Reviewed by: Strong Bonds: Child-Animal Relationships in Comics ed. by Maaheen Ahmed Alan Rauch (bio) Strong Bonds: Child-Animal Relationships in Comics. Edited by Maaheen Ahmed. Presses universitaires de Liège, 2020. Writing in Thierry Groensteen’s edited collection, Animaux en Cases (1987), Harry Morgan observes that: “Pour les Américains, Pogo de Walt Kelly et LE classique de la bande dessinée animalière,” (93) that is, “For Americans, Walt Kelly’s Pogo is THE [emphasis his] classic animal comic strip.” And, of course, it was in fact Pogo that came to mind first when approaching this collection. But for many readers, Pogo, if recalled at all, is a long distant memory, and more to the point the remarkably insightful, political, and amusing strip did not have a child protagonist at its center. That disqualifies it from Maaheen Ahmed’s impressive and provocative collection delineating “child-animal” relationships in Strong Bonds. But it’s well worth acknowledging, as more than a few of the authors do in this collection, two critical points: 1) that a child need not be a protagonist in the context of a narrative to actually be “embedded” as an implicit reader; and 2) that adults are central and often determinative readers of comics [End Page 343] ostensibly “for” children. When I read Pogo as a child, I was delighted by the animal caricatures and sometimes by their clever repartée, but even then, I knew that Walt Kelly was writing (if not drawing) for adults. As critical readers of children’s literature and comics, we all know that to be true, but it does always bear repeating. Ahmed’s collection “seeks to build stronger bridges between the fields of comics studies, childhood studies and animal studies” in an effort to take “a first step towards a more profound and holistic understanding of animals and children in comics” (9–10). To be sure, this emerging branch of research follows—as she acknowledges—on the heels of critics such as David Herman, Mario Ortiz-Robles, Tess Cosslett, and Glenn Willmott, but it also expands our view into a very diverse array of comic animal-human companions. The collection certainly includes familiar American animal-child pairings, such as Little Orphan Annie and Sandy, Calvin and Hobbes, Charlie Brown and Snoopy, and even Comet and Supergirl, but devotes well-deserved attention to European strips such as Jommeke, Snowy and Jocko, Yakari, and the relationship pairings in the magazine, Corriere dei Piccoli. The emphasis on “strong bonds” is not merely on the relationship between the animal and the child, both of whom like Tintin and Snowy and Annie and Sandy are orphans and thus dislocated from “natural” family ties. As orphans, the characters bond with each other in their abandonment, but even as outcasts they are motivated to pursue moral integrity (read justice) and no less often, nationally driven initiatives. In great measure we, as readers, are then bonded with the characters who, whether orphans or runaways, don’t require parental guidance to know the difference between right and wrong. The animals themselves are implicitly orphans and, by and large, they are naturally (if not instinctively) inclined to be good. That the animals are companions for their human partners often goes without saying, but they also require care, empathy, responsible attachment, and not a little caution. Thus, as Peter Lee points out in his essay “The Maternal Arf,” it is the dog Sandy that in a very real sense “domesticates” Little Orphan Annie. The animal-child dyad adds power to the child figure who, in the moment of each story, can dispense with adult superiority and ostensible wisdom. A new variant of wisdom, as Fabiana Loparco points out in her essay on Corriere dei Piccoli (published during WWI), is often augmented by animals. One series in the Corriere focuses on a girl named Didì who, with the aid of her pet cat, dog, and goat, manages to defy the Croatian soldiers who threaten her Italian homeland. “By using these animals as mental and physical extensions of [Didì’s] abilities,” Loparco writes, her “astute and adaptability” are amplified without “making her grotesque or unrealistic” (201). As running narratives of resistance...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Dec 1, 2022
Mollie Kervick 
Open Access