Novel Idea for Social Justice: Comics, Critical Theory, and a Contextual Graphic Narratology

Home , Andrew Aydin, Bushman (comics), David Hajdu, Genesis (2012), Lumberjanes, Percy Crosby

A (Graphic) Novel Idea for Social Justice: Comics, Critical Theory, and A Contextual Graphic Narratology

Dissertation

Presented in Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy in the Graduate School of The Ohio State University

Karly Marie Grice, M.A.

Graduate Program in Education: Teaching & Learning

The Ohio State University

2017

Dissertation Committee:

Patricia Enciso, Advisor

Michelle Ann Abate, Co-advisor

Melinda Rhoades, Committee Member

Caroline Clark, Committee Member

Copyrighted by

Karly Marie Grice

2017

Abstract

In my dissertation, I develop a combination of structural and critical theories for the medium-specific analysis of comics for children and young adults. I begin by laying a historical foundation of the medium of comics and a visual culture analytic framework to delineate my specific methodology of research, a contextualized graphic narratology. As of the writing of this dissertation, this work is the only extended, single-authored exploration into the construction and implications of comics for children and young adults. Within the following chapters, I combine the medium specific tools of a formalist comics study with the field-based knowledge of the function of children’s and young adult narratives. I use these combined analytic tools to not only further the growth of a new comics scholarship but also to investigate how comics for children and young adults are using the implied reader to push the boundaries of the definition of “child.”

Looking at two comics series for young readers, Lumberjanes and the March trilogy, I explore how what I call tools of disruption are woven into the visual constructions in order to play with reader’s experiences and expectations, provoke them into questioning the texts they are reading and the world around them, and push them to lay the foundation for imagined alternatives. I conclude by discussing the importance of my framework as a means of generative dialogic interdisciplinarity in the fields of children’s literature, literacy education, and youth culture studies in their efforts to teach, read, and write for social justice.

ii Dedication

Dedicated to my academic family, including the mothers who guided me, the sisters (and

brother) who grew with me, and the children who galvanized me

iii Acknowledgements

I am so very thankful for all the people who have helped me along the way. I want to first thank my family—Mom, Dad, Casey, and Chris. Thank you for believing in me and supporting me through my schooling…which has somehow lasted for the majority of my life. I can’t wait for you to see me walk across this last stage. Y’all should be the ones who get to toss the cap instead.

I also want to thank my extensive academic family for being there for me. First, my writing group: Ashley Dallacqua, Sara Kersten Parrish, Eileen Shanahan, and Sarah

Lightner. I couldn’t have done it without you, my Academic Goddesses. You helped me redefine my understanding of academia, scholarship, vulnerability, and competition in loving and supportive terms. “Friendship to the max!”—even if we’ll be in four different time zones. I also want to deeply thank my two friends who were there with me until the end, Ryan and Caitlin. I’m always in awe of your passion and insight. Thank you for not only sharing them with me but also using them to read me with the greatest possible kindness. You didn’t just cheer me on while I fought; you were in the arena with me, equally “marred by dust and sweat and blood.” Thank you for daring greatly with me.

Of course, I couldn’t have done this without the amazing feedback I received from my professors and committee. Jared Gardner provided so much support and inspiration as both a professor and candidacy committee member. I can’t believe I’ll get to walk away from my doctoral career saying, “I know him!” Mindi Rhoades was such a

iv cheerleader for me, helping me wade through the quagmire of visual culture and assuring me that my work had a place within the field. Thank you for believing in me when I was certain all I had was gobbledygook. And then Caroline Clark stepped in as my superhero, saving the day last minute and doing so with such compassionate support and engaging questions. I couldn’t imagine this project completed without you!

Lastly are my advising twin pillars. First, Michelle Ann Abate, you are solid

#professorgoals. Thank you for always treating me as an equal, providing me with so many opportunities, and having so much confidence that I could get them done. Every

Ernie needs a Bert like you. My deepest thank you goes to Pat Enciso. Your selfless devotion to your students and the world of educational research is awe inspiring. I hope I can live up to even a fraction of your expectations for me and be a source for good, working for the great change I see you working towards every day. Thank you for pushing me onward and guiding me through the forest when I was lost in the trees. Your support always reached me when I thought I couldn’t go any further, encouraging me to

“get up, keep moving.” Thank you for pulling me up and helping me finally get to walk.

It’s because of you that I will continue to march.

Vita

2007…………………………………………B.A. Secondary Education in English,

Clemson University

2013…………………………………………M.A. English, Illinois State University

2013-2017…………………………………...Graduate Teaching Associate, Department

of Education, The Ohio State University

Publications

“ ‘What Is China But a People and Their (Visual) Stories?’: The Synthetic in Narratives

of Contest in Gene Yang’s Boxers & Saints.” Graphic Novels for Young Readers:

A Collection of Critical Essays. Eds. Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene

Tarbox. Jackson: U of Mississippi, 2017. 32-44.

“First Opinion: Defying Expectations and Limitations in Drum Dream Girl.” First

Opinions, Second Reactions. 9.3 (2016). Article 5. Web.

“Do Robots Dream of Electric Sheep? Robot Dreams as Children’s Graphic Medicine.”

Red Feather Journal 6.2 (2015): 75-91.

“Journey to the Center of a Vlog: One Woman’s Exploration of the Genre of Video

Blogs.” Grassroots Writing Research Journal 3.1 (2012): 31-37.

Fields of Study

Major Field: Education: Teaching & Learning, Literature for Children and Young Adults

Table of Contents

Abstract……………………………………………………………………………………ii

Dedication………………………………………………………………………………...iii

Acknowledgements…………………………………………………………………….…iv

Vita………………………………………………………………………………...……...vi

Chapter 1: Introduction……………………………………………………………………1

Chapter 2: The History of a Making and Unmaking: Contextualizing Comics for Children and Young Adults and Seeing Visual Constructions…………………………………….22

Chapter 3: Falling in Stepping out of Little Red Formation: (Re)writing Images of

Gender in Lumberjanes………………………………………………………...…...……85

Chapter 4: “To the Past and Future Children of the Movement”: (Re)seeing Race and

History through Stylistic Variation in March……………………………...…...………132

Chapter 5: Conclusion: (Re)making Comics for Children and Young Adults…………177

References………………………………………………………………………………194

vii

Chapter 1: Introduction

A Narrative of Exploration

My Circuitous Road to Comics

As a public high school English teacher in South Carolina, I rarely came across comics in educational spaces. My undergraduate experience as a Secondary Education in

English major led to a couple brief encounters with the grittier “adult” comics in a college English course on contemporary U.S. literature. The course syllabus was filled with works about middle class midlife crises gone wrong (Dickey’s Deliverance), the lasting traumatic repercussions of war (O’Brien’s In the Lake of the Woods), and the moral “grey zone” of survival at all costs (Nelson’s The Grey Zone: Director’s Notes and

Screenplay)—not really the kinds of texts that would get approval from my future administration to use in the classroom. Yet two texts assigned that semester helped open my eyes to the potential of comics: Max Allan Collins and Richard Rayner’s Road to

Perdition and Art Spiegelman’s Maus. At the time, I had no knowledge of the seminal role Spiegelman’s memoir of his childhood/history of his father’s Holocaust experience held in the comics world; I only knew that the text was powerful and spoke of the unspeakable in ways that were greater than the sum of their visual parts.

Even though both of these graphic narratives challenged my understanding of literature, literacy, and how comics could fit into both categories, I had no further experiences with comics during my undergraduate education. My children’s and young

adult literature classes were filled with classic, contemporary, and critical works that expanded my world and taught me to see both young people and the literature written for them in complex ways. However, these were mostly traditional monomodal texts; visuals were reserved for the younger children’s picturebooks or photographs in nonfiction texts.

So while comics had made a triumphant return through the burgeoning comics studies field and within English classrooms that focused on contemporary adult literature, they did not really have a place in the children’s and young adult literature classroom in the early 2000s.

The beginning of my teaching career coincided with a watershed moment in comics for children and young adults: the publication of Gene Luen Yang’s American

Born Chinese. Like most first year teachers, I was trying to keep my head above the water. Keeping up to date on recent publications took a backseat to teaching the curriculum, managing my students, communicating with parents, and grading all the papers. My interest in comics as a literary art form was figuratively and literally shelved.

My undergraduate copy of Maus rested on my classroom bookshelf along with the countless other young adult books I had collected to provide my students with a classroom library. So when a student brought a brightly-colored graphic novel about an

Asian American boy into my classroom to ask permission to read it for his quarterly independent novel, I was taken aback. My immediate reactions were skeptical: he got this from our school library? Does this count as a novel? What will the other teachers think?

Will all the kids want to read it now assuming it’s easy? But I recalled my own experience with Maus and gave him the go-ahead. At least he was reading, right? It

would be years before I understood what this book meant for the field of children’s and young adult literature as well as comics studies.

Once the chaos of being a new teacher settled down, I found myself discussing books outside of the curriculum much more with my students. We bonded over young adult literature (YA), with me sharing John Green’s recent novels with them as they insisted I read The Hunger Games and Twilight. Although it was not YA, one student begged me to read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s notable comics series Watchmen and talk with her about it since the movie was coming out soon. When I did, I was in awe at how Moore used the visual in his comic. All of the literary tools I desperately tried to elucidate for my students—themes, motifs, allusions, narrative structure, character development, etc.—were woven seamlessly into his work, and more often than not they were constructed through the image. I did not have words beyond traditional narrative theory to describe what he was doing, but I knew there was something in the text’s makeup lying just beyond my grasp. I began to wonder what I had been missing by relegating comics to pieces of a nostalgic childhood past, the Archie and X-men comics I flipped through at the grocery store as a child; had I been underestimating my teen students by privileging graphic novels as rarities of the college English classroom, with

Maus and Persepolis earning enough notoriety in the previous years to become regulars on university syllabi? As I packed up my classroom my final year of teaching before returning to school full time, I picked up my old copy of Maus. The book was in shambles. The spine had long been broken, the cover worn to a wrinkled softness. The pages were all in order but tucked into the cover that served more like a folder for loose documents. This comic—one that addressed identity, history, story, and ethics in

complex and critical ways—was well-loved and voraciously read by my students. I began to wonder what if as I considered the role both comics and literature for children and young adults could have had if they were valued more in my classroom, the curriculum, and society at large.

The next six years of my educational experience, including my time as both a student and a teacher at two different universities, would build upon this curiosity. I returned to the classroom as comics and graphic narrative hybrids were gaining momentum in the literary field of children’s literature. From Yang’s American Born

Chinese to Raina Telgemeier’s Smile, comics for children and young adults were being published in larger numbers while also receiving greater interest from libraries, professors, awarding committees, and journalists. Furthermore, these comics for children and young adults were breaking new grounds by dealing with critical topics. So many strong graphic narratives came out during this time: Yang’s American Born Chinese

(2006) addresses racism and stereotypes; Mariko and Jillian Tamaki’s Skim (2008) explores sexuality, religion, and suicide; G. Neri and Randy Duburke’s Yummy: The Last

Days of a Southside Shorty (2010) tackles age, gang membership, and responsibility;

Yang’s Boxers & Saints (2013) takes on colonialism, religion, and national identity; and

Cece Bell’s El Deafo (2014) discusses disability and gender. In addition, all of these comics, and many other works not addressed here, engage in adventurous and experimental graphic narrative structures in order to best address these weighty topics for young audiences.

Yet even as I incorporated more of these quality comics into my own university classroom, I felt a similar—and much stronger—resistance from my undergraduate

students to that which I had expressed when first faced with Yang’s comic some years before. My students insisted comics did not count as “real reading,” and while they were fun and easy to get through my students did not think they had much place alongside “the classics.” Often students would warm to the specific comic texts I assigned by the end of the semester, expressing surprise for how much they enjoyed them and fascination for the important topics discussed within them. However, some students would also express a frustration that the comics we looked at were “too hard to follow” and that there was “too much happening on the page.” Despite comics setting academia and awarding ablaze in many ways, my university students—many of whom were future teachers—were still a tepid lukewarm at best.

Purpose and Questions

The purpose of this dissertation is to further explore comics for children and young adults. From my own classroom experiences, I recognized that many of my students enjoyed reading comics but struggled to see the value of the form within a classroom space, often taking for granted the meaning and construction of the works as shallow and simplistic. I found that asking students to read comics often led to their developing a higher estimation for the medium, yet they remained hesitant to move into deeper discussions about what made the graphic narratives they read effective. As such, a core question for my dissertation became how does the structure of the comics medium work? I wanted to understand how the form itself functioned. This exploration of the workings of the medium was intended to help me look for the tools I needed to explore the development of meaning, message, and rhetorical intent within a graphic narrative.

By making my research incorporate a focus on comics studies, I hoped to understand the

well-developed medium-specific scholarship with which to better analyze the newer development of texts within this medium aimed at young audiences.

This core question led to more inquiry as I realized the explosion of comics within the field of children’s literature was a relatively recent phenomenon, with the earliest watershed moments occurring in the early 2000s. Knowing that comics as a medium far outdated my own educational experience and being curious as to the how comics for children and young adults fit into this larger history, I was led to my next core question: how does the history of the broader world of comics lead up to and further influence comics for children and young adults? Many comics scholars have written about the seemingly fundamental need felt by many authors and academics alike to distinguish comics as not just “for kids” (Eisner, Comics; Groensteen, “Why”; Hatfield, “Comic”).

Likewise, Hillary Chute writes about her push to “treat comics as a medium—not as a lowbrow genre, which is how it is usually understood” (“Comics” 452). An overview of the history of comics scholarship shows a long struggle for “cultural legitimization” as

Groensteen terms it (“Why” 29). With this understanding, I decided to direct my research at both the historical development of the medium as well as the scholarly evolution of the academic work in order to pinpoint where comics for children and young adults fit.

Further inhibiting reception to comics reading and scholarship is a general undervaluation of the visual mode. Traditionally in both educational and sociocultural spheres, particularly in the West, the visual holds less cultural capital than the linguistic

(Yang, “Asian”). The students who enter the children’s literature courses I teach frequently comment about their assumptions of the ease with which they expect to read visual texts, children’s picturebooks in particular. Within the literary-based field of

children’s literature, Karen Coats has written about students’ assumptions of simplicity as an explanation for the notoriously high numbers of student enrollment in university children’s literature classes (“Fish” 405). Contrary to these assumptions, numerous scholars have published works in order to explicate the thoughtful construction that makes up the visuals in picturebooks (Nodelman; Nikolajeva and Scott; Sipes). This does not change, however, the common view of literacy as a linear developmental model in which young readers are pushed to move (as quickly as possible in most cases) beyond the visual and/or multimodal narrative and onto texts predominantly of linguistic construction and canonical status. Within the education-and-literacy-based field, Brian V.

Street’s writings against the autonomous model of literacy and the New London Group’s encouragement of a pedagogy of multiliteracies provide a critique of rigid, traditional approaches to learning, literature, and literacy (Street, Social; Street, Cross-cultural; The

New London Group).

What both the English/literature and education/literacy fields’ approaches to this undermining of the visual have in common is a fundamental appreciation of the visual regardless of the cultural capital behind the publication of the piece—be it application, form, or audience. This objective shared across these fields lies at the core of visual culture and, thus, led me to my next central question: how does a visual culture analytic framework enable new perspectives about comics written for children and young adults?

