Watch this space: childhood, picturebooks and comics

This is a special issue of Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics exploring the relationships of picturebooks and comics with notions of childhood. There have been productive readings in relation to the mechanics of both these media such as Maria Nikoljeva and Carole Scott’s How Picturebooks Work (2001) and Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (2007), as well as extensive research on the history and specific creators of children’s picturebooks. However, much less attention has been paid to the intersection between these comics, picturebooks and constructions of childhood. This is an area that is potentially significant, as the understandings and definitions of childhood held by creators, publishers, teachers and others shape both what is offered to actual child readers and how children are depicted in texts. We believe, then, that focusing on constructions of childhood, rather than education, or reading for pleasure, is an important area of enquiry that opens the fields of childhood studies and visual culture to new debates.

Focusing on the links across illustration, graphic narratives and visual culture, this special issue offers interventions in the fields of comics and picturebooks. It is perhaps worth noting that comics and picturebooks are not typically considered together, with some rare exceptions such as Mel Gibson’s (2010) work in ‘Graphic Novels, Comics and Picturebooks’ and David Lewis’s (1998) work on ‘knowingness’ in relation to Colin McNaughton’s work. Perhaps one material difference between comics and picturebooks is the traditionally serial nature of the former compared with the relatively infrequent production process for the latter. While comics such as Little Nemo in Slumberland (1902–1914), Calvin and Hobbes (1985–1995) and the long-running The Katzenjammer Kids (1912–1949) were produced in weekly, if not daily, newspapers, picturebooks and graphic novels such as Raymond Briggs’s (1978) The Snowman, Maurice Sendak’s (1963) Where the Wild Things Are, or even the Dr Seuss corpus might be regarded as more ‘singular’ publication events. This is not to suggest that picturebooks are somehow more valuable, but only to draw attention to some of the material specificities surrounding each genre. While both genres have spawned their own kinds of adaptations, spin-offs and readerships, there are several links between them that might fruitfully be considered.

For example, in relation to audience (a focus in Lewis), comics and picturebooks have frequently been associated with younger readers, despite the two being very flexible media that can be used to address readers of all ages on any topic. When such assumptions are dominant, this is usually related to perceptions of what might be ‘appropriate’ content. As the artist and illustrator Shaun Tan commented in an interview, ‘I’m not sure if there is a conflict across different audiences, but like to think that pictures can work on multiple levels, both emotionally and intellectually, so long as they are not particularly coded’ (Stathopoulos 1999) This aspect of audience participation has frequently been neglected, often because of assumptions about who or what kinds of readerships constitute appropriate audiences.

In this respect, controversy is sometimes generated about an entire medium, for instance, as outlined by John A. Lent (1999), in ‘Comics Controversies and Codes: Reverberations in Asia’. Here, Lent draws attention to the way that manga was seen as having a detrimental impact upon the health and morals of young people in South Korea, Japan, the Philippines and Taiwan between the 1940s and the 1980s.

Equally, controversy might focus on a single text, as was the case in relation to the British publication of Jenny Lives with Eric and Martin by Suzanne Bösche (1983; originally published in Denmark as Mette bor hos Morten og Erik), one of the first picturebooks focusing on homosexuality and family structure. This single text was a key element in Britain in the introduction of section 28 of the English Local Government Act 1988, which forbade the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality by local governments, through publications or in public schools. More recently, the charming And Tango Makes Three written by Peter Parnell and Justin Richardson (2005) was listed as the American Library Association’s most ‘challenged’ book between 2006 and 2008, and then again in 2010, because of its depiction of a same-sex penguin couple that raise a penguin chick together.

In both these cases, what may be seen to underpin controversy relating to these media are social constructions of childhood, a concept developed within Childhood Studies and perhaps best illustrated by Allison James and Alan Prout’s (1990) collected edition Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood. Concerns about content sometimes combine with constructions of childhood, positioning children as in need of protection, or as ‘tabula rasa’, susceptible to media effects. Such assumptions can be the basis of ‘moral panic’, with the upshot that censorship becomes a key component of keeping youthful readers engaged with only what is deemed ‘appropriate’ content, rather than equipping them with the skills to navigate a world that is, more often than not, a complex and difficult setting.

By contrast, constructions of childhood that position children as active readers, discriminating and engaged, inevitably have a different relation with both comic and picturebook in celebrating the challenges they offer and embracing the notion of work for older readers as a way of continuing a passion for either medium over a lifetime.

