered a cult...