Comics for children and young adults face multiple fronts of attack, with comics themselves being viewed as low brow and puerile, children’s literature being viewed as equally juvenile and simplistic, and the visual nature of them both assumed to be readily understandable and lacking of any specific literacy skills. I argue that by exploring

comics for children and young adults through an analytic framework based on the tenets of visual culture, a general appreciation and analysis of the most critiqued mode (the visual) of the multimodal comics medium can be addressed with greater insight and respect.

As I discuss further in chapter two, visual culture is closely tied to critical theories. While Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen emphasize important mode-based tools with which to read the visual, their ideas of a social semiotics of the visual text coordinates with other theorists of visual culture who emphasize how reading the visual is enhanced when coupled with critical theories that explain the ideological mechanisms of the visual text (Hall; Evans and Hall; Mirzoeff). Coupling critical theory with visual culture as a theoretical frame is central to visual culture’s interdisciplinary nature. This interdisciplinarity and these visual culture scholars’ discussions of the role of the visual in society firmly ground my argument for viewing comics for children and young adults as literature for social justice, a proposal I will further delineate in chapter two and the conclusion. Using comics for social justice would require the reader to have further tools in the form of lenses with which to see social issues at work in the world around them and the world within the text. Furthermore, using comics in this transformative way with young readers requires a language with which to speak their critique of these real and literary worlds; in this case, the critical theories would provide the vocabulary of a critical analysis of power and oppression (Soter).

Children’s literature for education and literacy is often separated from children’s literature as literature. An inclusion of these literary theories into the reading of comics might bridge the gap between the use of the medium within English literature and

education literacy classrooms, especially when New Literacy Studies and multiliteracies are taken into consideration (Street, Cross-cultural; Street, Social; The New London

Group). Street’s ethnographic studies and theory of literacy, foundational to New

Literacy Studies, views the traditionally employed approach to literacy as the

“autonomous view of literacy,” which he argues “takes literacy out of its social and cultural context and views it as a discrete skill” (Christenbury, Bomer, and Smagorinsky

7, emphasis in original). In contrast, an ideological view of literacy is one that refuses to see literacy as neutral, understanding it “instead as an ideological practice, implicated in power relations and embedded in specific cultural meanings and practices” (Street, Social

1). Furthermore, the autonomous model positions literacy as “reductive, eliminating attention to the contexts, intertexts, intercontexts, and other factors that are implicated in readers’ efforts to become engaged in their reading” (Christenbury, Bomer, and

Smagorinsky 7, emphasis added)—all factors that I will argue, along with Street should be considered in analyzing both the writing and reading of comics. The New London

Group posits within their pedagogy of multiliteracies that:

educators must view literacy in the context of global change, particularly

that involving technology that produces images, sounds, icons with

particular spatial relations, and other sign systems along with languages to

produce texts with meaning potential. Producing and making sense of

these signs requires a sophisticated approach to “reading” that is typically

ignored in school. (Christenbury, Bomer, and Smagorinsky 7, emphasis

added)

Ultimately, these ideologies position literacy as more than a politically-neutral and thus methodically-taught skill with words that fails to consider the contexts of both the reader and the text. New Literacy Studies and multiliteracies understand readers, reading, and the texts being read (including the text’s form, content, and context) as inextricable from ideology, politics, power, and privilege.

Similar to these literacy approaches, the kind of textual analysis that happens in literary studies and publications utilizes critical literary theories to understand a text’s engagement with and/or representation of power, cultural, identity, and constructedness.

If comics are to fit in the literary world of children’s and young adult literature, research within this subfocus should incorporate the kind of theoretical/ideological analysis that many children’s literature scholars use in order to understand the pieces as “literature”

(Stephens; Trites, Disturbing; May). Altogether, the overview outlined above shows how an ideological analysis via critical theory weaves through visual culture, education/literacy, and children’s literature in different yet not disparate ways with implications for comics for children and young adults. I am interested, then in the following core question: how can critical theories be used to understand comics as a valued literacy and valid literature? Given the various academic departments, research objectives, and pragmatic applications for comics for children and young adults, having critical theory as a central through line provides these frequently siloed areas— visual/popular culture, English literature, and education/literacy—a means of generative dialogic interdisciplinarity.

Before moving on to my next and final core question, I want to delineate how literacy is and is not showing up within the purpose and scope of my dissertation. I do not

categorize the work I am doing here directly as literacy research. For that, I would need a more educationally-focused, human-participant centered approach and theoretical foundation. My research does not look at the social process for meaning making with actual human readers of comics. However, what I am doing is positioning comics for children and young adults as a powerful potential tool. My dissertation functions predominantly within a literary research framework with an understanding of the reader as implied by the construction of the text. My dissertation engages with literacy in the way the conversations I start within my work aim to provide an interconnection between the approach and application of this work as a tool to both literacy and literature, particularly in ways that respect both the meaning making possible with a child reader and the meaning making potential within a children’s text. Ultimately, I hope the work that I am doing with critical theory, visual culture, and comics for children and young adults will open pathways for future scholars and teachers to connect analytic readings and research of children’s comics with literacy research, pedagogical methods, and pragmatic application of such texts.

Finally, I am interested in exploring the relationship between authorial intent, medium, and implied readers: how do contemporary authors of comics for children and young adults utilize the comics medium to construct alternative concepts of childhood?

This particular question was first influenced by the debates amongst my students as to who the target audience was for many of the comics we read together. For example, every semester I taught American Born Chinese within my children’s literature course, my students were adamant that Yang’s text was not appropriate for child readers. Part of their rejection of this text as children’s literature was its complex seemingly-separate

triple narratives that wove together in the end; however, most students opposed the text’s appropriateness for younger readers due to Yang’s representation of racism and stereotypes in an effort to denote and destroy them. I would push my students to explain more clearly why they felt that way, and time and again my students commented that they believed children were not capable of handling critical discussions of racism. Students argued the tri-narrative structure would be too confusing for young readers, the stereotypes would be read at face value, and the representation of racism would be internalized since they felt young readers could not read critically or even satirically.

Altogether, I understand my students’ assumptions about the readership of the text to be based upon their own reading of the text in correlation with their understanding of the concept of childhood. While none of my students were basing their critique on observed reading/literacy data with actual children, they each had an understanding of what they felt the generalized “child” was capable. Students placed American Born Chinese as only being appropriate for “advanced high school students,” and even March: Book One, which I will discuss in chapter four, as being for older middle school students at the youngest. Because the elements within the text did not match my students’ understanding of the cognitive and emotional capabilities of a “child1,” they understood the texts intended reader to be older than the parameters of our “children’s literature” course.

However, as I explore within this dissertation, the authors who are currently writing

1 I am intentionally using the term “child” here indefinitely as not all of my students agree to the age parameters of childhood. Classroom debates often explicitly define the upper-end of childhood between 14 at highest and 11 at lowest; however, based on my students’ statements of what “grade level” a book could/should be taught, many times they pushed their connotations of childhood even higher into the sophomore year of high school, which would thus encompass 15 and 16 year olds in their definition. 12

books for children and young adults are including elements within their texts that imply their stated intended audience—children and young adults—can be understood as much more capable of handling narrative elements and plot points that might otherwise be considered by some readers as being “too mature” for children. As such, I argue that these comics authors are working in tandem with other contemporary authors of children’s and young adult literature broadly to redefine our understanding of the child and teen reader.

Scholarly Significance

Literature Review of Comics for Children’s and Young Adult Literature Scholarship

Even though comics for children and young adults falls under the purview of two different fields—both comics studies and children’s literature—it has historically been given short shrift in both areas. In many discussions of the medium’s history, young readers are mentioned prominently at the core of comics’ identity, circulation, and development (Hajdu; Gardner, Projections; Nyberg, Seal; Wright; Duncan and Smith); however, only an occasional mention of comics for young readers2 is incorporated into edited collections of comics scholarship, even when the collection’s focus is on teaching in a high school or undergraduate classroom (Aldama; Heer and Worcester; Dong;

Tabachniak). At the 2004 Eisner Award ceremony, Michael Chabon gave a keynote speech lamenting “the medium’s abandonment of children. . . . Chiding the industry for forgetting young readers, Chabon ended by envisioning a new sort of comics for children,

2 Usually the only examples of comics for children and young adult readers that get explored in edited collections are Yang’s work or Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, but even the latter serves more as an adult crossover text of interest to young readers. 13

‘truly thrilling, honestly observed and remembered, richly imagined. . . [comics] about children’ ” (Hatfield, “Comic” 360, emphasis in original).

Charles Hatfield was one of the first to call out children’s literature (as opposed to comics studies) for neglecting comics for children and young adults. In his 2006 Lion and the Unicorn piece “Comic Art, Children’s Literature, and the New Comics Studies,”

Hatfield takes to task “children’s literature scholars [for] hav[ing] treated comics for and about children in a sweeping manner without a sustained interest; this lapse has sorely impoverished the field” (“Comic” 361). However, he argues the blame is to be shared, describing the lack of interdisciplinary conversation between the two fields as “a critical blindspot,” writing that children’s literature is “impoverished” without acknowledging the role of comics, and comics studies’ avoidance of the child leaves it “bankrupt”

(“Comics” 376-377). Hatfield’s titular “New Comics Studies” is one defined by its interdisciplinary “critical handclasp between comics study and children’s literature”

(“Comics” 370). This new (children’s) comics studies is one where the affordances of tools and histories of both comics studies and children’s literature are placed into conversation. Comics studies provides the nuanced structural tools of the medium in addition to its historical context as a cultural artifact, which is then served by the strong youth-culture-based reading of children’s literature and its exploration of other image/text works, such as picturebooks, written for young readers. “Such a reconciliation,” posits

Hatfield, “could rewrite the very boundaries of both fields” (“Comics” 378).

Since Hatfield’s piece, scholars on both sides of this academic divide have been working towards such a reconciliation. One of the first lengthy, dedicated works to do so was the 2007 special issue of the comics journal ImageTexT on Comics and Childhood

(Martin and Hatfield). Being early to the discussion, longer graphic narratives for children and young adults were not as frequently published at the time, and the articles include a mixture of more literary analyses on newspaper strips (Calvin and Hobbes), mid-century Harvey serial comics (Little Dot and Little Audrey), and comic adaptations of children’s classics (A Connecticut Yankee in King Arthur’s Court). In 2012, Children’s

Literature Association Quarterly published the symposium “Why Comics Are and Are

Not Picturebooks” (Hatfield and Svonkin). Most contributing scholars came from a background in children’s visual texts like picturebooks (e.g., Perry Nodelman, Nathalie op de Beek, Michael Joseph), while only a couple have more substantial comics-based backgrounds (i.e., Phil Nel and Charles Hatfield). Since then, children’s literature scholars’ interests continued to grow with essays on comics for children and young adults becoming a regular addition to the top journals within the field (Tarbox 241).

I want to acknowledge here the parallel development of literacy education scholars’ interest in comics. At the same time as the scholarly growth in comics studies and children’s literature, several education scholars were writing pieces about how to incorporate comics and graphic narratives into the classroom and/or how these texts support New Literacy Studies and multiliteracies (Carter; Christensen; Connors;

Dallacqua; Jacobs; Low; Monnin). The majority of this scholarship tends to emphasize the educational role of the medium by focusing on canonical comics like Maus and

Persepolis rather than those works intended for young audiences. There are a couple of scholars publishing now (Low; Dallacqua) who are starting to bridge the gap more between educational scholarship, comics studies, and comics for children and young adults in ways that work in conjunction with my dissertation.

Recently, Gwen Athene Tarbox took up Hatfield’s call for interdisciplinary comics and children’s literature scholarship. In her article she “advocates for new modes of interdisciplinary close reading, joining pivotal aspects of young adult literature scholarship to interpretive moves practiced by comics theorists who study narrative form” (231). In order to do so, she argues a scholar would need a familiarity with the functions and affordances of comics, building on the medium-specific, narratological scholarship of fundamental comics scholars like Scott McCloud, Thierry Groensteen,

Jared Gardner, and Barbara Postema. However, she also posits that a similar intimacy with the structures and scholarship of children’s and young adult literature is necessary in order to understand best the means (i.e., the narrative structures) of the medium (i.e., comics) working within a specific mode (i.e., children’s and young adult literature).

Altogether, Tarbox details the practices necessary to engage in Hatfield’s earlier projection of a child-inclusive “New Comics Studies” as well as models what that analysis looks like for future scholars to follow.

Personal Contribution to the Field

To date, few full-length works exist that perform a critical, structural, interdisciplinary analysis of comics for children and young adults. The only two extensive works that meet the guidelines of Hatfield’s and Tarbox’s parameters of this kind of study were published just this year—concurrent with the development of this dissertation. The two works, Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics and

Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults: A Collection of Critical Essays, are both edited collections, published simultaneously and released in consecutive months, March and April 2017, respectively. The former, edited by Mark Heimermann and Brittany

Tullis, is positioned more centrally within comics studies. The essays the collection encompasses take an interest in bringing youth culture, childhood studies, and an understanding of the culturally, historically contextualized child symbol to bear on the readers’ understandings of comics spanning historical eras and geographic areas. A strength of this collection is its transnational reach and in its emphasis on, as Frederick

Luis Aldama argues in the work’s foreword of the same name, “putting childhood back into world comics” (vii). However, the comics of interest to the contributors are not exclusive to those intended for young readers, and in that way the collection continues— while, admittedly, expanding upon—a scholarly focus on comic texts that use children as tropes but aren’t necessarily inclusive of them as the target audience.

The latter collection, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox, is instead positioned more centrally within children’s and young adult literature scholarship.

With Tarbox as one of the co-editors, the structure of the text follows her suggested interdisciplinary method of children’s comics scholarship. Essays throughout the collection all focus upon comics for children and young adults but vary in their emphasis on medium-specific narrative structures3, transmediation/adaptation, critical readings of ideology and representation, and even comics within the classroom. Altogether, the collection speaks to the many disciplines of interest regarding comics for children and young adults. However, the individual essays within the collection vary in their comics-

3 My own contribution to the Abate and Tarbox collection is a snapshot of the methodological approach I take within this dissertation and an example of the interdisciplinary analysis Tarbox outlines. 17

based narrative analyses due to the individual authors’ varying levels of familiarity with the form.

My dissertation is meant to participate in this evolution of a new comics scholarship of which Hatfield and Tarbox write. As of the writing of this dissertation, this work is the only extended, single-authored exploration into the construction and implications of comics for children and young adults. Within the following chapters, I combine the medium-specific tools of a formalist comics study with the field-based knowledge of the function of children’s and young adult narratives. I use these combined analytic tools to not only further the growth of a new comics scholarship, but also to investigate how comics for children and young adults are using the complex implied reader to push the boundaries of the definition of “child” and to lead to a questioning of the definition of “childhood” as well as for children, themselves, to question.

