Journal Article

Young Adult Comics and the Critics: A Call for New Modes of Interdisciplinary Close Reading

Tarbox, Gwen Athene

2017

Overview

From 2006 to 2015, forty-six of the forty-nine text-only finalists for the Michael L. Printz Award for Excellence in Young Adult Literature were released by HarperCollins, Penguin, Macmillan, and other international publishing houses that operate long-standing children's and young adult imprints and employ editorial personnel who establish criteria for age and reading level designations.3 In contrast, as mentioned above, comics marketed to readers under the age of eighteen during the same period have been produced in a variety of contexts and often by small, independent publishers whose editors have little attachment to the conventions that govern the marketing of mainstream young adult literature.[...]while recommended comics lists such as the YALSA \"Great Graphic Novels for Teens\" and the annual group of Eisner Award nominees have provided a roadmap for navigating the young adult comics marketplace, significant numbers of comics created for teens are released outside the children's and young adult divisions of major publishers, meaning that age designations are often absent or blurred.Given the renewed interest in young adult comics on the part of readers, authors, artists, educators, librarians, and publishers, the question then becomes how scholars of young adult literature can follow Hatfield's call for interdisciplinary engagement with children's and young adult comics.4 Understandably, the multimodal nature of comics texts has attracted critics from a variety of backgrounds who bring their own disciplinary practices and classification systems to bear upon the medium.When it comes to developing an effective critical lens for the examination of young adult comics, scholars benefit from acknowledging the preeminent status of visual imagery, while paying attention to the thematic patterns, cultural contexts, and linguistic structures that characterize literary analysis.6 Moreover, it is important to recognize that phenomena that are commonplace in text-only narratives do not always manifest themselves in a similar fashion in the image/text realm of comics.In three establishing panels scattered across the text, Vivès presents a portrait of the characters from the perspective of an omniscient narrator; in the rest of the comic, however, the reader's access to the narrative is limited to what the protagonist sees.[...]the only time the reader sees the woman is when the protagonist sees her, and the protagonist's dialogue is only known to the reader based upon the replies that the woman makes to him.

• Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press
• Subject: Adolescents / Age / Anime / Artists / Audiences / Bans / Children / Children & youth / Childrens literature / Childrens picture books / Classification / Comic books / Comics / Conventions / Cultural factors / Graphic novels / Heroism & heroes / Ideology / Imagery / Interdisciplinary aspects / Juvenile delinquency / Librarians / Library associations / Literary characters / Literary criticism / Literary devices / Literature / Manga / Marketing / Markets / Mental imagery / Narrative structure / Narrative techniques / Narratives / Narratology / Nodelman, Perry / Novels / Publishing / Publishing industry / Readers / Reading / Sales / Studies / Superheroes / Teachers / Young adult literature / Young adults