Children’s and Young Adult Comics by Gwen Athene Tarbox

Abstract

Reviewed by: Children’s and Young Adult Comics by Gwen Athene Tarbox Deborah Brothers (bio) Gwen Athene Tarbox. Children’s and Young Adult Comics. Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Children’s literature is not the same as young adult literature. “Comics” can mean anything from a one-panel cartoon to a multivolume graphic novel. Each of these fields is impacted by cultural trends as well as deep and challenging assumptions about audience, race, ethnicity, gender, censorship issues, and more. In this slim (just under two hundred pages) volume, Western Michigan University professor Gwen Tarbox unpacks some of those complications for general readers and students yet never reduces the analysis to talking points for scholars. The third book of the Bloomsbury Comics Studies Series, Children and Young Adult Comics invites all to learn from an expert teacher and synthesis magician. Tarbox weaves the complicated strands into a patterned tapestry, creating a “revised history of children’s literature” as she shifts “comics from the periphery to the center of the discussion” (3). Tarbox builds upon earlier work of many scholars (Maria Nikolajeva, Perry Nodelman, and Philip Nel, for example) but also, notably, herself. She and [End Page 132] Michelle Abate broke new ground in their first-of-its-kind Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults (2017). In Tarbox’s essay from that book, “From Whoville to Hereville: Integrating Graphic Novels into an Undergraduate Children’s Literature Course,” she explains that “no children’s literature textbook to date includes a dedicated chapter on the comics medium” (142). Her current project becomes such a text. Children and Young Adult Comics is redolent with insights from years of teaching and reading critical scholarship pertaining to visual literacy, comics, and children’s literature. The personal focus Tarbox always brings to her own scholarly work, an emphasis on equity and inclusion, is manifestly present and developed in a manner that satisfies like the last piece of a jigsaw puzzle. The “Introduction” (chapter 1) reveals comics’ capacity to reach diverse audiences, even as their champions employed Superhero qualities in order to secure their place in literary conversations. Comics, Tarbox tells us, have only been seen as “an aesthetically and a pedagogically valid form of expression” by “most librarians, teachers, and publishers” since the turn of the twenty-first century (2). The fact that comics are recognized as important and what this recognition means to the fields of children’s and young adult literature are further taken up the next four chapters of the book. Chapter 2, “Historical Overview,” carefully bridges the parallel worlds of comics as a medium and children’s literature as a field, displaying how illustration has long been associated with children’s books, so when comic books became popularized and marketed to children beginning in the 1930s, a two-decade or so love affair between classic texts and comic book depictions was born. This, in turn, birthed a readership that included children and young adults in novel ways (27). The relationship between producers, marketers, and readers intersected and influenced each other, even when few people, outside of those marketing to children, saw the relationship as positive. Chapter 3, “Social and Cultural Impact,” depicts how the history still impacts the assumptions behind children’s publishing. Each section of this small book brings intellectual surprise, but chapter 4, “Critical Uses,” packs the largest pedagogical punch for those newer to comics form analysis because it is here that her pedagogical applications are best displayed. In the chapter’s “Case Study” sections, Tarbox models activities that build fundamental form literacy and reflective analysis for any comics enthusiast or children’s lit lover. Instructors (for students of any age) can use the suggested texts or apply the techniques to other comics, adapting exercises on closure, braiding, image/text relationships, focalization, point of view, line style, and color (83–108). Tarbox’s work in the section on “Manga” (108–11) adds much needed context for those who are looking to go beyond a surface-level reading. [End Page 133] Throughout the book, Tarbox thoroughly displays how Nodelman’s 1999 assertion that picture books must be decoded using the convergence of text with pictures holds true with comics as well, and this core...