Dissertation Overview

In the following chapters, I work with an understanding of the objectives of a visual culture analytic framework, employing a contextual graphic narratology partnered with a specific poststructural critical theory in order to more fully understand the nuances of the implied reader, comic text, and sociohistorical context of the comic. In chapter one,

“The History of a Making and Unmaking: Contextualizing Comics for Children and

Young Adults and Seeing Visual Constructions,” I explore the foundational theories to my work. I contextualize comics for children and young adults within the broader history of comics, explaining the role the child has played in that history shaping its rise, fall, dormancy, and now resurgence. I argue within this chapter that the presence/absence of the child within comics was the catalyst to the evolution of both the medium and related

scholarship. I wrap up this history of theory with an interconnected methodology I am calling contextual graphic narratology and will introduce the comics tools of disruption that will be explored to greater detail throughout my later chapters. I close the chapter by overviewing the scholarship on childhood in order to ground my discussion of the implied child reader of my focus texts and tie childhood as a concept to how the texts I explore contradict the historical comics censorships’ understandings of that concept.

The next two chapters are examples of a detailed textual analysis utilizing the comics and critical theories I flesh out in chapter two and adhering to the interdisciplinary contextual graphic narratology reviewed within chapter two. In chapter three, “Falling in

Stepping out of Little Red Formation: (Re)writing Images of Gender in Lumberjanes,” I turn to an application of feminism and queer theory, drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of performativity. I explore the first few volumes of the Lumberjanes series by Grace

Ellis, Noelle Stevenson, and Brooke Allen and discuss how Lumberjanes, through both its structure and content, engages in performativity through subversive repetition. I argue that in doing so, Lumberjanes plays with reader’s experiences and expectations in order to lay the foundation for imagined alternatives. Within the chapter, I consider how the series plays with readers’ expectations regarding gender and embodiment, starting with visual representations of traditional gender archetypes before deftly subverting them through strategic alterations in the repetition. In addition, I explore how the series works on a structural level to imply a critical, personal, and chaotic ontology to its creation. I conclude the chapter by explaining how the comics content and structure serve to define the implied reader in the same critical, personal, and chaotic ways.

In chapter four, “To the Future Children of the Movement: (Re)seeing Race and

History through Stylistic Variation in March,” I examine the visual adaptation of

Congressman John Lewis’s Civil Rights memoir March co-written with Andrew Aydin. I will begin my chapter briefly by placing the March trilogy into conversation with the history of other notable autobiographical graphic memoirs in order to contextualize illustrator Nate Powell’s construction of the comic. I use this contextualization in order to emphasize the uniqueness of the comics’ construction, tying a mostly realistic visual style together with structural synthetic elements in order to both serve the rhetorical objectives of the text as teaching tool and to rewrite the child as knower of harsh realities and questioner of historical narratives. I close this chapter by arguing that March rewrites the child as doer with Lewis challenging his young readers to “get into good trouble, necessary trouble” (Lewis, Aydin, and Powell, “March: An Evening”), a state from which children are most often discouraged. But Lewis implies trouble is imperative in orienting them to become “the future children of the movement” (Lewis, Aydin, and Powell,

March, dedication). I close the chapter by positing that the dualistic visual nature of the trilogy as well Lewis’s explicit invocation to children serves to position the series as performing the critical racial actions of what Christina Sharpe calls “wake work.”

I conclude my dissertation with chapter five, “(Re)making Comics for Children and Young Adults.” I tie together how the work I am doing within this dissertation fits into the current movements within children’s and young adult literature at large that are taking risks with narrative structure and content in order to remake the implied child reader as more agentic. I argue that the tools of disruption present within the comics analyzed herein work towards the ethos of contemporary children’s and young adult

literature authors who argue that embracing the “uncomfortable” is important for the actual readers of the text (Alexie; Perez, “Embracing”; Yang, “Comfort”). This position towards comics for children and young adults is in line with the objectives of New

Literacy Studies, multiliteracies, and culturally sustaining pedagogies educational scholars have developed/are developing in order to work for social justice. As such, this interdisciplinary work hopes to show that these complicated and complex comic texts and scholarly conversations are serving to help us fulfill Lewis’s imperative to get in “good trouble,” what might be just what we need to survive in “troubling times” (Haraway 1).

Chapter 2: The History of a Making and Unmaking: Contextualizing Comics

for Children and Young Adults and Seeing Visual Constructions

In 1954, Dr. Fredric Wertham—child psychologist, opponent of comics, and self- nominated savior of innocent youths—spoke with grave certainty about the inevitable danger of the medium that, until then, had been powerful, popular, and beloved by children and adults alike: “Comic books are definitely harmful to impressionable people, and most young people are impressionable. . . . I think Hitler was a beginner compared to the comic-book industry” (qtd. in Hajdu 6). In the 1950s, juvenile malleability was only socially acceptable in the hands of a hegemonically-oriented adult. The ideological pulse of the country was—and, as I further discuss later, to an extent still is—one created of a nationalist rhetoric, serving ideologically-conservative definitions of childhood4. In particular, the view of children as tabula rasa, or a blank slate upon which any message

(virtuous or vile) could be written, necessitated the constant surveillance of children and censorship of external media. These sensitive, sacred children must be protected—even at the cost of their own voices. Children, this ideology posits need structure and discipline.

Put them in tiny boxes—for their own protection, of course—and keep them safe from

4 Childhood as an ideological construct as opposed to a biologically set stage of life is an important guiding concept throughout my dissertation. I mostly introduce this concept through Iser’s narratological concept of the “implied reader” for each of the texts I analyze; however, I specifically address various constructions of childhood as an ideologically based construct later within this chapter. For further reading on childhood as a construct, see Hintz and Tribunella and Bernstein. 22

the world and themselves. As a result, comics, a medium once founded upon the making and breaking of expectations both socially and structurally, had its gutters cleaned up and its violence toned down for the good of the child audience.

Thierry Groensteen asserts that “the comics medium is ruled by fashion cycles”

(Comics 44). Thus, from the events surrounding the medium and its shift from famous to infamous in 1954, the critique of comics and the resultant censorship and constriction led to a retrograde in the field of comics with effects lasting much longer for children’s comics than for their adult counterpart. This setback may now seem to be a thing of the past given the current trend of contemporary comics for children and young readers that seems to embrace complex constructions and dissonance over structural disambiguation.

Indeed, few contemporary authors even consider the code in its now defunct state, at least not any further than as a woebegone relic and misguided attempt at extreme censorship.

However, I posit that the Senate Subcommittee trials on juvenile delinquency of 1954 and the subsequent restrictive comics code creation came together to create a watershed moment in the development of comics studies for children and young adults. I argue that these events augmented the pressure to sacrifice the child upon the twin alters of artistic

“legitimacy”: the avant-garde and authoritative. In order to ultimately receive legitimization under the reign of the code, comics would eventually need to return to the kind of creative development that is necessary for media to evolve as opposed to wither.

Furthermore, comics would eventually need to find a way to garner institutionalized approval from cultural capital gatekeepers of the highbrow. Unfortunately, before they could do either, they had to slip out of the perpetual surveillance and its resultant stasis that surrounded children. This effected a splintering of comics into two threads: the first,

children’s comics created under the approval of the code; the second, mature alternative comics developed under the nose of the code. As a result, this freedom from the moralizing baggage that comes with writing for children allowed comics for adults— specifically, those branching from this tradition of comix5—more innovative wiggle- room.

Within this dissertation, I work to show that in their contemporary instantiation, the comics for children and young adults that diverged in the 1950s are now converging with adult comics and their medium-specific narratological advances. Consequently, I argue for the equivalent development of a specialized thread of scholarship specializing in comics for children and young adults, working not just in the shadow of adult comics but as an equal partner in the evolution of comics scholarship to come. In order to provide a foundation for my argument through historical context, I begin by giving an overview of the events leading up to and following from the implementation of the comics code. Afterwards, I explain how this history connects to my choice of an interdisciplinary visual culture framework, supports my integration of critical poststructural theories of power, and leads to my employment of a medium-specific narratological methodology.

5 “Comix” was the nomenclature used to distinguish mature comics that were being produced in the 1960s through informal presses and sold without the approval (or knowledge) of the Comics Code (Hatfield 7-8). 24

“The Marijuana of the Nursery”: Wertham, Juvenile Delinquency Trials, and the

Comics Code

The U.S. origin of comics traces back to fin de siècle newspaper strips and the coalescence of printing technology, industrialization’s effects upon urbanization, and a desire to expand newspaper readership to the burgeoning diverse urban populations of immigrants (Gardner, Projections 7-9). From R. F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley to Frederick

Burr Opper’s Happy Hooligan, the settings, events, and actors represented the characteristic evolutions of the 19th/20th century city landscape. Topics and tales of urban modernity populated the pages of the newspapers that circulated. Illustrations reflected the buildings and conveniences (as well as complications) of the city in addition to the multicultural milieu and ethnically diverse patois of the population. Seeing various races, dialects, and socioeconomic classes6 within comic strips was a commonplace, a diversity that would not spread to the medium’s nearest relative—film—for decades to come.

Curiously, even as these diverse inclusions inform an understanding of the origin of comics, Jared Gardner encourages readers to also “attend to the aspect of these comics that perhaps catches modern readers most by surprise: they are in many respects remarkably unfunny” (Projections 9, emphasis in text). “Dead dogs, starving children, robbery, and urban violence—the stuff of the early cartoon was the same material that made up the sensational stories increasingly occupying the front pages of newspapers and

6 Of course, this inclusion provided a mixed-bag of diversity, with many of the narrative choices being done at the humor and expense of these diverse groups, including the perpetuation of racist visual stereotypes like the pickaninny character in Pore Lil Mose or the laughable chaos and disarray of the more impoverished areas of the city where the most ethnically diverse individuals lived as displayed in Hogan’s Alley. 25

illustrated weeklies of the period” (Gardner, Projections 10). Contrary to assumptions of comics’ origins as shallow and salacious, Gardner positions these inclusions as revolutionary: “Whereas the illustrated press focused in its front pages on the perils of modern life. . . the comic supplement celebrated the modern body’s resilience in the face of these same forces, its ability to bounce back, to recover, and to find humor and humanity in the midst of these inhuman conditions” (Projections 10-11, emphasis in text). Thus, despite problematic representations in early comics, the occasional victory of the vagabond and thwarting of authority embodied the same potential found in reversals of the social order. Gardner’s reading of the role of mischief and upheaval in comics featuring children and aimed at an all-ages audience provides a foundation for understanding this origin of comics as in conversation with other children’s texts, particularly those described by John Stephens, whose explanation of the carnivalesque in children’s literature works just as well for the child-based origin of comics:

Carnival in children’s literature is grounded in a playfulness which situates

itself in positions of nonconformity. It expresses opposition to

authoritarianism and seriousness, and is often manifested as parody of

prevailing literary forms and genres, or as literature in non-canonical

forms. Its discourse is often idiomatic, and rich in a play of signifiers

which foregrounds the relativity of sign-thing relationships, and hence the

relativity of prevailing “truths” and ideologies. (121-122, emphasis

added)

Through this lens, the characteristics of early comics in the U.S.—with their multimodal forms, slapstick antics, familiar characters, exaggerated colloquial dialogue, social

commentary, and relativity of the visual signifier—positions the form within the family of carnivalesque literature inclusive of a young audience.

Not only did newspaper comic strips transgress racial, economic, and gendered barriers of audiences, they also bridged generational gaps thanks in large part to the child protagonist. From Buster Brown to Skippy and Little Nemo to The Kin-der-Kids, children took center stage on the comics page from its onset. In fact, one of the earliest comic superstars was Outcault’s Irish ragamuffin, the Yellow Kid7. Playing the central character in Hogan’s Alley, the Yellow Kid spoke in a phonetically-spelled pseudo-brogue and appeared with his recognizable shaved head and oversized yellow nightshirt. The child protagonist became so beloved as to lead to numerous Yellow Kid marketed products

(such as Yellow Kid Soap or Cigarettes). In particular, these child protagonists of the comics page attracted cross-generational readers through a variety of techniques. Adult readers would often respond to the dual audience method of using child protagonists as placeholders for “hidden adults,” where the comics children spoke beyond their years about philosophy, politics, and culture (Grice and Abate). The eponymous Skippy, for example, was “a philosopher, an ethicist and a politician. And this more than anything else is where Skippy changed comics—and the reason why [Percy] Crosby was such a

7 In 1896, the Yellow Kid’s popularity launched a vicious newspaper tug-of-war between publishers Joseph Pulitzer (New York World) and William Randolph Hearst (New York Journal) over the rights to his image and stories, resulting in the term “yellow journalism” to describe the events—a term that would ultimately come to reference “a style of newspaper reporting that emphasized sensationalism over facts” (Office of the Historian). Given the current role of sensationalism and the questionable role of “alternative facts” in 21st century media, the connection between children, comics, and journalism seems pertinent.

profound influence on post-war cartoonists such as Charles Schulz (Peanuts) and Walt

Kelly (Pogo)” (qtd. in Westfield Comics). Young readers, however, would be able to see reflections of their own youth on the page—from the use of child characters to plot elements reflecting “kids being kids” while playing ball or palling around with a pet.

Children (and adults alike) could also find interest in the vaudevillian humor and slapstick chaos that punctuated most early comic strips in one way or another (Grice and

Abate).

Perhaps the most appealing and yet controversial use of children in these early comics was the “mischievous kid” trope where the plot depends upon the delinquent antics of rambunctious youths delighting in the abuse and humiliation of the unsuspecting adult. The epitome of this comic type was Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids8, where siblings Hans and Fritz drew audience chuckles as they “carried their fiendishness to apocalyptic heights” through the endless torment of parental figures (such as Mama and “der Captain,” their father figure) and even school authority figures (namely, “der

Inspector”) (Waugh 45). Coulton Waugh argues that “the strong inner core of their appeal” was their representation of how “most healthy people have gone through such a stage when they were unthinking children” (45, emphasis added), a statement that represents the kind of “boys will be boys” rambunctious naiveté that forgives a child’s illicit deeds as simply ill-informed. Certainly, though, the draw of “those damned kids”

(Waugh 43) for many child and adult readers, alike, must have been more than just their

8 I do want to note that Wilhelm Busch’s German publication Max and Moritz (1865) served as The Katzenjammer Kids’ predecessor (Library of Congress). This means the origin of the mischievous kid trope in U.S. comics, much like the country itself, owes a debt to its immigrant ancestry. 28

creative chaos or impish charm. Perhaps it continued to draw on the aforementioned anti- authoritarian, carnivalesque reversal of fortunes that characterized so many other comics of the day—and thus set up the foundations that would foment the fearmongering still to come decades later.

While newspaper comic strips were growing in popularity with intergenerational audiences, a new comics form was calling more specifically to adolescents: comic books.

Emerging in the 1930s, comic book publishing companies sought to capitalize upon the burgeoning popularity of newspaper comics, the Depression-era desire for cheap entertainment as an escape, and the still-evolving semi-independent adolescent market of consumers. As Bradford Wright discusses, “Comic book publishers bypassed parents and aimed their products directly at the tastes of children and adolescents. . . probably furthered by parental guilt over deprived Depression-era childhoods, that young people deserved greater latitude to pursue their own happiness and means for self-expression”

(27). The origin of comic books was particularly subject to the tastes of young people; while early comic books were merely collected and republished newspaper strips, young writers began to create independent action and adventure comics, transforming the medium into what it is most widely known as today. Published within Detective Comics

(known today as DC), Superman became a game changer for comics in 1939. Comic books began to follow Superman’s successful formula, adding more complex storylines, extraordinary crime fighters, and historically relevant sociopolitical commentary (Hajdu

29-31). That, and the trend of junior sidekicks—from Batman’s Robin to Captain

America’s Bucky to the Captain Marvel’s twin sidekicks Captain Marvel, Jr. and Mary

Marvel—showing how comic book publishers also sought to draw a younger audience by employing child/teen characters (Grice and Abate).

