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

In recent years, comics studies has been expanding as a field or sub-discipline within many other more established academic disciplines, children’s literature certainly being one of them. More often than not, discourse in this scholarship seems to surround children’s graphic novels as opposed to mass market comics or comic strips, both of which have a considerably greater history and development. As such, it’s refreshing to find a major comics studies publisher like Bloomsbury pressing forth into children’s literature as is the case with Gwen Athene Tarbox’s Children’s and Young Adult Comics (2020). The work reads as a spiritual successor to Tarbox’s 2017 anthology with co-editor Michelle Abate, Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays (University Press of Mississippi), and, in many ways, acts as a primer more attenuated to the children’s literature scholar looking to dip a toe into the comics studies pool as opposed to vice versa.

The strengths of this slender volume—it’s a tight 154 pages before the glossary—reside in its ability to quickly traverse a densely-packed scholarly field and body of literature with solid and consistent close reading and an absolutely crucial fourth chapter on critical uses and case studies that take dense theory and places it into a readable and comprehensible format. Taking Thierry Groensteen’s dense (if not brilliant) guidance on braiding and articulating it with a graphic novel like Barry Deutsch’s Hereville: How Mirka Got Her Sword is neat and immediately deployable for the dilettante study of comics. Tarbox’s graceful and adroit prose only makes this easier and more accessible. Similar chapters on comics and comics studies history, social and cultural contexts, and key texts make for quick ingress into a field rich in titles and theory as Tarbox aims to move “comics from the periphery to the center of the discussion [in] children’s and YA literature” (3).

There are some curious choices in the work. As Tarbox writes, there is a feeling that the larger discussion emanates out of a defensive position regarding the marriage of children’s literature and comics. There is a tension or an agonism presented between the two fields that may or may not be accurate in the current moment (but certainly existed in the past). Comics scholars have been working with comics as children’s literature for years and extensively chronicling comics’ history with children. For example, for the better part of the last forty years, M. Thomas Inge interrogated the boundaries between the fields in works such as Comics as Culture (1990) and Charles M. Schultz: Conversations (2000). Through more recent works, such as Lara Saguisag’s Eisner nominated Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics (2018), Mark Newgartern and Peter Karasik’s How to Read Nancy (2017), or the capacious work on children, childhood, and comics of scholars such as Mel Gibson and Charles Hatfield, one can readily find voluminous discussion of the intersection of comics and children’s literature. This subject has actually been covered, here, in Children’s Literature Quarterly, in a colloquium helmed by no less than Philip Nel in Winter 2012 (37.4 to be precise) or the 2007 special issue on Comics and Childhood from ImageTexT helmed by the aforementioned Hatfield and Cathlena Martin (3.3). In a volume as compact as this one, it is unnecessary to give such a considerable amount of space to revisiting old arguments regarding comics’ place within a children’s literature community. I think it’s fair to consider these arguments relatively settled. Or, to put it another way, when Tarbox elucidates on texts and illuminates their inner workings, the book is resplendent, and one would do quite well to read several thousand more words of her insightful remarks on them.

Likewise, there is an immediate and obvious question that arises from a book entitled Children’s and Young Adult Comics: Where are all the comics? Tarbox focuses...