Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics ed. by Mark Heimermann, Brittany Tullis (review)

I have to admit that I struggled a little bit with this collection. As is typical of most essay collections, the work can be hit and miss—but that wasn’t the particular source of my confusion. Rather, the first thing that I asked in my reading notes was “is this a book about comics that feature children or a book about comics for children?” The subtitle, “Youth in Transnational Comics,” certainly suggested the former, but the essays seemed to stem from both approaches at the same time. More troubling was the specific use of the term “transnational.” While it is absolutely true that there are well developed cartooning traditions about and for children around the globe, I was unclear how the editors might mobilize the term “transnational” in distinction with “international”; how they might conceptualize children’s comics operating across and between national boundaries. While several examples immediately suggested themselves (the development of Disney characters in Italy and Sweden, for example), it was not immediately clear to me how this volume might trouble the centrality of American comics within English-language comics scholarship, and, indeed, I was a tad disappointed to see that it does not. While the editors promise a volume that is “comprehensive (but not exhaustive),” this is impossible to accomplish in a book that is so focused on a single national tradition (10). Of the thirteen essays in the volume, fully eight of them focus on comic books and strips produced in the United States, with only a small amount of space addressing work from Finland, Argentina, Japan, and France. Moreover, only a few of the essays actually address the transnational circulation of comics—the majority focus on discrete local or national examples.

Some of the strongest work in this volume outlines material that is little discussed in English-language scholarship on comics. Ralf Kauranen, one of the founders of the Nordic Network for Comics Research (a leading institute in the field), provides an outstanding overview of the use of comics in Finnish propaganda during World War II. This well-written and informative essay provides important historical insights into a cultural phenomenon of which many scholars will be completely ignorant. Annick Pellegrin’s close reading of the work of Fabien Vehlmann within the context of five decades’ worth of publishing for children in Belgium is a lovely model of textual interpretation that will add important social and cultural context for readers coming to the author’s work through recent translations into English. James Nobis’s reading of Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako is an interesting essay that sometimes feels like an outlier in this volume. Relying on the semiotic approach developed by Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen, Nobis reads the text on the level of image analysis while most of the other contributors take a more traditionally literary approach. All this is to say that Picturing Childhood is something of a mixed bag in methodological terms. When the majority of the contributions feature textual analysis rooted in the close reading of exemplary texts, essays like Kauranen’s take the volume in unexpected directions.

Given that there are thousands, possibly tens of thousands, of comics worldwide about and for children, the selection of works on hand here defies easy categorization. There is no strong rationale for some of the choices, which means that essays occasionally sit uneasily next to each other. Many of the essays are about comics that are about children: Tamryn Bennett discusses children in the work of acclaimed post-underground cartoonist Lynda Barry; co-editor Mark Heimermann writes about the work of Canadian cartoonist Jeff Lemire; C. W. Marshall discusses the comics of Paul Hornschemeier; coeditor Brittany Tullis contributes a chapter on Quino’s well-known Argentinean newspaper strip, Mafalda. While each of these chapters offers some interesting insights (and Marshall’s, with its strongly philosophical focus, is intriguingly unlike the others), two essays particularly...