Sociohistorical changes regarding the role of adolescents in society were also partially responsible for the comic book boom. As a response to unemployment in the

Great Depression, youth experienced a shift in time in and out of school. Wright comments, “As young people spent more time in the company of their peers, they acquired new personal independence and a generational consciousness that struck some alarmed adults as evidence of diminishing respect for authority and declining traditional values” (27). Certainly, the superhero comics’ tendency to represent authority figures— from business men to police officers—as corrupt only compounded the conservative adult concern sparked by the mischievous kids who traipsed defiantly through newspaper comics pages. More than that, however, David Hajdu argues that “[c]omic books were radical among the books of their day for being written, drawn, priced, and marketed primarily for and directly to kids, as well as asserting a sensibility anathema to grown- ups” (5). This youth-driven intentionality (i.e., the implied audience) and uptake (i.e., the actual audience) helps place comic books as a predecessor of other media, like rock-and- roll music independent of (and thus terrifying to) adults. “Comic books, in fact, preceded rock-and-roll by two decades as one of the first entertainment products marketed directly to children and adolescents instead of their parents” (Wright xvi). Thus, with the growth of comic books, young readers often circumvented adult gatekeepers and entered into a community of writers and readers both very political in their content and present in their seriality. “Like rock-and-roll, comic books responded to the emergence of adolescents as a discrete market with tastes and preoccupations of its own, sometimes in direct conflict

with the mores of mainstream adult culture” (Wright xvi). Much to parental chagrin,

“[c]omics were capital in the social economy of childhood, void among adults” (Hajdu

37).

Eventually, this youth-based space would provoke the consternation of protective parents intent on chaperoning their children’s lives. Ralph Bergengren decried comics, writing, “Respect for property, respect for parents, for law, for decency, for truth, for beauty, for kindliness, for dignity, or for honor, are killed without mercy” (qtd. in Hajdu

11-12). Ironically enacting the very sensationalizing journalism that originated with the

Yellow Kid, reporters accused parents who let their children read comics of being

“criminally negligent” for allowing their children to fall victim to the “marijuana of the nursery” (Hajdu 12; Gardner 76). This damning moniker in itself evokes the idealized, innocent child in need of protection. Such articles shamed parents for not being more responsible for (and restrictive of) their children, and as a result the spotlight began to shine harshly upon comics. Eventually, adult authorities—from politicians to psychologists to librarians—began to vilify comics, turning the medium into a scapegoat for everything from bad behavior to illiteracy. This scapegoating further protected adults’ idealized conceptualizations of children by separating child readers from their own agentic choice to read comics. Instead, critics emphasized with a passive voice that

“comic books were ‘sold,’ but not purchased,” bolstering “a denial of the possibility that comic-book readers were reading comic books by choice” (Hajdu 42).

In fact, Fredric Wertham made this implication of children and teens’ helplessness against such luridly illustrated temptation quite explicit with his book Seduction of the

Innocent, a scathing (pseudo)psychologically-based critique of comics using unethically

altered and fabricated data (Tilley). Wertham instigated the prohibition of comics sales to children by positioning comics as the cause of young people’s pathological deterioration into criminality as well as proposing other as-yet unseen psychological damage being done to all young comics readers (Wright 159). Wertham claimed Seduction of the

Innocent stood as scientific proof of comics reading resulting in juvenile delinquency.

However, most of Wertham’s conclusions are drawn from his piecemeal reading of handpicked comics and logically fallible deductions from the popularity of comics with young readers in psychiatric centers and reform schools (Tilley). Of course, his connections between juvenile delinquency and comics reading required ignoring the vast popularity of the medium already consumed by most U.S. kids in the first half of the 20th century (Hajdu)

Based on his own conservative, hegemonically centered opinions, Wertham took from his narrow comics analysis, in his view, glorified sadistic acts of violence and torture, so-called “flagrant sexual practices” including bondage and homosexuality, the objectification and mutilation of women, and anti-American/anti-authoritarian messages of lawlessness (Wright 158-163). Yet while Wertham’s condemnation of the racism prevalent in comics was quite accurate, most of his other interpretations fell on the scale from cherry-picked examples not truly representative of the field to grossly manufactured misreadings in order to support his preconceived biases against the medium (Tilley).

Ultimately, one of the most powerful tools in Wertham’s arsenal against comics was the way he promoted parental control of children while simultaneously passing the blame for juvenile maladjustment on to a source other than the parents. “ ‘Why, in a democracy,’ asked Wertham, ‘should parents feel “helpless?” ’ Why indeed? Yet that was exactly how

many anxious Americans felt. Bewildered by the complex of economic, social, and cultural factors dividing them from their children, parents wanted an easy answer”

(Wright 163). Wertham gave parents a convenient answer: the immoral juggernaut of the comics industry was to blame for corrupting their innocent babes, and they as parents were helpless to stop them. Wertham’s inciting illustration of comics led to a public outcry and multiple comic book burnings.

In response, the Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency held an official trial in the summer of 1954. The purpose of this trial was to determine once and for all the culpability of comic books on the degeneration of a generation. Wertham served as one of the top experts presenting a damning testimonial of comics. In contrast, Dr.

Lauretta Bender, who also worked with young people in psychological settings, countered the deleterious role of comics and actually asserted the benefits of the medium.

Bender argued, “The comic…is the folklore of the times, spontaneously given to and received by children, serving at the same time as a means of helping them solve the individual and sociological problems appropriate to their own lives” (qtd. in Hajdu 44-

45). In the end, the Senate Subcommittee determined comics were doing more harm than good and would benefit from having their act cleaned up in much the same way as the then-recent rehaul of the movie industry’s morality via the Motion Picture Production

Code. Thus comics censorship became official with the creation of the Comics Code in

1954 and the subsequently established Comics Code Authority of 1955 to serve as its defenders and enforcers (Gardner, Projections 102).

Gardner, however, posits that there was much more to Wertham’s fear of comics than their manipulation of youths, and that was their empowerment of them, an

understanding of comics that positions Wertham’s view of them much closer to that of

Bender’s point of view. He argues that Wertham’s fear of comics given shape in

Seduction of the Innocent were but the other side of the same coin that showed his admiration of comics as a powerful medium. Gardner argues that in Wertham’s later composition The World of Fanzines he reveals “his recognition of the power of this new form to activate readers’ imaginations and from his keen sense, as both a student of popular culture and a Freudian analyst, of the power of images to do much more than simply ‘display’ ” (Projections 71). Coupled with their terrifying potential for youth empowerment, comics also fomented adult censure in the ideological variations they provided. Hajdu believes “[i]t is clear now that the hysteria over comic books was always about many things other than cartoons: about class and money and taste; about traditions and religions and biases rooted in time and place; about presidential politics; about the influence of a new medium called television; and about how art forms, as well as people grow up” (Hajdu 7, emphasis added).

Gardner asserts that “[t]he comic book—arguably more than any other form in the postwar period—epitomized the new power of an emerging youth consumer no longer easily regulated within the household” leading to “parents and self-appointed cultural gatekeepers who were made nervous by this power” (Projections 96). As a result, “[t]he world of comics became a battleground in a war between two generations” and “was one of the first and hardest-fought conflicts between young people and their parents in

America, and it seems clear, too, now, that it was worth the fight” (Hajdu 6-7). I, too, am arguing within this dissertation for the value of the fight to revive and reclaim comics for children and young adults.

“With Great Power There Must Also Come—Great Responsibility”: The Dynamic

Duo of an Interdisciplinary Critical Visual Culture Framework and Critical

Theories of Power

As comics fall under the purview of visual culture, and as visual culture provides an interdisciplinary and critical approach to the lives of visual texts—especially those, like comics, that are often overlooked in their mainstream appeal or low brow status—I have decided to turn to this field to provide an analytic framework for my dissertation.

Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen situate and delineate the pertinence and performance of a visual culture analysis when they write:

If we are to understand the way in which vital text-producing institutions

like the media, education and children’s literature make sense of the

world and participate in the development of new forms of social

stratification, a theory of language is no longer sufficient and must be

complemented by theories which can make the principles of the new

visual literacy explicit, and describe, for instance, the role of layout in the

processes of social semiosis that takes place on the pages of the texts

produced by these institutions. (179, emphasis added)

Through this call, Kress and van Leeuwen describe a multifaceted approach to the analysis of visual texts, one that merges a structural analysis exploring the text’s makeup; a rhetorical analysis concerning the text’s effects upon the reader; and a critical analysis regarding the text’s social, historical, and institutional engagement with power. Per my understanding of the various scholars working within the field, this is what a visual culture analytic framework can provide. Specifically, it grounds the use of visual culture

with the critical analysis tools of scholars in the field of cultural studies, including

Nicholas Mirzoeff, Stuart Hall and Jessica Evans, and Marita Sturken and Lisa

Cartwright.

Kress and van Leeuwen believe that “visual communication is coming to be less and less the domain of specialists, and more and more crucial in the domains of public communication” (3). Part of the reason for this democratization of the image is its seeming ubiquity in contemporary settings. That we live in a world characterized by visual proliferation is undeniable (and unsurprising). W. J. T. Mitchell refers to this as

“the pictorial turn” (Picture 11). He begins by referencing the “linguistic turn” of New

Criticism/Russian Formalism that occurred in the mid-twentieth century as scholars became interested in the connections between the formal and philosophical characteristics of texts and began not only to dissect texts structurally but also to view the world around them through the linguistic tool of discourse (Picture 11). Such a linguistic turn suggested that we needed a medium-specific—or, as I would argue reading Mitchell, a modally-contingent—means with which to explore texts. The pictorial turn asks for this: it seeks out a visually grounded way to answer the questions of pictures, to discover

“what pictures are, what their relation to language is, how they operate on observers and on the world, how their history is to be understood, and what is to be done with or about them” (Mitchell, Picture 13, emphasis added). Mitchell further delineates the pictorial turn as “a postlinguistic, postsemiotic rediscovery of the picture as a complex interplay between visuality, apparatus, institutions, discourse, bodies, and figurality” and that

“visual experience or ‘visual literacy’ might not be fully explicable on the model of textuality” (Picture 16).

But these scholarly claims misrepresent the level of low regard visual texts garner in contemporary society —especially those, like comics, that have cultural and historical connections to young audiences. This devaluation of the visual might seem contrary to the textual evolution and visual revolution of the current and growing pictorial turn.

However, it is important to understand that prior to this epoch, even though the image might have had less semiotic presence in society, that same limited production resulted in a position of aesthetic privilege. Technological innovation and its resultant ease of production, publication, and circulation has dislodged the image from its place of sacrosanct art (presuming it ever fully existed there) and transfigured it into the banal.

Such an evaluative shift was bound to occur when advancements in technology— printing, cameras, digital production and manipulation, etc.—turned the tide of the means of image production.

However, Nicholas Mirzoeff posits that this actually creates a “paradox of visual culture” in that the image accrues its power in the very same way it is devalued; that is, in how “it is everywhere and nowhere at once” (1). He goes on to explain that “[w]e live in a world saturated with screens, images and objects, all demanding that we look at them”

(Mirzoeff 1). As a result, the power of the visual is often taken for granted. Yet even with images all around, educational institutions largely position subjects like art as extracurricular and restrict subjects like English to traditionally monomodal linguistic texts. As a result, students could—and frequently do—internalize the implicit ideology that the picture, whatever it might be, is less meaningful or important than linguistic forms. I have seen this internalized ideology at work in my preservice teachers’ dismissive responses to visual texts, especially through their frequent comments that

reading comics is a waste of time that could be spent on “real reading.” Regardless of a general underestimation of the visual in education and society, at least in the U.S.,

Mitchell believes the pictorial turn is something which we cannot ignore:

While the problem of pictorial representation has always been with us, it

presses inescapably now, and with unprecedented force, on every level of

culture, from the most refined philosophical speculations to the most

vulgar productions of the mass media. Traditional strategies of

containment no longer seem adequate, and the need for a global critique

of visual culture seems inescapable. (Picture 16, emphasis added)

In this commentary, Mitchell underscores one of the tenets of visual culture, that is its exploration of both the highbrow and lowbrow. A scholar working within a visual culture analytic framework, therefore, does not underestimate the power of any visual, even

(perhaps especially) those otherwise presumed by society to be ideologically vacuous and, thus, easily dismissed—those visuals that might be undervalued such as children’s comics.

Altogether, Mitchell’s imperative above suggests that scholars should expand both the critical depth and disciplinary breadth of the visual. Specifically, I argue that scholarship of comics for children and young adults must have an awareness of the many academic families to which it belongs, situating the study in its broader context in order to paint a more holistic picture of its complexities. Comics for children and young adults

(CCYA9) can trace its lineage to multiple disciplinary fields. From comics studies to children’s literature and visual culture, contemporary CCYA ultimately manifested from several splintered and siloed antecedent disciplines. With each of the various directions of the core field, disparate yet not diametric threats developed. For example, children’s literature takes on more of a pedagogical, child reader focus in the education discipline, but shifts to a literary analysis within the English discipline. Visual culture may take on a visual semiotics and content analysis, or it may go in the direction of art appreciation and a classical history of the form. Composed of the visual itself and long pigeonholed for its

“low brow” and juvenile historical connections, comics studies has a place within each of the above siloes, but it often takes a more structural approach and thus also facilitates a practical study of comics for the art producer.

As a product of these fields, CCYA suffers from a disciplinary tug-of-war. In his introductory chapter by the same inquisitive name, Henry Jenkins asks, “Should we discipline the reading of comics?” (1). “Make no mistake about it,” he argues, “a discipline disciplines. Disciplines define borders and set priorities. . . . Disciplines are defined as much by what they exclude as they are by what they include (and that consists of methods, works, theories, and people)” (Jenkins 5, emphasis added). Jenkins calls for urgent yet cautious attention to this debate: “So the decisions we make right now—as basic as which methods to represent. . .—matter because they represent the road map for a field that is still trying to grab its turf, define its boundaries, and find its way” (5). With

9 Due to the cumbersome nature of referencing my texts and field of focus in so many words, from here on out I will frequently use CCYA as an abbreviation for comics for children and young adults. 39

the scholarly study of CCYA still being relatively young, the academic works being published now serve to delineate the parameters of the field in the disciplining fashion of disciplines. Therefore, what contemporary scholars choose to ignore methodologically is just as vital as what they choose to employ.

I have thus chosen a visual culture analytic framework for the way it serves as an epistemological model of scholarly symbiosis, one that is already braided throughout the foundational fields of CCYA via the concepts of networks, contextualization, and interdisciplinary practices. In regards to comics studies, Thierry Groensteen argues the importance of expanding one’s limited focus from a single, disconnected page or panel to conceptualizing a work in its entirety as a network of images and medium-specific tools to understand the working joints of the comics body (what he calls “arthrology”) (System

22). Similarly, Mirzoeff describes visual culture as a “networked, subject-oriented field”

(258). Mirzoeff’s “subject-oriented” can be understood as multifaceted in relation to the

“the visual construction of the social field” (Mitchell, “Showing” 171). Mirzoeff’s term

“subject” can be broken down to understand multiple meanings: for example, it might focus upon the people-subjects who are the implied readers of the texts; however, it also makes room for the topic-subjects (e.g., themes, motifs, intertextuality, etc.) with which the texts engage. Looking at CCYA, then, through a visual culture framework provides the study with a mutually beneficial, multimodal, interdisciplinary way of thinking about the texts. This complex framework also connects the fields of comics studies and children’s and young adult literature through their similar core objectives and current challenges. Such an approach is one that incorporates, in varying degrees, the

relationships between the reader, the text, and the context (Rosenblatt; Wolf, Coats,

Enciso, and Jenkins).

