Following the pictures: wordless comics for children

Abstract

Comics publishers as well as children’s book publishers are turning out increasing numbers of comics created especially for children and young adults. Amongst these is a striking number of wordless comics. This article explores how wordless children’s comics relate to and differ from ‘conventional’ children’s picture books and comics more broadly; it discusses the reading strategies that these comics invite, including a focus on character building through body language and non-verbal communication. The comics form of these texts assumes a certain amount of literacy on the part of its readers, and consequently teaches literacy habits even in a wordless context. This article also notes that academic writing on children’s picturebooks tends not to engage with comics, but that, when they do discuss comics, these are frequently silent comics. Silent picturebooks and comics can be very far apart, stylistically, but in sharing storytelling and representational techniques they inspire one another to tell new stories.

Keywords:

• Raymond Briggs
• children’s comics
• graphic narrative
• narrative theory
• Shaun Tan
• picturebooks
• Sara Varon
• David Wiesner
• wordless comics

Notes

1. In ‘Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comics Studies’ (2006), Charles Hatfield discusses the sometimes awkward relationship between comics and children’s books, both in the publishing industry and the academy.

2. While the book’s title implies that the robot character is called Robot, the dog character is never explicitly named in the text, nor is he or she specifically gendered. The dust jacket blurb says ‘Dog tries to replace his friend’, but I choose to call Dog ‘her’ in my analysis, to foreground the potential for malleability in wordless comics, and the reader’s agency in creating interpretations.

3. Some studies do hint at reasons to keep the two forms, comics and picturebooks, apart. For example in Suspended Animation: Children’s Picture Books and the Fairy Tale of Modernity, Nathalie op de Beeck (2010) is careful to include comics repeatedly in listings of various forms of children’s culture available in the period she is discussing, but she does not include any comics in the corpus of texts she discusses in detail. They are apparently too different a form from picturebooks to be considered.

4. Unfortunately the text they recommend, Monkey vs. Robot (2000) by James Kochalka, is not actually wordless. The comic does not include a lot of dialogue, since, true to nature, the monkey does not speak, but the work is filled with sound effects of the monkeys banging logs and sticks in the forest and the clanking of machines in the robot factory, to the degree that often any space in the panels that is not filled with figures is taken up by onomatopoeia.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Barbara Postema

Barbara Postema is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow with the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre at Ryerson University in Toronto, funded by a grant from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. She is working on a book project about silent comics. Postema has presented on comics at numerous conferences, including the Modern Language Association, Popular Culture Association and International Comic Arts Forum, and is now serving on the Executive Committee of the Canadian Society for the Study of Comics (CSSC/SCEBD). She has published articles in the International Journal of Comic Art and elsewhere, and her book Narrative Structure in Comics: Making Sense of Fragments was published by RIT Press in 2013.