Category: Publications

Reading children in comics

New article by Maaheen Ahmed published in the trend-setting journal Children’s Geographies, articulating a sociohistorical mapping of children in comics:

“This article seeks to map a social history through examining children and ‘childish’ or child-like drawing styles, and hence the presence of children, in comics. Traced across different print formats, this history reflects the changing readership of different kinds of comics, ranging from the mixed, primarily adult readership of newspaper comics, the young readers of comics albums and magazines, and the mature readers of contemporary book-length comics or graphic novels. Unfolding through a changing matrix of affects incarnated by comics children, this social history shows how different kinds of power relationships between adults and children are articulated in the comics discussed. The carnivalesque liberty and laughter of early newspaper comics contrasts with the nostalgic gaze towards childhood imbuing many graphic novels that cater to a mature readership. Unfolding across a select corpus of key comics formats, this sociohistorical reading of comics children is channeled through affects and power struggles.”

Strong Bonds

Click here to download book: ACME_6_Strong Bonds
Snoopy and Charlie Brown, Calvin and Hobbes, Tintin and Snowy… comics are home to many memorable child and animal figures. Many cultural productions, especially children’s literature and cartoons, stress the similarities between children and animals, similarities that have their limits and often place the child, as human, above the animal. Still, these fictional situations offer opportunities for thinking of child-animal relationships in diverse ways through, for instance, considering the possibilities of privileged contact between children and animals or of animals that are more knowledgeable and powerful than children and even adults.
Despite the prevalence and success of child-animal tandems in comics and culture, we know very little about these relationships. What makes them so popular? How do they work? How much do they vary across time and cultures? What do they tell us about the place of animals and children in comics and in the real world?
Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics takes a first, important step in this direction. Bringing together scholars with a diverse range of comics expertise, the volume’s chapters combine contextualized readings of comics with relevant theories for interrogating childhood and animalhood, their overlaps and divergences. The strong bonds between children and animals mapped out here point towards alternative modes of conceptualizing family and identity and, ultimately, alternative means of reading, interpreting and imagining.
With chapters on early comics (the Italian children’s magazine Corriere dei Piccoli during WWI, Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie) international and regional classics (Tintin, the Flemish Jommeke) and contemporary graphic novels (Bryan Talbot’s A Tale of One Bad Rat, Brecht Even’s Panther), this critical anthology sheds light on a vast array of child-animal relationships in comics from Europe and North America.

Advertising and Children’s Comics

The latest issue of H-ermes features an article in Italian by Eva Van de Wiele, “Sedurre a tavola: confini mutati tra pubblicità e fumetti per bambini,” about the long history of comics and advertising relationships, as a brief archeology of the cartoonist-marketeer from the newspaper to the digital arenas of social media
“This article aims to investigate how advertising in Italy and in children’s comics has evolved. In postmodern times when goods have become messages (Klein, 2001), comics’ characters are progressively morphing into products. The intensification of the relationship between cultural and economic production (Jameson, 1998) led to different outcomes. On the part of the industry, similar appropriations – although they may seem either innovative or antiquated operations – testify to the persistent idea of a deep-rooted link between childhood and the medium itself (one of the childhood geographies studied by Ahmed 2020). These appropriations also show a relationship that has been established in comics since its origins: the bond between children and consumption in the comics published in Corriere dei Piccoli. This paper discusses the survival of paper comics for educational purposes as well as its strategies to retain the reader (International Kids). These are contrasted with pure entertainment comics which present various hybrid forms on social media such as Instagram and TikTok. Finally, the boundaries between the cartoonist- marketeer and international companies that create or deny the use of testimonials in advertising are also changing. The hybrid forms of comics activate the multimedia skills of the child consumer.”
Also of UGent note, Giorgio Busi Rizzi’s article, “Il fumetto digitale tra sperimentazione e partecipazione: il caso Homestuck,” about the tension between two inclinations (experimental and participated) of digital comics:
“Digital comics that try to maximize the affordances of their medium seem to be condemned to in-betweenness: their strength (leveraging on unusual narrative potentials) often becomes their limit, and authors are hardly able to free themselves from the role of niche experimenters and open up to audience participation. A significant exception, however, is Homestuck, a gigantic webcomic by Andrew Hussie. Strongly connected to videogame culture and the very nature of the internet, Homestuck features animations, sounds, embedded flash games, and so on. The webcomic resulted in various transmedial branches (a videogame spin-off and several friendsims, a multi-volume soundtrack, a book epilogue) and an ongoing intermedial adaptation in book format. It has equally managed, over the years, to consolidate an extremely lively community active both in its interactions with the author (with a constant exchange of ideas and an endless readiness to subsidize his projects), in its interpretation of the canon production, and in providing an amazing extent of fan production.
This contribution aims to analyze Homestuck as a possible mediation between the two inclinations (experimental and participated) of digital comics.”

Eco-citizenship within contemporary comics for children

Luke Pearson, Hilda and the Black Hound, London: Flying Eye Books, 2017.
New article published by Dona Pursall in the latest issue of Closure, about eco-citizenship in contemporary comics for children, looking at Acquicorn Cove by Katie O’Neill and Hilda and the Black Hound by Luke Pearson.
“Drawing from the premise that citizenship is an embodied, interactive practice, [the article ] argues that the characters in these comics enact behaviours and make decisions which demonstrate their own awareness of their positions not as humans in an anthropocentric society, but rather as eco-citizens within the whole ecology of the earth. The following analysis will apply an ecocritical, posthuman reading in order to highlight the ways in which the form and style of these comics promote notions of active compassion and complex decision making. It will consider how the works frame multiple perspectives, consequently encouraging a reconsideration of the morals and ethics of the human through the prism of an entangled relationship with non-humans.”

Graphic Attractions in TBO

The Spanish comics studies magazine Cuadernos de Comics has published Eva van de Wiele’s detailed study “Las atracciones gráficas de Méndez Álvarez en la phase foraine de TBO (1917-1928)” (English title “Méndez Álvarez’ graphic attractions during TBO’s phase foraine“), which considers the cartooning career of Méndez Álvarez, who has moved between different magazines, juggling adult and child audiences, and often times revisiting already-used gags in fresh ways. Eva van de Wiele considers the gag economy of his work together with the grotesque humor and lively drawing style, which she described in terms of the carnivalesque.

Comics and Novelizations for the Youth

Benoît Glaude and Laurent Déom have just released a collective volume on novelizations for the youth, looking at various literary adaptations of comics, films, manga, animation, and other media. They look at a specific and vibrant editorial sector, in which comics for young readers hold a significant share, in different geographic zones. Benoît Glaude and Maaheen Ahmed contribute together a chapter on novelizations of Tintin in American literature.

More info on the publisher’s website.

 

Children in Graphic Novels

Maaheen Ahmed’s article “Children in Graphic Novels: Intermedial Encounters and Mnemonic Layers” has been published in the latest issue of the open-access journal Etudes francophones. The article fleshes out the notion of media memory (building on previous work) in connection to pseudo-autobiographical graphic novels in Europe and North-America published between the 1990s and 2010s that turn to children and childhood.

“They are imbued with the specific childhood geographies of children’s image-making practices and children reading comics (the latter with a focus on the North American context). These geographies, which are intermedial in their essence, are fleshed and activated by media memories.”

In tracing these geographies, the article extends the concerns and issues at the heart of the COMICS project to a contemporary corpus of adult comics where the figure of the child gathers various tangents and concerns.

“Childish presences capture the struggle of canonical hierarchy, but also of expression, and hence of establishing emotional, affective and consequently powerful connections.”