Coupled with the interdisciplinarity it models, the visual culture analytic framework I am employing focuses upon how power works within and through the visual. Donna Haraway posits that “vision is always a question of the power to see” (qtd. in Mirzoeff 5). This emphasis on locating and interpreting power in relation to the visual—be it via the seer or the seen—characterizes Mirzoeff’s visual culture scholarship10. Mirzoeff expounds upon Haraway’s question with the following statement about rights and visuality, particularly within contemporary times of policing visible diversity:

Visual Culture, every day, has to claim the right to look, to see the

migrant, to visualize the war, to recognize climate change. In reclaiming

that look, it refuses to do the commodified labor of looking, of paying

attention. It claims the right to be seen by the common as a counter to the

possibility of being disappeared by governments. It claims the right to a

secular viewpoint. Above all, it is the claim to a history that is not told

from the point of view of the police. (15)

One of the benefits of a visual culture framework, therefore, is in how it offers the chance of realizing Thomas Carlyle’s objective of visuality: “visualizing of the battlefield first but then…becom[ing] a means to imagine other encounters as war” (Mirzoeff 7). Thus

10 In literacy education, Frank Serafini incorporates into his work Reading the Visual: An Introduction to Teaching Multimodal Literacy an emphasis on the necessity of a critical approach to visual and multimodal literacy. 41

the (in)sight practiced through visual culture nurtures the seer’s/reader’s ability to see the places of conflict that are present in society. More importantly, the seer/reader can perceive the places where they—including children—can be empowered to resist by waging their own counterinsurgency upon the visual, including those adults and institutions who hamper the child’s right to visuality.

With this acknowledgement of vision and visuality being grounded in power inequity, a visual culture analytic framework thus requires the collaboration of partnered theories of power to serve as methodologies. What this vital partnership suggests is that when a scholar works with visual culture of any kind, ideally another theory must be employed as its academic companion in order to not just see the visual but to understand the power present in visuality. From Mirzoeff’s An Introduction to Visual Culture, to

Gillian Rose’s Visual Methodologies: An Introduction to Researching with Visual

Materials, and Jessica Evans and Stuart Hall’s edited collection Visual Culture: The

Reader, many scholars ground their visual culture scholarship in critical theories in order to understand the ideologies presented and the rhetoric attempted by the visual texts they are analyzing. Altogether, the interdisciplinarity of a visual culture framework and its necessarily paired critical theory methodology bring together children, visual texts (like comics), and social issues, providing the user with the power to see and, as a result, question the seen and unseen.

The Underground High (Brow) Road vs. the Aboveboard Low (Brow) Road:

Critical yet Cringe-worthy Adult Comix and Banal yet Code-worthy Children’s

Comics

The scholarly antecedents of CCYA—comics studies and children’s literature— both have spent much of their comparatively young existence searching for “cultural legitimization” with the same “symbolic handicap” (Groensteen, “Why” 10). This particular handicap, according to Thierry Groensteen, is their relationship to children, including the child reader (both actual and implied) and the ideological construct of childhood. The quality of comics for children and young adults withered to a shell of its former self under the stifling oppression of the Comics Code (Nyberg). As a result of the protectiveness of parents over children, comics experienced a schism. The first half of the split, mainstream comics read by/aimed at children, represented the devolution of the medium with mass-produced comics largely becoming the stomping grounds of trite funny animals that emphasized innocence and somewhat impotent super heroes who emphasized assimilation and deference for authority (Nyberg). This by no means suggests that there were not subversive comics underneath the restrictive eyes of the

Code. In fact, many funny animals comics, like Pogo by Walt Kelly, or other cutesy children’s comics, like Li’l Tomboy produced by Charlton Publications, evaded the censors’ critique due to the adult committee’s ideologically-based assumptions about children and innocence (Gardner, “Invasion”; Abate 60). It was easy for the committee to assume no harm or danger in representations of animal antics, which fit their expectations for the parameters of an idealized childhood. But the vast majority of comics being published and sold under the reign of the code managed to remain above board by

playing by the rules—or, at least playing to the expectations that dictated a saccharine subordinance in children’s comics.

If authors and publishers did not play by the stringent rules of the Code, they were denied the “seal of approval” and, consequently, the ability to sell their books at licensed vendors. This, in effect, damned the defiant in their attempts to reach a larger mainstream audience through formal publishing venues. As a result, some publishers bailed on the entire comics enterprise, as did Harvey Kurtzman in his choice to move to producing

Mad Magazine instead of comics, a clever use of the magazine moniker in order to bypass the restrictions of the Comics Code. Furthermore, even child readership waned.

Significantly, this was a result of restricted accessibility to purchasing locations coupled with heightened adult censorship over comics at home (Hajdu). As was previously mentioned, this epoch occurred concurrently with the rise of television, and, together, a perfect storm formed to wash away children’s comics. The once-burgeoning power of comics drifted off—for a while, at least. It has taken time for comics for children and young adults to resurface after the deluge of the Code. During that dormant time, children’s comics seemingly abided by the rules, not even stepping out of the structural expectations, proving themselves model comics citizens—for better or worse in regards to the form and its function.

However, the other half of this bifurcation proliferated by publishing more inconspicuously—albeit controversially—post-code. Comics authors who rejected this institutional intrusion into their craft went completely in the other direction vis a vis function and form. Plots and pictures were violent, lascivious, iconoclastic, and political, developing a countercultural status. These comics authors writing in the early 1960s

through 1970s are referred to as having written “alternative comics” or “comix” as a means to distinguish the work they were doing from the crumbling comics of the Code

(Hatfield, Alternative). Notable authors like Robert Crumb, Harvey Pekar, Aline

Kominsky, and Art Spiegelman all contributed to this comix alternative (Gardner,

Projections). Yet even as these comix were experimental with their topics—including edgy themes and images—they also expanded the boundaries of the form, pushing comics narratively in ways that played and disobeyed rules in much the same way

(Hatfield, Alternative). Thus from this comix tradition the medium continued its evolution. As a result of this splintering of comics, the underground tradition became a fertile space devoid of the restrictions of childhood and free to experiment in content, style, and form. Comics studies as a field owes its existence to the developments that occurred in these texts made for adults and sold through illegitimate headshops often under the deceptive name of “zines” (Hatfield, Alternative).

Contextualized Graphic Narratology, Tools of Disruption, and Contemporary

Comics

Broad comics scholarship today has a vast freedom of form and focus, and essays exploring the medium reflect all the varied disciplines of comics studies and their contingent methodologies. Each academic track is as worthy of study as the other, and it is not the purpose of this work to claim the superiority of any one focus. However, as I have already discussed the complex influence of various fields and theories in comics for children and young adults, I argue for the expansive nature of a visual culture analytic framework. As such, I assert that more fully understanding the state of CCYA requires an interconnected, medium-specific theory imbued with an awareness of the evolution of

comics methodologies, especially one that acknowledges the history of the medium as it relates to the child. Therefore, instead of arguing against other scholars’ methodological choices, I would like to ground my own comics scholarship in a methodology based, not in the field’s divergence into “alternative histories” as Jenkins describes (2), but through the messy convergence across those histories that has led to the burgeoning scholarship and development of what I call a contextual graphic narratology. I outline this methodology herein by tracing the evolutionary pathway through its development in three foundational components: comics’ structural basis, comics’ medium-specific narrative innovations, and comics’ sociocultural contexts.

It was in the development of a comics artistic education that in 1985 Will Eisner, long-time legendary comics artist, published his seminal text on how comics work. This early work serves as my starting point for understanding how graphic narratology developed from a structural foundation. Eisner knew that if comics were to be taken seriously as a form there must be some explication of how that form functioned. In his seminal text Comics and Sequential Art, Eisner discusses the components of comics. He introduces the reader to the building blocks of comics: panels, frames, dialogue balloons, and how the structure of the comics page guides reading both in order and time. Eisner makes clear the intent of his text as solidifying the role of comics as a respectable form, even positioning the presumably young readership as part of its delayed reception of respect. Eisner laments, “[F]or reasons having much to do with usage, subject matter and perceived audience, sequential art was for many decades generally ignored as a form worthy of scholarly discussion” (Comics xi, emphasis added). In the foreword written for the text’s republication two decades later, he praises the growth of the form and the

“increasing number of artists and writers in this medium ambitiously pursu[ing] a wide range of cerebral topics” (Comics xi).

I would argue that Eisner’s position as one possible11 genesis for comics studies certainly explains the prevalent view of the necessary expulsion of the child from the field (and thus may seem a bit epistemologically problematic for a children’s literature scholar). Yet his work is important in how it emphasizes form as foundational to the development of comics studies and, ultimately, for a contextual graphic narratology.

Eisner bases the scholarly field’s starting point in a kind of art-text apprenticeship when he aims to “diagnose the form itself” and “dismantle the complex components of the medium” in order to “addres[s] the elements. . . regarded as ‘instinctive’ and. . . examine the art form’s parameters” (Comics xii), This artistic analysis of comics had not occurred prior to Eisner’s scholarship. To provide a mental image for understanding the development graphic narratology, Eisner’s work is the cornerstone upon which the field’s foundation was built. When there was no structure present for discussing the structure of comics, Eisner placed this first dot upon the blank slate of scholarship.

If Eisner’s writing is the dot on the page making comics visible, then his successor Scott McCloud’s scholarship a decade later extends that dot into a line of possibility. Through Understanding Comics (1993), McCloud sought to describe in

11 Bart Beaty argues that Wertham cannot be ignored as a founding father of comics scholarship. I agree with Beaty’s assessment that Wertham’s critique of comics should be deemed the crux of U.S. comics scholarship—and I have heretofore positioned his publication of Seduction of the Innocent and his participation in the Senate Subcommittee trials as epochal catalysts. However, as the work he did was not fruitful in itself for the development of comics studies, I choose to position Wertham as demarcating an important point in the history of comics scholarship without considering the work he did as the foundation of comics scholarship. 47

greater detail not just what the components of the comics form were but also to explain the range of the medium’s tools and with that the potential of the form. McCloud takes up a few of the same building blocks of comics that Eisner does before him. Yet instead of just naming and illustrating them in an extended “how-to” fashion as Eisner does, providing tools for the novice artist, McCloud emphasizes more how the tools affect the reader of comics and how the reader makes sense of them during the reading process.

McCloud describes the objectives of his meta-comic as “an examination of the art-form of comics, what it’s capable of, how it works…. How do we define comics, what are the basic elements of comics, how does the mind process the language of comics—that sort of thing” (n.p.12, bold in original). Yet for all of its posturing about the potential of the form, Understanding Comics seems to stop short with limited possibilities—offering a variety of options for style, narrative time, panels, color, and the text/image relationship, but always seeming to remain on a flat, one-dimensional spectrum: from realistic to iconic, from fast to slow, from text heavy to image heavy, comics to him seem largely to remain obediently on that understandable, definable line.

While Eisner and McCloud were the only two comics scholars with significant medium-specific works about comics in the U.S. for quite a while, Thierry Groensteen’s writing was taking comics scholarship further in the Franco-Belgian13 field in the late 20th

12 While Understanding Comics is paginated, these comments come from the single page Introduction that lacks a page number and does not otherwise fall into the pagination of the rest of the book. 13 Franco-Belgian is a reference to the French language comics referred to as bande dessinées that are published and read widely in France and Belgium. Bande dessinées have received greater respect as a cultural art form within their home Franco-Belgian setting, part of what could be said to lead to the strong development of comics scholarship in the “Franco-Belgian” tradition (Heimermann and Tullis). 48

century, but his work was not translated into English until the early 21st. When his book,

The System of Comics (2007) finally entered the English language, Groensteen’s semiotic exploration of the form elevated comics analysis. As Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen assert,

“Groensteen’s approach moves beyond the descriptive to provide important and useful tools for analyzing the specific formal functioning of comics as a system that speaks by and through images” (ix). Groensteen takes McCloud’s foundation of the form and discusses its internal relationship as used to convey meaning, connecting the structural categorization of the comics form into a visual semiotic analysis—although he refers to it as “neo-semiotic” (System 2). He emphasizes his goal to “conside[r] [comics] as a language, that is to say not as a historical, sociological, or economic phenomena, which it is also, but as an original ensemble of productive mechanisms of meaning” (System 2).

However, within this explanation of comics as a language, Groensteen confirms the importance of comics’ sociohistorical context even while admitting this is not within the scope of his work. In this way, Groensteen builds upon McCloud’s base, adding more structural components and cognitive shape to the form of the medium while implying the possible future work to be done in the field by combining these foci with a more contextual approach.

Skipping ahead a bit chronologically to continue explicating the formalistic development of comics scholarship, in 2015, Nick Sousanis also entered into the discussion on comics, form, and cognition. Using his comic-text about comics texts reminiscent of McCloud’s Understanding Comics in essence although contrary in aesthetic, Sousanis does not just rehash the same structural elements that were developed from Eisner to McCloud and through Groensteen. Instead, he attempts to shift the

discussion towards the way readers cognitively react to the form. Sousanis’s presence as the next significant formalist text following Groensteen, in my chronology of the development of comics scholarship, becomes poignant precisely for how he addresses the downfalls of language structures, the way Groensteen describes comics:

Languages are powerful tools for exploring the ever greater depths of our

understanding. But for all their strengths, languages can also become

traps. In mistaking their boundaries for reality, we find ourselves much

like flatlanders, blind to possibilities beyond these artificial borders,

lacking both the awareness and means to step out. The medium we think

in defines what we can see. (Sousanis 52, emphasis added)

He instead describes comics as an “evolving dialect” (Sousanis 60), and while perceiving comics in the frame of linguistics, his explanation seems to locate his view of comics as the beginning of a descriptivist hybrid linguistics that allows for innovation with the comics form and stands as a more agentic conceptualization than its methodological forerunners, whose emphases on structure suggest a more prescriptivist approach to the language of comics. Sousanis seems to be highlighting an alternative way of perceiving medium and form in order to encourage the reader of his text—and, eventually, of comics in general—to break free: “Disrupting these deeply ingrained patterns takes a profound nudge. . . a rupture in experience, illuminating boundaries and the means to transcend them. And with that comes an understanding that we need not be rendered inanimate, and that empowered on our own two feet we can step out and look anew” (Sousanis 25-26).

Altogether, Sousanis’s contribution to the foundation of structural comics scholarship performs the very act of his text’s title—it unflattens it. He provides depth to the

understanding of the comics structure—where it can go and what it might truly be—thus conceiving it as a three dimensional presence, emphasized through his repetition of

“stepping out” comments. This encouragement to step out of the box—structurally, conceptually, and ideologically—is the kind of alteration to the basis of graphic narratology necessary for its methodological conception. It is also a very “taboo” directive in regards to children who are often asked to “fall in line” as opposed to

“stepping out of line,” and as such makes for an intriguing foundation for an epistemology of childhood and a methodology of comics analysis.

