More Words about Pictures: Current Research on Picture Books and Visual/Verbal Texts for Young People ed. by Naomi Hamer, Perry Nodelman, and Mavis Reimer (review)

In 1988, Perry Nodelman published Words About Pictures, an analysis of picture books that considered in depth what the words and pictures were communicating and how they were interacting. Although not the first to address such topics—see Joseph H. Schwarcz's Ways of the Illustrator: Visual Communication in Children's Literature (1982) and William Moebius's influential "Introduction to Picturebook Codes" (1986), among others—Nodelman's monograph immediately assumed prominence in the scholarship of children's literature. As co-editors Naomi Hamer and Mavis Reimer confirm, Words About Pictures has been cited "in some 700 monographs, reference works, scholarly articles, dissertations, and theses published in more than thirty countries since 1990," informing conversations about picture book criticism, literacy studies, analyses of comics, apps and e-games, and even advertising strategies (xii). To commemorate the book's twenty-fifth anniversary in 2013, an international symposium was held in Winnipeg; the present volume includes nearly a dozen of those presentations.

Hamer and Reimer emphasize that the contents of More Words about Pictures are eclectic and intended not only for researchers but also for educators (xiv). The essays encompass "three thematic strands … semiological and structural readings of picture books; studies of graphic narratives and media forms; and explorations of the material and performative aspects of picture books" (xv). The editors have chosen "to order the chapters to cultivate less obvious intersections between arguments" (xv). Building on the symposium, the volume conveys the impression of an engaged and ongoing conversation.

Nodelman reflects in the introduction not only on what he accomplished in 1988 but also on what he failed to accomplish. Acknowledging a lack of attention to comics and recognizing the scholarship of Charles Hatfield, Craig Svonkin, and Joe Sutliff Sanders, among others, he notes that "my experience of reading graphic novels has made me aware that the most characteristic structures, rhythms, and narrative techniques of picture books and graphic novels are significantly different from one another" (9). In seeming response, Nina Christensen's "Between Picture Book and Graphic Novel: Mixed Signals in Kim Fupz Aakeson and Rasmus Bregnhoi's I Love You Danmark" attends to works that "combine elements from traditional picture books for younger children and elements from comics or graphic novels" (155), ensuring that some attention is paid to comics and to the relationship between comics, picture books, and graphic novels, even as she suggests that these media may have more in common than Nodelman imagines.

Nodelman also acknowledges that the picture book market that influenced his scholarship was predominantly American. Several chapters expand the horizons of More Words about Pictures, including Christensen's essay (which addresses the pictorial qualities of a refugee's experience), but also Moebius's analyses of European picture books; Erica Hateley's contextualizing of an Australian classic; Hamer's cataloging of picture book apps from Canada, the US, and the UK; and Torsten Janson's survey of publications by the England-based Islamic Foundation, among others. Andrea Schwenke Wyile's essay showcases two texts by Canadian poet Sheree Fitch while articulating significant new theories about poetry published in picture books.

Nodelman acknowledges that picture books continue to reinforce predominantly white, middle-class perspectives (6–7). The selections in the volume are perhaps more attentive to racial and ethnic diversity than they are to issues of class and privilege, but they also address or at least ask significant questions about the role of picture books in ecocriticism (in Nathalie op de Beeck's incisive and cautionary "Environmental Picture Books") and, to some extent, in social justice movements (in, for example, Hateley's and Janson's contributions).

While delineating the ways that pictorial texts have and have not changed, Nodelman also attends to audience. Representative essays expand readers' conceptions of audience, as well as audiences' impact on authors. Lian Beveridge focuses on babies as...