The contributors to this special issue explore such constructions in a number of ways and from a range of disciplinary perspectives. Sean Eedy, for instance, looks at the ways in which children’s comics were seen as having the capacity to mould children in the GDR of the 1960s regarding political awareness. Eedy also considers the development of a distinct East German children’s Kultur, in the way that comic books gained popularity within the rubric of children’s literature more generally.

By contrast, Robert Shail’s article develops a critical framework for considering the appeal of Davy Law’s character ‘Beryl the Peril’, who first appeared in British children’s comic The Topper on 7 February 1953, published by D.C. Thomson (Law and Bell 1953–1990). Here, the analysis works with the tensions between two constructions of childhood, first as disruptive and in need of control, and second as joyfully anarchic. This article, then, analyses how ‘Beryl the Peril’ negotiated these conflicting conceptions of childhood, and offers a consideration of the productive possibilities of the text.

Having looked at comics aimed at children, another contributor, Mark Heimermann takes a different approach in focusing on images of childhood within a specific text, namely Robert Kirkman’s (2006) The Walking Dead. Here it is the construction of childhood innocence with which the text engages and, more particularly, how, and why, it is used as it is within the text.

The issue now moves onto a very different theme, with two articles focusing on combining the picturebook and the comic. Returning to Lewis’s work on Colin McNaughton, that creator typically combines the two, although the overall form is a picturebook, using all of the ways of telling associated with the comic. Matthew Zbaracki and Jennifer Geringer explore similar approaches in their article, showing how blended narratives, in which visual and textual media equally share the burden of storytelling, have produced new types of texts for children.

Alongside this article is a piece by Rebecca Palmer, who shares her work as a practitioner, showing ways in which the two media can be combined to create texts that draw on the comic, but are aimed at creating a work that can be successfully read aloud to children. Palmer focuses on visual rhythms in her work, with detailed attention drawn to the intersection between musicality, picturebooks and communication. Palmer offers a self-reflexive exploration of her work, accompanied by working images.

By contrast Barbara Postema looks at wordless comics and their readers. She explores how wordless children’s comics relate to and differ from ‘conventional’ children’s picturebooks and comics more broadly; discussing the reading strategies that these comics invite, including a focus on character building through body language and non-verbal communication. Her examples include Shaun Tan’s (2007) The Arrival and Raymond Briggs’s (1978) The Snowman.

Moving on, Yasco Horsman focuses on a comic strip created by Art Spiegelman and Maurice Sendak in 1993 for the New Yorker, in which understandings of childhood and of picturebooks and comics were central. The tensions between the creators are clear and their views, whilst shared in many ways, differ over childhood and trauma.

Ariel Kahn offers a different approach again in analysing two books for young adults, published by Walker Books, best known for their picturebooks. Kahn envisages the reader as active, negotiating with the text, and explores the implications of this enhanced, active reader’s role for the construction of gender identity.

Finally, we turn to Katrina Gutierrez, who brings together conceptual blending and glocalisation to investigate the dynamic interrelations between text and image and east and west in Philippine comics and picturebooks. Gutierrez explores how the blending of eastern and western story scripts and aesthetics grounded on Philippine ideologies of subjectivity produce glocal Philippine comics and graphic novels and represent a ‘glocal’ childhood that transcends cultural borders.

In addition, we offer here an additional section focusing on Shaun Tan, now perhaps best known for The Arrival. It contains an interview in which he talks with Golnar Nabizadeh about graphic novels, picturebooks and notions of the audience. Alongside the interview sits an article by Nabizadeh which, looking at The Arrival, analyses folding and unfolding, repetition and loss within the text and the use of photographic and other types of image that are central to it.

Taken together, these articles demonstrate the diversity of a focus specifically on childhood in relation to comics and picturebooks. As a critical developmental stage, among other things, the study of childhood offers a rich field within which to investigate how it might be structured, and how cultural works such as comics and picturebooks might complement other kinds of learning that takes place throughout and beyond ‘childhood’ itself.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mel Gibson

Mel Gibson is a Senior Lecturer at The University of Northumbria, teaching in the area of Childhood Studies. She has published extensively on comics, graphic novels and picturebooks. Currently working on a monograph about British girls’ comics.

Golnar Nabizadeh

Golnar Nabizadeh is a Lecturer at The University of Western Australia, teaching in the areas of modernist literature and film. She has published on pedagogy and cultural studies, and is working at present on a monograph entitled Departure and Arrival: Loss and Mourning in Literary Migrant Narratives. Her broader research interests include trauma and memory studies, cultural mourning, graphic narratives, photography and transnational literature.

Kay Sambell

Kay Sambell is a Professor at the University of Northumbria. She lecturers in Childhood Studies. She researches in the areas of Teaching and Learning and Childrens’ Literature.