In order to understand the next foundational component of contextual graphic narratology, I need to step back chronologically to the introduction of a narrative basis. In

2011, SubStance brought together scholars who were asking what would happen if narratology were wed to comics studies when examining the comics text? The journal special issue, edited by Jared Gardner and David Herman, was the “first of its kind” as a collection of articles “organized around the question of how ideas from contemporary narrative theory can be brought to bear on graphic narratives, and how, reciprocally, the richness and complexity of narratives told in words and images might pose challenges to existing models of story,” what Garnder and Herman referred to as “graphic narrative theory…[a] hybridized field of study” (3). The collection works with the kind of explorations that have come from transmedial narratology, or the study of narratives across media, particularly in its look at how “the constraints and affordances associated with particular media may affect the design and interpretation of narratives” (Gardner and

Herman 5). Within the collection, scholars combined narratological foci—e.g., narration, focalization, style, etc.—with graphic narrative devices—e.g., the spatiotemporal use of

panels, the text’s multimodal phenomenology, calligraphy, braiding and its effect on arthrology14, etc. Altogether, graphic narratology as given shape in this special issue explores the structural components of comics in order to understand how these pieces become tools in the hands of the comics author for creating a graphic narrative. The emphasis on the how and the agentic choices of the authorial who utilizing these tools shows foresight in this seminal publication—predicting the kind of narratological innovation through structural alteration that will not be taken to the next level for another few years until Sousanis tackles it. SubStance’s special issue contributors were already shaping their development of the narrative basis of graphic narratology with an understanding of medium-influenced cognition and authorial innovation, challenging the prescriptive structural restrictions that were implied by their scholarly predecessors as they explored not how comics should work but detailed how certain comics did work. In my understanding of the development of graphic narratology, this evolutionary moment led to scholars taking a step back from the “comics” box and looking at the big picture of the authorial hand as the agentic manipulator of the graphic text for a rhetorical effect.

The path that graphic narratology has taken to date largely springs from the directions proposed by Gardner and Herman in their introduction to this special issue.

Scholars following this publication aim to enter into the same conversation and explore the parameters of graphic narratology even as they expand upon the boundaries of the scholarship. For example, Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon position their own collection

14 Braiding and arthrology, two graphic narrative structural terms coined by Groensteen, will be further discussed as they come up within the chapters as representative tools of disruption. 52

of graphic narratological work as continuing where Gardner and Herman (and the many contributors to the SubStance special issue) left off. They explain their purpose as “to explore new ways of thinking about the narrativity of comics from [graphic narratology’s] theoretically as well as methodologically refined vantage point” (2). Stein and Thon position the work that graphic narratologists are doing as falling largely within the realm of transmedial narratology, “an umbrella term for a variety of narratological practices concerned with media other than literary texts” (2). However, they also locate the scholarship emerging from graphic narratology as being one that is inclusive in its focus, spanning what J. Christoph Meister calls the three “dominant methodological paradigms of contemporary narratology” (qtd. in Stein and Thon 1). Its contributors do not just focus on a medium-specific narratological examination of the text but also take up the text’s cultural, historical, and ideological engagements in the style of contextualist narratology, and also incorporate inquiries into how the reader is making sense of the narrative in the style of cognitive narratology (Stein and Thon 2). This development provides the final foundational component for my current understanding of a contextual graphic narratology: the contextual basis. What Stein and Thon’s collection does not do as much is focus on the potential found in transgressing structural boundaries; for that element, Sousanis has to be brought to bear upon Stein and Thon to complete a scholarly contextualized approach. In my imagined figure, I finally have zoomed out to the “big picture” to see the current evolution of contextual graphic narratology as one where both the text and the authorial hand are variously contextualized in the greater social, historical, political, and scholarly environment. This fully realized contextual graphic narratology serves as the methodology for my combination of comics studies and

children’s literature, and thus shows how my work is entering into the scholarly conversation.

Altogether, the path of comics studies that produced contextual graphic narratology is one that sought first to name comics, define it, and label its components, all in order to understand how it works so that authors and scholars might better understand how it could work. This medium potential is the driving force behind graphic narratology: “[D]o graphic narratives afford different storytelling possibilities than other kinds of multimodal narratives that exploit different semiotic channels…?” (Gardner and

Herman 5). Resultantly, contextual graphic narratology is the next natural evolution in the medium-specific study of comics writing as it works towards answering the question that if there is a language to comics and rules for how to speak it, then how do we utilize that language to tell stories, particularly in engaging, ethical, and equitable ways?

Furthermore, how do we use this knowledge of the rules of graphic narratives in order to continue to progress forward in narrative innovation and avoid storytelling stagnation?

This evolutionary track of the methodology of contextual graphic narratology requires first knowing the basis of each of the foundational components. For the structural/foundational basis, this includes Eisner’s, McCloud’s, and Groensteen’s comics metalanguage of panels, gutters, the mise-en-page layout/composition, style, and arthrology. For the narrative foundational basis, this is Gardner and Herman’s incorporation of medium-specific narration, focalization, perspective, narrative time, motif, etc. Finally, for the contextual foundational basis, this is Stein and Thon’s inclusion of sociohistorical and sociocultural relevance; an understanding of the audience, the text, and the medium as contextualized; an emphasis on the ideological

workings of the text within a social context; and, ultimately, an acknowledgment that the text was not constructed or published in a vacuum—or, in sum, a scholarly focus on what the graphic narrative means when studied in its context.

Tools of Disruption

Many comics tools exist to erase the boundaries between reader and text and create a comfort with the text, seeing oneself as part of the textual world. For example, much has been written about the gutter as a formal characteristic that leads to strong reader engagement with and entrance into the story world (McCloud; Low). In addition to the gutter, one of the most commonly referenced tools of reader engagement, is the use of more iconic, cartoony illustrations that allow content to take precedence over the container (McCloud 37). According to McCloud, this visual style creates a vacuuming effect, and the distance between the audience and the text collapses: “I’m practically a blank slate!. . . You give me life by reading this book and by ‘filling up’ this very iconic

(cartoony) form. Who I am is irrelevant. I’m just a little piece of you” (37, bold in text).

This comfort and its resultant audience proximity and complicity connected to both the gutter and visual style has great potential. A reader who projects herself into the text could care more about the narrative events, potentially developing empathy for others who have those same experiences with which the text has allowed her to temporarily engage. In addition, such a structure could lead to a sense of ownership over the text, facilitating a greater aesthetic relationship with the text as a result of privileging the reader.

But this proximity and involvement between reader and text can also lead to a problematic kind of reading. The more the text sucks the reader into it, the less distance

there is between the reader and the text and, thus, the smaller the space for critical engagement. Using William Morris’s understanding that “the book’s ‘anatomy’ [should create] a normalized habit of reading that enacts disembodiment,” Michael Joseph explains that the elements of a text are often understood as being desirable by readers are those that fade into the background during the reading experience (458). Texts that perform this way might best described as passive and “unobtrusive” (Joseph 459). The pulling of the reader into the text means that the reader—in theory—sees herself unquestionably as one with the text, and therefore the characters and their actions into which she projects herself seem to pass with ease in front of her eyes while reading. Even while the visual/verbal hybrid nature of comics already does a certain amount of emphasizing form and reminding readers of the text beyond that of traditional monomodal linguistic narratives, those comics that play by the structuralist rules facilitate a smoother transition into the graphic narrative reading experience. The composition of the story world is more easily internalized and used as a guide for reading the rest of the story, and the predictability of structure creates a concordant visual rhythm to harmoniously time the narrative beat. Groensteen explains that any visual code or structure that occurs with “persistence makes it[self] less noticeable, ensures that emphasis will be on the subject matter, and reinforces a reality effect, which gives credibility to the story being recounted” (Comics 114).

Yet within Groensteen’s explanation of structural obedience is an antithetical disobedience: “Conversely, any break in the code reminds readers they are looking at a drawing, and so combats or weakens the fictional illusion” (Comics 114). When the structural formula is tampered with, the antithesis occurs, positioning the text in the

forefront and thrusting the reader out of the narrative, extending the distance between reader and text in a way that makes possible a distanced observation and critique. The authorial exploration emphasized with contextual graphic narratology supports this kind of move; its scholarly focus is to define and then deconstruct the graphic narrative.

Sousanis’s methodology ideologically stands with contextual graphic narratology against the restrictiveness of a compelled “standardization” of the visual form. He argues that

“conforming to another’s expectations is detrimental—if the shoe doesn’t fit, it’s hard to move freely. To ignore our differences and the configuration of threads from which we are uniquely composed robs us of our inherent nimbleness. Rather than. . . following a series of prescribed steps, let us open out…” (Sousani 146-147). The moments in the text where the graphic narrative resists conflation with the reader, where the form refuses to be formatted, creates fertile gaps in the narrative: “There are always gaps: spaces for the unknown, openings for imagination to spill into. Incompleteness reveals that there is always more to discover” (Sousanis 150)

These gaps of which Sousanis writes are fractures in the otherwise pristine appearance of an orderly—and, thus, somewhat invisible—text. In my work, I refer to these gaps or fractures as tools of disruption. Specifically, tools of disruption are any obtrusive, overt rejection of obedience to the graphic narrative form that appears within the text. When the reader comes across these, the opposite of McCloud’s vacuum effect occurs: instead of being pulled into the text and privileging the narrative aesthetic experience, the reader is thrust outward from the text by the explicit, undeniable bookness of the book, creating a distinctly synthetic experience that slows reading time, shifts reading direction, and leads the reader to question the motives behind the text’s

construction. Such tools of disruption abound in alternative comics, the kind that got their start as underground comix, as the artists played with all manner of comics boundaries

(Hatfield, Alternative; Joseph 461); consequently, as I detailed earlier, these developments of comics’ structural innovation occurred largely in isolation from CCYA.

Groensteen writes of a contemporary upswing in the employment of such tools of disruption and argues they “deplo[y] a whole arsenal of unsystematic effects, allowing for some images to be highlighted and so to escape the monotony presumed to be the inevitable consequence of any form of regularity” (Comics 47). Groensteen attributes this narrative trend “to a generation that has turned its back on the ideals of simplicity and transparency” the qualities most prized in their authorial predecessors who “strove above all to tell a story as legibly as possible” (Comics 47).

I acknowledge that Groensteen writes of the Franco-Belgian bande dessinée tradition, and the contextual foundation of my contextual graphic narratology methodology would not allow me to ignore such geographic, cultural, and historical context. However, even though he is only intentionally referencing works outside of the

U.S., I believe and will go on to show in this work that the same narrative trends are occurring in U.S. children’s and young adult comics and are clearly being embraced by the U.S. reader15. In service of both this and my explication of these tools of disruption, I will address the various ways children’s and young adult comics authors are

15 This trend can be seen through book popular praise and prizing, which I address later in this work as beginning with Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese and continuing with recent ALA awarding—including El Deafo and This One Summer along with Yang’s appointment as National Ambassador for Young People’s Literature. 58

incorporating graphic narrative tools of disruption into their works and discuss how these tools are altering the narrative and, thus, the reading experience.

It is also important for me to note here that one limitation of my study of CCYA is my narrowed focus upon U.S. CCYA. This focus is not intended to say that I believe

U.S. CCYA are doing things better than or absent from CCYA in other countries. It is, instead, my attempt at first explaining the effect of Wertham’s condemnation and the

Senate Subcommittee’s trials on the stagnation of comics development within the U.S. context for the last several decades. As such, I am using the U.S. CCYA herein to discuss how contemporary U.S. CCYA authors are taking part in the taking back of innovative and engaging comics for young people. Finally, as I believe a contextual familiarity is important to perform contextual graphic narratology as a methodology for textual analysis, I have chosen to remain within the U.S. contextual boundaries of which I am most familiar. This is especially important in regards to my cultural and linguistic barriers since exploring comics in English translations would add another layer of mediation to the texts, and even visual semiotics can vary largely internationally, altogether compounding the analytic needs beyond my contextual knowledge and the scope of my project.

Children, Childhood, and CCYA

Ideology and Children’s Texts

Ideology is “the system of ideas that define a culture” (Parsons). As Elizabeth

Parsons explains, this “includes the larger scale of political, cultural, and economic ideas like democracy, Christianity, capitalism and individualism that dominate in the Western world, but also the more intimate identity politics within a culture, in particular those that

surround gender, sexuality, race, and class and that effect the distribution of power among individuals in a society.” Louis Althusser asserts the individual’s complicity in his internalization of such ideologies: “The individual in question behaves in such and such a way, . . . [and] participates in certain regular practices which are those of the ideological apparatus on which ‘depend’ the ideas which he has in all consciousness freely chosen as a subject” (696). One of the examples he gives is that when an individual “believes in

Justice, he will submit unconditionally to the rules of the Law, and may even protest when they are violated, sign petitions, take part in a demonstration, etc.” (Althusser 696).

Althusser explains that ideology “ ‘recruits’ subjects among the individuals. . . by that very precise operation which I have called interpellation or hailing, and which can be imagined along the lines of the most commonplace everyday police (or other) hailing:

‘Hey, you there!’ ” (699, emphasis in text).

Even though scholars who subscribe to ideological analyses of children’s and young adult texts are “criticized for intellectualizing about stories in ways that would not be part of the reading experience of the child,” their work becomes important precisely because “ideology is often hidden beneath the narrative surface” and thus goes unchecked

(Parsons). Ultimately, because “ideological analysis scrutinizes the cultural work a children’s story does” it helps to reveal how ideological state apparatuses, like children’s and young adult texts including CCYA, serve an unequal distribution of power in society

(Parsons). These publications interpellate the young reader into the ideological cadre to which the book and author already belong. Curiously, though, as I touched on in the introduction, due to the very assumptions often made about young readers, adults approaching these texts often immediately disregard their ideological weight and power.

My intention behind beginning with this detailed discussion of ideology, interpellation, and intellectual resistance is to lay the foundation for my argument that negative evaluations of contemporary CCYA and its resultant censorship is fueled by adult resistance to ideological analysis, precisely because these books challenge the ideological basis into which the adults have already been interpellated. As Parsons asserts, “These criticisms of ideological analysis can also be linked to a social belief in the idea that children are, or should be, apolitical beings, and that the stories adults give them, and the analysis of such texts, should be somehow outside politics.” As such,

“conservatives wish to claim that children’s literature is not ideological” (Parsons, emphasis added). This such denial of children and young adults’ political positioning and identity serves ideology’s necessary task of remaining invisible in order to be assumed as an innate phenomenon (Parsons). As adults cling to the idea of the child as apolitical, they create an argument for the disapproval of any text that threatens to imbue children with political identities, and they negate the necessity for understanding the latent political power within children’s and young adult texts. Understanding this role of ideology, I argue that there are two core16, competing ideological bases at work in my understanding of the constructions of childhood that inform discussions of appropriateness of texts and the “child” reader of these texts, whether those readers are

16 I want to emphasize these “two core” ideologically based constructions of childhood are by no means the only two options that exist. Furthermore, I eschew the understanding of identities and concepts as binaries. However, as I’m arguing that this these are dominant, contradictory, and often most relevant towards research in children’s and young adult texts, I am privileging only these two within my work. For a greater overview of the concepts of childhood, see Hintz and Tribunella. 61

actual or implied: the hegemony-serving Romantic child and its contradictory counterpart the subversive agentic child.

