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

This collection of twenty essays productively combines the fields of children's and young adult literature with comic studies; these two academic areas frequently intersect and overlap in many ways. In the essays, scholars from both fields examine a wide range of visual narratives that combine words and images to tell stories.

While comics and graphic novels now have a wide readership among children and young adults and have increasing approval by librarians and teachers, this has not always been the case. Comics for children have a contested history in the United States. Comics were singled out as a corrupting influence on young people, in part due to the publication of Fredric Wertham's Seduction of the Innocent in 1954 that lead to the creation of the Comics Code. With the development of alternative and underground comics and the rise of graphic novels intended for adult readers, comics appeared to temporarily abandon child readers, as Michael Chabon argued in his 2004 Comic-Con keynote speech. Thanks, in part, to librarians who recognized that comics and graphic novels could be an effective method to encourage reading and increase literacy, we are experiencing a golden age of children's comics and graphic novels. Not only are comics and graphic novels a popular and profitable aspect of contemporary publishing, but the form is simultaneously attracting talented and innovative writers and artists. As the editors mention in their introduction, Edward Schneider found that, by 2013, 98.1 percent of libraries in the United States had a graphic novel collection, and that children and teens were responsible for half of the graphic novels checked out from of libraries (8). As Aaron Kashtan observes in his essay on the transmedia strategies involved in the My Little Pony television programs and comic book series, graphic novelists for younger readers—Gene Luen Yang, Raina Telgemeier, Jeff Smith, and Jeff Kinney—now outsell the top Marvel and DC comics (112).

This is a timely and important collection of essays for children's literature scholars interested in learning more about comics and graphic novels and for comic scholars wanting to learn more about those texts intended for younger readers. The essays are organized into five broad categories: structure and narration; transmedia and adaptation; pedagogy; gender and sexuality; and history, politics, and culture. Contributors offer carefully researched analysis of some of the most popular and influential author/illustrators of children's graphic novels including chapters on Jeff Smith's Bone, Jeff Kinney's The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, and Dav Pilkey's Captain Underpants series. The collection also features critical essays on well-known graphic narratives for adolescent readers including John Lewis's March, Gene Luen Yang's Boxers & Saints, Raina Telgemeier's Drama, Vera Brosgol's Anya's Ghost, and Mariko and Jillian Tamaki's Skim and This One Summer.

The collection has a number of outstanding essays. Annette Wannamaker explores the thirteen-year, complicated publishing history of Jeff Smith's Bone, which culminated in 2004 with Bone: The Complete Cartoon Epic in One Volume. Wannamaker notes that Bone, "challenged the later Harry Potter novels and even Samuel Richardson's Clarissa" in terms of length as well as Jeff Smith's favorite novel, Moby-Dick (21). It is a detailed examination of the materiality of the comic, and how factors such as genre expectation and market forces affect the physical form and ways that the comic is read. Equally compelling is Joanna Davis-McElligatt's examination of how John Lewis's March: Book 1, written by Andrew Aydin and drawn by Nate Powell, is intimately linked both in form and content with the publisher FOR's 1957 Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, revealing how the comic medium was, and remains, pivotal as an effective method of dissemination of information concerning the Civil Rights movement. Karly Marie Grice effectively untangles...