Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis

by Alison Halsall

Overview

Honor Book, Children's Literature Association Book Award 2025 In Growing Up Graphic, Alison Halsall considers graphic texts for young readers to interrogate how they help children develop new ideas about social justice and become potential agents of change. With a focus on comics that depict difficult experiences affecting young people, Halsall explores the complexities of queer graphic memoirs, narratives of belonging, depictions of illness and disability, and explorations of Indigenous experiences. She discusses, among others, Child Soldier by Jessica Dee Humphreys and Michel Chikwanine, War Brothers by Sharon E. McKay, Baddawi by Leila Abdelrazaq, Matt Huynh’s interactive adaptation of Nam Le’s The Boat, and David Alexander Robertson’s 7 Generations. These examples contest images of childhood victimization, passivity, and helplessness, instead presenting young people as social actors who attempt to make sense of the challenges that affect them. In considering comics for children and about children, Growing Up Graphic centers a previously underexplored vein of graphic narratives and argues that these texts offer important insights into the interests and capabilities of children as readers.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780814258880
Publisher:	Ohio State University Press
Publication date:	10/13/2023
Series:	Studies in Comics and Cartoons
Pages:	266
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.80(d)

About the Author

Alison Halsall is Associate Professor of Humanities at York University.

Read an Excerpt

Reading can empower. Comics about predicaments and challenges that affect children can deepen young readers’ sociopolitical understanding of the world and move them toward an awareness of social justice and perhaps even awaken a desire for activism. The inherent belief in the abilities of young people to cope with challenging reading material, which fuels this dynamic new genre, responds to the often-dismissive attitudes directed toward readers by comics artists and critics alike. Critics Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey, for example, boldly claim that the content matter of the graphic novel is “adult” and “too sophisticated—or simply uninteresting—for a juvenile audience.” As such, their excellent analysis of this medium is limited to graphic novels directed at adults, with little to no acknowledgement of this literature for young people that increases on an annual basis. In fact, the rapid growth in the comics industry for young readers easily discounts Baetens and Frey’s quick dismissal of comics for children. Like the texts they identify as being specifically “adult,” graphic narratives for young people such as Mariko Tamaki’s Laura Dean Keeps Breaking Up with Me (2019), Morten Dürr’s Zenobia (2018), and David Small’s Stitches (2009) gravitate just as frequently toward realism, autobiography, biography, documentary, reportage, and history as they do toward fantasy and superhero narratives. In the process, these texts tackle challenging, sometimes harrowing subject matter. Child Soldier (2015), War Brothers 2013), and Deogratias (2006, in English), for instance, all explore child abduction and the enslavement of young people by rebel militias in verbal-visual form. Adrian and the Tree of Secrets (2013), Drama (2012), and Skim (2005) approach the complexity, ambiguity, and humanity of LGBTQ+ identity politics for young people. “Seeing ourselves reflected accurately in the world is crucial to a sense of well-being, to feeling whole and real,” lesbian comics creator Alison Bechdel asserts in a 2012 foreword to Dylan Edwards’s Transposes, six comics about transgender experiences Bechdel’s pronouncement applies equally to coming-of-age and coming-out narratives, comics about Indigenous experiences in Canada, forced migrations around the world, and ableist assumptions that govern the built environment through which young people (at least try to) navigate.

Many, if not all, of these comics rely on a desire to expose readers to some lived realities that young people living all over the world might tackle. They do this by means of the power of the visual and the hybrid possibilities of the graphic narrative, which target the multimodal capabilities that young readers already demonstrate. “The ability of cartoons to focus our attention on an idea is, I think, an important part of their special power, both in comics and in drawing generally”, Scott McCloud affirms in Understanding Comics (1993). Comics harness this power, provoking reader identification with a story’s characters, which in turn helps to explain why cartoons have “historically held an advantage in breaking into world popular culture.” Misguided dismissals of children’s comics and their complexity betray an ignorance of the variety of visual narratives that currently dominate the comics and children’s literature industries. Thus, Baetens and Frey’s insistence that graphic narratives are “not just for kids” is rooted in an assumption about the apolitical nature of children, about childhood innocence that critics from disciplines like children’s literature, childhood studies, sociology, and visual art have been questioning for the past twenty years: “Their worlds [are] seen as social and cultural spaces, not political arenas,” as Nicola Ansell states. “Children are understood to belong to the private sphere, whereas politics is confined to the public sphere.” The texts that Growing Up Graphic explores refute this assumption of the apolitical nature of young people; the acute personal and political challenges that youngsters face are vividly and deftly represented. Books like Honor Girl (2017), “The Boat” (2015), and El Deafo (2014) contradict this association of childhood with innocence by focusing on topics as varied as deafness, forced migration, people trafficking, and human sexuality. The accessibility and adaptability of the comics form allow it to speak to diverse audiences about broadly ranging topics that affect the lives of children; the simplicity and childlike features of comics characters become the “blank slate” onto which readers can project themselves.

Table of Contents

Introduction    Comics as Children’s Literature Chapter 1        The Use of Childhood in War: Representing Child Soldiers Chapter 2        Youthful Experiences of Immigration, Migration, and Diaspora Chapter 3        Indigeneity and Resurgence in Canadian Comics Chapter 4        Space and Orientation in LGBTQ+ Graphic Narratives Chapter 5        Young People and/in Graphic Medicine Conclusion      Comics and the COVID Crisis

Editorial Reviews

By balancing several interrelated arguments regarding comics’ role in young people’s culture, their pedagogical/didactic value, and their capacity for generating empathy, Growing Up Graphic reflects the interdisciplinary nature of child studies and comics studies and opens itself up to interest from wider scholarship.” —Andrew O’Malley, author of Children’s Literature, Popular Culture, and Robinson Crusoe


“Growing Up Graphic makes a necessary and refreshing contribution to heretofore understudied twenty-first-century children’s comics. Halsall’s use of the theme of crisis to emphasize the multiplicities and diversities of childhood and children’s lived experiences around the world is exciting and important.” —Lara Saguisag, author of Incorrigibles and Innocents: Constructing Childhood and Citizenship in Progressive Era Comics


“Halsall seeks to enrich comics scholarship by bringing to it a deep understanding of childhood’s many narrative and political entanglements—a task that is timely and compelling. ... The book provides a wealth of insights and opportunities to continue the conversation, and in this way, it can be the foundation for many fruitful investigations into children’s culture and graphic narrative to come.” —Pat Lawrence, Children's Literature Association Quarterly


“Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis is a refreshing and honest assessment of the importance of accurately and frankly acknowledging that childhood innocence is a Western invention … Halsall meets all her stated objectives with aplomb and a frankness that makes the book hard to put down.” —Cecilia Garrison, International Journal of Comic Art


“Halsall’s impressive grasp of the most pressing texts and compelling topics in comics studies today combined with her own insightful commentary make Growing Up Graphic a timely and invigorating read.” —Michelle Ann Abate, author of No Kids Allowed: Children’s Literature for Adults

From the Publisher