The Romantic Child

Literary and Historical Context of Innocence

Many adults—my university students, included—understand texts intended for young people as marked by didactic morals, bright and colorful pictures, and above all childhood being characterized by dual pillars of happiness and simplicity. Some of these ideas even appear in the works of scholars within who work with children’s texts in their own fields (e.g., children’s literature scholars, literacy education scholars, etc.) as can be seen in the following representative quotation: “There are some limits to the content of children’s literature. . . set by children’s experience and understanding” such as their

“childlike imagination and joyful exuberance” and that emotions like “cynicism and despair are not childlike emotions and should not figure prominently in a children’s book” as they “are outside the realms of childhood” and “children’s experience and understanding” (Kiefer and Tyson 4).

These assumptions about texts for young people are grounded in the ideological construction of childhood as a time of innocence. This conceptualization of childhood originated in the late 18th through mid 19th century (Hintz and Tribunella). According to

Carrie Hintz and Eric Tribunella, children up until the early 20th century—with exceptions largely a result of class and race—were “[h]ardly precious objects to be coddled,” far from the “sacred and sentimental objects” they would come to be (20). This earlier view of childhood is one where children are part of the world and society, not

sheltered from it, and are thus deemed either capable of handling or at least not in need of protection from many things (e.g., work, violence, and harsh realities).

However, two Romantic philosophers greatly shifted the Western conceptualization of childhood. In 1693, John Locke turned his philosophical mind towards the institution of education. With his work Some Thoughts Concerning

Education, Locke turned around earlier views of children as miniature adults and inherent sinners and instead created the idea of “the child as the embodiment of innocence, or the

Romantic child” (Hintz and Tribunella 15, emphasis in text). Locke viewed children as tabula rasa, or blank slates. Their experiences in the world, the books they read, and the lessons they are taught by their educators would write themselves upon the child’s blank slate and shape forever her character. As such, childhood became a state necessitating protection lest the wrong things become indelibly marked upon the child’s slate. He posited the purpose of education as largely one of a moral nature, working to inscribe the

“right” messages upon the child (Hintz and Tribunella 15). Later in 1762, Jean-Jacques

Rousseau composed his own “treatise on education”: Emile. In it, he pushes adults to recognize the beauty and natural qualities of the child as he writes, “To know good and bad, to sense the reason for man’s duties, is not a child’s affair. Nature wants children to be children before being men. If we want to pervert this order, we shall produce precocious fruits which will be immature and insipid and will not be long in rotting” (qtd. in Hintz and Tribunella 15-16). Rousseau’s warning against these “precocious fruits” can be seen reflected even in Waugh’s later 20th century description of the pleasure of comics being based in a nostalgia for being “unthinking children” (45) who are naive and free of

responsibilities. Together, Locke and Rousseau provided the educational impetus for protecting childhood and separating it from adulthood.

This ideological construction of childhood developed concurrent with the

Romantic zeitgeist of the late 18th/early-mid 19th centuries. Romantic authors’ works, both those published for adults such as that of William Blake, and eventually for children, including Christina Rossetti, facilitated these shifting views of childhood. Romanticism’s ideals included emphases on emotion over reason, of innocence over experience, and of grand imaginative thought over realistically based logic, all rejections of the previous

Enlightenment ideals. It also included a return to the untouched beauty of nature, a response to the growing urbanization of the Industrial Revolution. Altogether, these ideals assisted in redefining childhood as an age and concept. Children—being young, untouched by the world and education, naïve of the world, emotionally exuberant, and naturally imaginative through play all appeared closer to nature and the natural state of man and thus garnered praise as the ideal embodiment of Romanticism.

Since returning to an unspoiled Romantic childhood would be impossible—after all, perceiving of childhood in the tabula rasa fashion, one is indelibly written upon by their experiences in the world—children instead became praised and idealized, beloved with a tinge of jealous nostalgia and protected as precious things by those who adored them. For those who could afford it—the growing middle class and already present upper class—childhood could be a protected time now. Following the tenets of Locke and

Rousseau, a slow, isolated educational period was developed. Opinions opposing child labor began to rise, and children’s literature, itself in its infant stages, would be shaped to promote such Romantic ideals to the child readership, as these Romantic ideals can be

seen heavily influencing much of the Golden Age of children’s literature from the mid

19th century to the early 20th century. This also meant children’s literature would be infused with Romanticism in marketing the books to the already converted Romantic adults raising those children, the other (more powerful) half of the dual audience. By the late 19th century, children’s literature was largely understood as a balance of jovial entertainment with judicious instruction, aided by visual illustrations to titillate young readers’ senses and moral edicts to proselytize them into propriety. The kind of “proper child” this conglomeration of events concocted was idealized within the very pages of children’s literature itself by works like those featuring the idealized upper-middle class, fair-skinned/haired children in Kate Greenaway’s illustrations and the virtuous little angels modeled in John Newbery’s own The History of Little Goody Two Shoes.

The post-Romantic conceptualization of the child, “the sacred child” is not actually that far removed from the Romantic conceptualization when the idealization and protection of both childhoods is highlighted. Hintz and Tribunella explain the sacred child in the following way:

In this model, children are understood as precious and fragile aesthetic

objects to admire rather than as practical tools. As such, they must be

protected, watched, fussed over. . . . Whatever the reasons, during this

period, children became primarily a source of emotional reward to fuss

over and prize, sacred objects to protect from every conceivable danger.

(22-23, emphasis added)

While the Romantic child was exceedingly isolated through race and class, the sacred child in its 20th century evolution was not: “Gradually, over the course of the late

nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, this model of childhood came to be understood as an ideal toward which all families across the economic spectrum could and should aspire” (Hintz and Tribunella 23, emphasis added). This understanding that all children should be protected, idealized, and lavished upon does not, however, take into account that race and class differences were, and still very much are, a reality. As a result, pressures are placed upon all families, regardless of circumstance, to provide this kind of privileged, sacred childhood for their children or else be viewed as deficit for failing to meet unrealistic expectations.

Troubling Romanticism

The contemporary instantiation of the Romantic child through the sacred child is one that continues the division of children across class and race. Contemporary understandings of childhood are often characterized by both the sacred child’s capitalistic/materialistic identification and the Romantic child’s naiveté/innocence. Peggy

Orenstein posits the princess culture trend as being a current example of this, particularly marking it as a contemporary reaction to fearful events, such as September 11th, more for the adult’s own pacification than for that of the child:

Recall that the current princess craze took off right around the terrorist

attacks of September 11, 2001, and continued its rise through the

recession: maybe, as another cultural historian suggested to me, the desire

to encourage our girls’ imperial17 fantasies is, at least in part, a reaction to

17 Romanticism and much Golden Age children’s literature also included a bolstering of nationalism. I assert it is this very same nostalgic return to imperialism, (racial) innocence—which I discuss later this chapter—and the elusivity of a “Golden Age” that is driving the current racist rhetoric of the 2017 U.S. president, Donald Trump, his earlier 66

a newly unstable world. We need their innocence not only for consumerist

but for spiritual redemption. (25, emphasis in original)

Altogether, despite the dated origins of childhood as Romantic and innocent, many adults today—my university students, especially—recognize the above philosophical developments as central to their own ideologically informed conceptualizations of childhood.

Unfortunately, the Romantic child is a concept based on an exclusionary binary. If childhood requires being innocent, sinless, asexual, oblivious, and non-political, then how does a young person within the ages often delineated as childhood get categorized if they lack one or more of these exclusive qualities? By necessity, in order to maintain the parameters of the Romantic child, this other child must be positioned as abject. Adults looking to maintain their Romanticized understanding of childhood must face this dilemma. Ultimately, in order to reconcile these contradictions, people who hold the

Romanticized ideology dear must bend their understanding of the world to fit their core beliefs. The reality that some children face extreme horrors—death, racism, abuse, poverty, despair—does not fit with Romanticism’s naïve innocence and worldly protection. As such, those who subscribe to this Romanticized view of childhood must reject reality—the realities of children and experiences that do not fit into their construct of childhood—and even denote as wicked or improper any person or any text which challenges that ideology. In so doing, these vigilant adults cloak their children in protective capes, encouraging their children to draw up their scarlet hoods in order to

2016 presidential campaign slogan to “Make America Great Again,” and the dangerous concomitant rise in the public presence of white supremacist organizations. 67

block out any view of the real world surrounding them. Consequently, all of those children, adults, experiences, and books that stand as potential threats for uncloaking their children are perceived as the threatening wolves lurking around every corner. As

Althusser explains, when a person does not “act according to his ideas” that support his ideological beliefs, then that person “is wicked” (696, emphasis added). There are many problems with adhering to the conceptualization of the Romantic child. To begin with, it’s exclusionary. Not all children’s lived experiences will fit into this understanding of childhood. In order to sustain the ideology, these children must be rejected from the definition of childhood altogether. Children whose race, class, gender, sexuality, or otherwise specific lived experiences of violence or trauma make them incompatible with the Romantic child must be defined as “not children.”

Racial Innocence and Censorship

In her book Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to

Civil Rights (2011), Robin Bernstein discusses in depth this convergence of innocence and whiteness as visible-yet-unstated markers of childhood and the resultant necessary exclusion of brown and black children in order to develop that racialized ideal. Quoting

Ann DuCille, Bernstein reveals the relationship between the Romantic child and the erasure/unmarking of whiteness: “[S]ilence about itself [is] the primary prerogative of whiteness, at once its grand scheme and its deep cover” (qtd. in Bernstein, Racial 7-8).

Bernstein posits that sociohistorical, ideological constructions of childhood were created—and, as I argue, are continuing to be maintained—in the service of bolstering whiteness:

Childhood. . . is a primary material in the historical construction of that

cover. Childhood innocence—itself raced white, itself characterized by the

ability to retain racial meanings but hide them under claims of holy

obliviousness—secured the unmarked status of whiteness, and the power

derived form that status, in the nineteenth and into the early twentieth

centuries. (Racial 7-8)

She further explains how this division between childhood innocence as a raced and intentionally/necessarily exclusionary construct “helped Americans to assert by forgetting, to think about by performing obliviousness, was not only whiteness but also racial difference constructed against whiteness. Racial binarism. . . that erases nonblack people of color—gained legibility through nineteenth century childhood” (Bernstein,

Racial 8). Indeed, the entanglement between the Romantic ideals of innocence, naiveté, asexuality, and natural beauty with the racial construct of whiteness has become a messy conglomeration of privilege while simultaneously a universal expectation of childhood.

As such, the disentangling of this dangerous knot of privilege and childhood requires an uncomfortable ideological shifting and sacrifice of the privileged position.

If the binaries of innocence vs. experience and child vs. non-child are adhered to, then racial division embodied by its own racial binary and violent racism both serves to continue the other divisions as well as is served by them. If childhood innocence is to be protected and children are sacred, then how does one explain turning her back upon the harsh treatment of children of color? This must be done through the abjection of these children from childhood itself. Violence and pain thus became a dividing factor in the construction of childhood: “in the second half of the nineteenth century, pain functioned

as a wedge that split childhood innocence, as a cultural formation, into distinct black and white trajectories. White children became constructed as tender angels while black children were libeled as unfeeling, noninnocent nonchildren” (Bernstein, Racial 33). This ideology both created and was created by the presence in visual culture of the pickaninny.

“The pickaninny may be animalistic or adorable, ragged or neat, frightened or happy,. . . but the figure is always juvenile, always of color, and always resistant if not immune to pain” (Bernstein 34-35). This, of course, stands in direct contrast to the simultaneous extreme sensitivity and fragility of the white child that actually became the rallying cry for the protection of the Romantic child. As Bernstein asserts, “Through this polarization, racial innocence—that is, the use of childhood to make political projects18 appear innocuous, natural, and therefore justified—emerged” (Racial 33)

Of course, children of color are not the only children sacrificed in order to protect the Romantic child. Bernstein points out that white childhood itself was not “monolithic in representation” and the lived experiences resulting from class, geography, and other circumstances likewise excluded some white children from the privileged protection of childhood (Racial 33). “Representations of white children especially diversified during the second half of the nineteenth century,” as Bernstein writes, discussing how “middle- class children became ‘priceless,’ in Viviana Zelizer’s term, while working-class children and poor children sweated in factories and fields” (Racial 33).

18 Furthermore, the Romantic child is also objectifying in its disempowerment, with the child often used as an object for political causes even while she is excluded from subjectivity within the cause, such as with the initial sick-child fundraising event “The Jimmy Fund,” about which I’ve written elsewhere (“Do Robots” 82-83). 70

Since these white children cannot be rejected in quite the same way that children of color are without undermining the white child’s racial innocence, an alternative solution must be found in order to exclude them. This solution is censorship, “a practice that goes back to ancient times and has been tied to notions of protecting the society from immorality” (Gopalakrishnan 73). Ambika Gopalakrishnan points out that most books censored in the name of protecting children from such immorality “are usually books that talk about the experiences of people who may have been marginalized, underrepresented, or otherwise ignored. . . [because they] portray a different world, alternate lifestyles, unique viewpoints, or topics that we would not be aware of, if not for these books” (73).

The ambiguous and completely subjective “unsuited for age group” excuse people use when challenging children’s and young adult texts is often used to ban any story or lived experience that threatens the Romantic child.

By not knowing of the realities of the world and its harshness, the Romantic child as tabula rasa may remain ignorant and “unmarred.” These children live in the world and learn from the world, but the more they learn from the world the more their natural, untouched states are altered. Such a conceptualization of the child leads to the understanding of “appropriate” materials for children as ones that maintain innocence through ignorance and likewise perpetuate bliss. Materials for this audience would require a denial of the harsh realities of the world. Death, loss, famine, poverty, prejudice, and politics would all be antithetical to this objective. The Romantic child is thus one who must be protected from experiencing the world lest such participation write itself upon her. Furthermore, in order to do such protecting, adults must sequester the Romantic child in an isolated world of childhood, serving as the mediator between the child and the

world and the proxy for all acts and decisions, requiring a child’s sacrifice of agency while promoting it as “for her own good.” In other words, the adult is the sole doer and decider in the child’s life, the one with all the power—but also, all the responsibility—in regards to the maintenance of childhood innocence. Altogether, the practice of censorship in children’s literature shows that “[c]hildren are not yet free to be themselves” (Nel

284), at least not as long as their existence challenges the dominant, conservative narrative of the Romantic child.

The Agentic Child

Another problem with the conceptualization of the Romantic Child is how is is fundamentally disempowering to children. As Karen Sánchez-Eppler comments, “[T]he concept of childhood dependency has frequently been used to naturalize a lack of autonomy.” In this way, the child’s natural need for an adult caretaker—one to work a job and provide for her—validates that children, in their powerlessness, must be protected. But, as Gopalakrishnan points out, actions taken to disempower children are part of the adult’s fear of the child, which manifests itself in adult control of capital through censorship. Quoting Judy Blume, Gopalakrishnan writes, “ ‘Censorship grows out of fear’ rather than a motivation to protect children. . . . . [C]ensorship is a form of power that is held by someone over others, and Blume feels that in order for censors to feel in control of their children’s lives, censorship is usually ‘disguised as moral outrage’

” (87). As I described earlier in this chapter, Gardner argues this act of censorship to disrupt young people’s potential power was at the core of the 1950s comics crisis that led to the development of the Comics Code (71). By censoring children’s literature, adults literally take away children’s agency in their reading material and cut short any attempt to

inform children of ideas about the world that might otherwise undermine the hegemonic ideologies supporting the construct of the Romantic child.

