Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays ed. by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox (review)

As a direct response to the ever-increasing popularity of graphic novels in both popular culture and literary scholarship, this wide-ranging edited collection analyzes "over twenty-five graphic novels written for young people since 2000" (9). In addition to its introduction and coda, the main body of this excellent collection is divided into five thematic parts. Beginning with essays that center on the structural and narratological elements of graphic novels, the sections that follow focus on transmedia storytelling, pedagogical possibilities, representations of gender and sexuality, and questions of identity based on historical, cultural, and political considerations (10). Michelle Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox's decision to divide this collection into these easily digestible parts is just one beneficial element of its organizational structure. While the essays are grouped together by overarching concepts, they also appear to follow a general pattern of first analyzing specific details in the primary texts and then considering "big picture" implications of texts in this genre. While the essays in part 3 have an overtly pedagogical focus, the scholarship in all sections can be used by instructors to teach both undergraduate and graduate students the multifaceted structural elements of graphic novels and their complex narrative implications. Unlike some critical collections, from the perspective of potentially using this text in the classroom, the essays are organized in a manner that promotes reading them in order for maximum effect.

To begin part 1, "Graphic Novels as Comics Storytelling: Word and Image, Form and Genre," Annette Wannamaker uses the diverse physical iterations of Jeff Smith's Bone to support her argument that a text/comic's physical form not only influences the bodily experience of reading, but also reveals information about its target audience and can be used to influence the comics marketplace and readership. Karly Marie Grice's essay centers on the contesting narratives in Gene Luen Yang's Boxers & Saints, arguing that Yang constructs these narratives via his rhetorical use of the synthetic component. In her analysis of "Overpeck" and Swallow Me Whole, Sarah Thaller contends that the comics medium is particularly well suited to creating narratives about mental illness, as the illustrations allow for graphic depictions of the often disturbing manifestations of illnesses such as PTSD or schizophrenia. In the last essay of this section, Catherine Kyle argues that in Ivy, Sarah Oleksyk's use of three levels of visual narration as well as three types of monstration combine to create a "new and sophisticated level" of "doubled narration" (72).

Part 2, "Hybrid Comics, Transmedial Storytelling, and Graphic Novels in Adaptation," begins with an essay by Rachel Rebellino that juxtaposes Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid series with Rachel Renée Russell's Dork Diaries. Rebellino argues not only that readers become reader-writers via the paratext, but also that the different DIY journals for both series work to improve the multimodal skills of middle schoolers. Joseph Michael Sommers analyzes The Adventures of Captain Underpants, arguing that Dav Pilkey uses parody to liberate child readers from authoritative adults and therefore "subverts the form he has been valorized in by authorized agencies" (109). In the seventh chapter, through analyzing the transmedial storytelling of My Little Pony, Aaron Kashtan demonstrates how young readers can develop critical media literacy via the series' use of intertextual references and the reflexivity of characters such as Pinkie Pie. Finally, Meghann Meeusen analyzes the comics and film versions of Coraline and The City of Ember to support her argument that though the former offer children "greater degrees of agency over their reading experience," both media nevertheless reinforce rather than break down the aetonormativity often depicted in children's texts (126).

In part 3, "The Pedagogy of the Panel: Comics Storytelling in the Classroom," Tarbox argues for the inclusion of comics in undergraduate children's literature courses and outlines a class unit...