Children's and Young Adult Comics by Gwen Athene Tarbox (review)

Children's and young adult comics and graphic novels have increased in popularity in the past few decades. Texts like Gene Luen Yang's American Born Chinese (2006), Shaun Tan's The Arrival (2006), and John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell's March series (2013–16) have become staples in both the children's literature and comics classrooms. Though not without their critics—see, for example, S. E. Hinton's tweet that graphic novels aren't "real reading" and the Twitter storm that ensued¹—graphic novels for young readers are clearly here to stay. As such, Gwen Athene Tarbox's Children's and Young Adult Comics, part of the Bloomsbury Comics Studies series, provides a productive and timely foundation for children's literature critics looking to learn more about the world of comics studies, and vice versa. Because this book's intended audience arguably includes both comics and children's literature specialists, neither of whom can be assumed to know anything about the other, Tarbox faces an interesting challenge in the book's framing and approach. Whether discussing children's literature or comics, Tarbox is likely telling one half of her audience something they already know. Tarbox undertakes this task with aplomb, deftly and concisely weaving together these two fields.

Though not formally divided, the book essentially has two parts in which Tarbox uses distinct critical approaches: in the first half, she employs distant reading and meta-analysis, and in the second, she relies on close reading strategies. In chapters 1 through 3, Tarbox provides an overview of the field of children's comics and graphic novels from educational, historical, and sociocultural perspectives, respectively. She maps out the histories of children's literature and comics, as well as the criticism of both, providing a helpful and easy-to-follow overview of both fields and their overlap. In chapters 3 and 4, Tarbox utilizes a more zoomed-in approach, providing case studies first of critical reading techniques necessary for the study of image/texts and then of contemporary key texts in the field. Here, she relies more on close reading and specific case studies as she establishes fundamental methodologies for the close reading and critical analysis of comics. In these chapters, Tarbox's readings double as arguments in and of themselves and as demonstrations of how, exactly, to close read an image/text that will be of particular use to those new to comics studies.

In "Introduction: 'Comics Are the Language of the Future,'" in addition to providing an overview of the book, Tarbox suggests that the recent shift to include comics and graphic novels in the secondary classroom coincides with an increase in the publishing of comics and graphic novels for young people from a growing number of mainstream presses. She argues that despite a long history of popular appeal, comics read by young people have only recently—within the last two decades—begun to receive significant critical attention from "mainstream children's literature publishers, librarians, and scholars" (3). Tarbox's aim with the book is thus to "address these absences by providing a revised history of children's literature that moves comics from the periphery to the center of the discussion, where it becomes clear that despite medium-specific differences, comics and text-based children's and YA literature share many thematic, stylistic, and socio-cultural elements" (3). Tarbox also identifies another goal of her work, clearly influenced by the #WeNeedDiverseBooks movement, namely, "to introduce readers to a wide range of texts and to comment … when a popular text presents issues regarding cultural authenticity and accuracy" (6). As an example of how she does so, while Tarbox uses Raina Telgemeier's wildly successful Ghosts (2016) as a case study in just how popular children's graphic novels have become, she also cites criticism by Laura Jiménez and Debbie Reese on Telgemeier's flawed depictions of a culture to which she does not belong.

Chapter 2, "Historical Overview," is one of the most useful...