This overall critical understanding of the Romantic child is potentially fueled by internalized aetonormativity. Maria Nikolajeva defines “aetonormativity (Lat. Aeto-, pertaining to age), [as] adult normativity that governs the way children’s literature has been patterned from its emergence until the present day” (16). One representative example of this is when in class discussions my students insist that they can make ideologically-based analytical observations about children’s books because they are adults but “kids will never get this,” or that any kid who does must be “really advanced.”

Key to their understanding of children is the aforementioned naiveté and inferior comprehension skills. Any adult who believes children are necessarily unaware of the world around them and defined by their innocent ignorance would presume that children are incapable of the kind of knowledgeable analyses of texts adults can perform. Further falling back on ageism and aetonormativity in class discussions, these university students cross their arms while dismissing critical analysis and ideological readings of any children’s and young adult text as “too much,” rejecting the possibilities of what they might see if they open their eyes, preferring instead keep them tightly shut.

In order to facilitate a shift in the power dynamics and positioning of children in society, we must necessitate a restructuring of the construct of the child away from that of the Romantic child and towards something more dynamic, independent, and agentic. But before kids can achieve something different, adult gatekeepers must conceive of them differently. This reconceptualization is that of the agentic child, a reconstruction of the child as experienced, knowing, political, and potentially powerful—all that was the

opposite of the Romantic child. The agentic child is one who has power and agency in her own life. The relationship between her and adults is not one driven by fear, that which otherwise leads to overprotection and censorship in the Romantic child. This alternative construct of the agentic child is the one I argue scholars of children’s and young adult literature and the adult gatekeepers responsible for introducing books to children and young adults have a responsibility to support.

Reesa Sorin explains the construct of the agentic child as one that “challenges the notion of the innocent, powerless child, as children are considered social actors who participate in their education and lives. . . and co-construct childhood with adults” (18).

Instead of viewing childhood as a a time of life when children must be isolated and protected from the world, the ideological construct of the agentic child “consider[s it] an important period of being—a time when children make sense of their world through active interaction with it” and a time when “adults interacting with these children are co- learners who negotiate, challenge and guide while sharing power with them” (Sorin 18).

Sorin posits the necessity of educators who work with children—and, I would add, those responsible for instructing future educators and adult mediators—to participate in

“critically examining situations, power relationships and discourses in operation [within their classrooms so] they can transform the situation” (18). “Viewing children as agentic rather than needy and incompetent may be the first step in this transformation” of the child in the classroom, Sorin argues (18). I would extend Sorin’s comment to the child’s place in the world and the oppressive actions that must be performed within society in order to uphold the dated, exclusionary, and disempowering construct of the Romantic child.

The construct of the agentic child is one that respects the child’s knowledge of the world instead of denying it. Nickey Singer asserts that “books should be avenues that children and young adults have to openly discuss topics they see often on television and in other media” (Gopalakrishnan 87). She argues, “The least our children deserve, is a context for the events they witness around them….The usefulness of fiction in this process is that it can offer a ‘safe space’ for that discussion. Terrible events can be realistic but not real” (qtd. in Gopalakrishnan 86). Singer goes on to condemn silence and censorship in children’s literature saying, “If we say nothing about [acts of terror] to our young people it gives terror a kind of legitimacy, makes it ordinary, not something worthy enough to be remarked upon” (qtd. in Gopalakrishnan 87). Thus by protecting children from the world and isolating them from the tragic events that occur in it, adults are imbuing the world that surrounds them with a perpetual terror as norm, something that will be even more jarring for children who have otherwise been raised in isolation from it, believe it does not exist.

CCYA and Childhood

While Singer is technically discussing the kind of lived experiences of some children’s childhood that encompasses trauma—whether closely experienced or otherwise distantly witnessed—her ideas connect altogether with the child’s right to see.

As I addressed earlier this chapter, Mirzoeff describes the importance of seeing in relation to power, not only the right and power to see the representations in the world—to really see them as they are, in all of their constructed glory—but also the right to be seen as opposed to erased (15). This includes children’s rights to see the world around them that has otherwise been censored by adults in the service of protecting their construction

of a blind childhood innocence and even their rights to see themselves presented within the texts they read, validated in text and image in children’s literature. This is where the importance of the agentic child coalesces with the necessity of a visual culture analytic framework and a contextual graphic narratology for the use of critically analyzing

CCYA—particularly as contemporary CCYA authors are already creating comics that respect the child’s right to see.

Today’s CCYA have decided not to heed their mother’s warnings, choosing instead to step off the prescribed path and “ta[p] their childlike determination to play where they weren’t supposed to go” (Hajdu 14). Such comics transgressions occur through narrative tools of disruption and also through topics seemingly “inappropriate” for children, actively remodeling the agentic child by modeling actions for inquiry and engagement. In a way, by putting the comics image into its structural little boxes, and then allowing the narrative to break out of those boxes—to play with them, remold them, undermine their fixity, and emphasize their flexibility—these comics are communicating a possibility that the other restrictive boxes children see surrounding them in society are also transmutable barriers. By removing the inherent authority of the walls and concomitantly the assumed futility in fighting them, comics free young readers from the boxes of childhood that are often inextricable from picturebooks and other forms of children’s literature and challenge the presumed necessity of the adult chaperone, effectively uncloaking Little Red and giving her the tools to challenge the wolf instead of run from him.

Today’s comics for children and young adults are adding to the cultural evolution of children’s literature—from the texts written for children and young adults to the

professional communities analyzing those texts. This evolutionary moment is marked by an awareness of the necessity of looking backward as well as forward in order to grow

(Wannamaker). The field looks back in the way it returns to the original spirit and creativity of the emergence of the new medium; but it looks forward in the way that it is intertwined with the evolution of the way children are perceived and childhood is constructed. Comics filled with such innovative tools of disruption and culturally- complex storylines, such as El Deafo and This One Summer, are garnering the attention now not just of rebellious child readers but also of authoritative children’s literature associations such as the American Library Association in the collection of their own accolades such as the Newbery and Caldecott awards, respectively. This current trend in prizing suggests an acceptance in the zeitgeist of today’s children’s literature field of the way these texts are constructed and the image of the agentic child they subsequently construct.19

After enough time and distance had been placed between children’s comics and the Comics Code—and with the newer, scarier sensationalized digital realm taking the spot of the new Big Bad Wolf for young people—there came the possibility to reunite the estranged form and audience. Through the stellar works of CCYA renaissance pioneers like Gene Luen Yang, whose American Born Chinese effectively turned the tides for the place of comics in children’s literature with its numerous accolades, the chance for comics to be connected to children and still be a legitimate art form became more than just a possibility. In fact, the nature of children’s and young adult comics since American

19 More on this shift towards the agentic child and the progressive way children’s literature authors see and construct children in their texts is addressed in the conclusion. 77

Born Chinese is one based on a structure of irregularity, density, disruption, and the neo- baroque rhetoric20 that more closely mimics adult alternative comics than the history of children’s comics to date. The current movement of the comics cycle is much closer to its origins, picking up where children’s comics left off before being cut down by the Code.

Through their flagrant use of tools of disruption, their serious sociocultural commentary, and their ideological leanings, today’s comics for children and young adults share with their pre-code and underground comix predecessors “their earthiness, their skepticism toward authority, and the delight they took in freedom” (Hajdu 11). In this way, notable

CCYA are participating in very similar ways with the traditions of alternative comix of which Hatfield writes that shaped the comics field greatly (Alternative). In the origin story of comics, the medium was “infusing [the works and readers] with the spirit of adventure” (Hajdu 13). As Hajdu writes, “Working in a young field with few traditions or conventions and little supervision. . . talented artist-writers pushed comics forward by pulling them in every direction” (13-14).

This push and pull is reflective of the challenge, resistance, questioning, and reimagining that tools of disruption can foster in comics readers when they are used.

Tools of disruption provide the chance to challenge readers by interrupting the smooth transmission of a structurally obedient and, thus, supposedly invisible text. The reader’s possible inclination to resist such a fractured and conspicuous narrative is fertile ground for questions of the author’s why and how. Such interrogations into a text’s rhetorical

20 Groensteen describes the most recent comics cycle as this, explaining it in the following way: “[C]omic art values the possibility of [a neo-baroque] rhetorical display more highly than the former imperative of harmony, the classical ideal” (Comics 114). 78

construction and effect can reveal the subjective and goal-driven choices behind a text’s composition. Once the text is no longer a sacred, immutable source but a text object created by an author to convey a specific message—as opposed to the message—the reader can reimagine the possibility of alternative messages both in the text and the outside world. Children’s and young adult comics today remind readers “they are renegotiating a medium with a social history. . . and perhaps even that they, themselves, are a material reality” (Joseph 455).

Text Choice

Within my dissertation, I’ll be exploring several texts within two comics series: the first five volumes of the Lumberjanes series, with an emphasis on volumes one and two, and the March trilogy, with an emphasis on March: Book One. The books I have chosen for study meet several requirements in structure, critical content, and notable context. I based my initial text choice on the author/illustrator’s integration of tools of disruption within their work. Comics were chosen when their use of braiding, page composition, panel composition, style, and other graphic narrative elements in some way marked the comic as having an awareness of the visual tools of the form and utilizing those tools to emphasize the text as construct. In addition, these two series engage with critical theory and views of identity, power, and oppression in society. Race, gender, and sexuality are specifically taken up within the narratives in complex and engaging ways and, most importantly, in flexible and constructed ways. Ultimately, I chose these series for the way their form meets function in this critical exploration of complicated identities and ideologies.

Although perhaps not surprising based on my former choice criteria, both series also have in common a positive critical reception within the context of the separate comics and children’s/young adult literature communities. The works included in this study have one or more contributors who have been nominated for or won an Eisner

Award, the most prestigious award within the field of comics. Beyond being notable within the world of comics, the books explored here also received notable attention within the general world of children’s and young adult literature. Books and authors/illustrators chosen include winners and honorees from the following: the National

Book Award, the Printz Award, the Coretta Scott King Author Award, and the GLAAD

Media Award. Even beyond these prestigious accolades, the series and their authors have been recognized as quality literature for children and young adults by numerous programs and publications for educators, librarians, academics, and popular readers.

Incidentally, another defining quality of these text choices is that neither series would have received the approval of the Comics Code of 1954. If it were left up to the code authority, the popular and prestigious comics I explore in this dissertation would not have passed censors’ stringent tests to ensure that “violations of standards of good taste, which might tend toward corruption of the comic book as an instructive and wholesome form of entertainment, will be eliminated” (CMAA). Instead, these texts would have never seen the light of day (or would have been peddled only within specialized, underground markets). As such, these books would most likely have entirely missed their intended young audience—thus making the fact that they are both intended for children and young adults while also deemed by the Comics Code as inappropriate for that audience.

As an overview, here are some of the comics code rules the focus texts violate.21 I have denoted the elements directly present in the comics of my dissertation as bold/underlined for emphasis:

1. Lumberjanes:

o General Standards Part C:

§ (1) Profanity, obscenity, smut, vulgarity, or words or

symbols which have acquired undesirable meanings are

forbidden.

§ (3) Although slang and colloquialisms are acceptable,

excessive use should be discouraged and, wherever possible,

good grammar shall be employed.

o Marriage and Sex Standards:

§ (2) Illicit sex relations are neither to be hinted at nor

portrayed. Violent love scenes as well as sexual abnormalities

are unacceptable.

§ (3) Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable

behavior shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the

problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion.

21 I do acknowledge that I approached these code violations from the same ideological understandings that founded the 1950s making of the Comics Code itself. However, even though the language surrounding the code violations might have changed in contemporary institutional settings (i.e., referring to the presence of LGBTQ peoples as “sexual perversions”/“sexual abnormalities” (CMAA), the ethos of the code’s goal mimics contemporary concerns surrounding censorship in CCYA. Common complaints towards contemporary CCYA include “inappropriate for age group” and “homosexuality” (ALA). 81

§ (7) Sex perversion or any inference to same is strictly

forbidden.

2. March:

o General Standards Part A:

§ (1) Crimes shall never be presented in such a way as to create

sympathy for the criminal, to promote distrust of the forces

of law and justice, or to inspire others with a desire to

imitate criminals.

§ (3) Policemen, judges, Government officials and respected

institutions shall never be presented in such a way as to

create disrespect for established authority.

§ (6) In every instance good shall triumph over evil and the

criminal punished for his misdeeds

§ (7) Scenes of excessive violence shall be prohibited. Scenes of

brutal torture, excessive and unnecessary knife and gunplay,

physical agony, gory and gruesome crime shall be

eliminated.

§ (10) The crime of kidnapping shall never be portrayed in any

detail, nor shall any profit accrue to the abductor or kidnaper

[sic]. The criminal or the kidnaper [sic] must be punished

in every case.

o General Standards Part B:

§ (2) All scenes of horror, excessive bloodshed, gory or

gruesome crimes, depravity, lust, sadism, masochism shall not

be permitted.

§ (3) All lurid, unsavory, gruesome illustrations shall be

eliminated.

o Religion Standards:

§ (1) Ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is

never permissible.

o Marriage and Sex Standards:

§ (3) Respect for parents, the moral code, and for honorable

behavior shall be fostered. A sympathetic understanding of the

problems of love is not a license for morbid distortion.

I would like to also draw attention to the fact that Lewis, Aydin, and Powell’s nonfiction March trilogy overwhelmingly fails the Comics Code. In order to adhere to the

Code, the history would have to be rewritten with no “illegal” protests, no government violence in response to those protests, the racism and abuse would at least have to occur off-stage, and those perpetrators of racist violence would have to be punished. This kind of cleaned up narrative of the Civil Rights Movement specifically and U.S. History generally is very popular, particular in government institutions like schools, but is problematic and disingenuous. March, however, with its representation of police/government abuse, Lewis’s rejection of parental warnings to “stay out of trouble,” and the graphic images that detail the violence Civil Rights activists faced, emphatically opposes the ethos of the Code. And yet, the March series is overwhelmingly accepted as

prestigious literature not in spite of these elements but directly as a result of the text’s use of comics tools to weave them into a critical, crucial narrative.

Reflecting upon these texts with an awareness of the Comics Code speaks to the way these contemporary comics exist as antithetical to conservative notions of the

Comics Code: pictures and plots do not shy away from shock to protect some notion of constructed, privileged innocence; adults and representatives of institutional authority are frequently questioned, challenged, and/or rejected; and traditional “wholesome” morals and the hegemonic status quo do not reign supreme. Altogether, the Code, as comics writer Arnold Drake explains, “ ‘robbed the medium of the integrity it had and whatever purpose’ it had as ‘an escape hatch’ for young readers” (qtd. in Hajdu 306, emphasis added). Instead, CCYA authors today are revitalizing this initial tool of youth subculture and critical-cultural exploration. While Drake’s phrase dubbing comics as “an escape hatch” might be perceived as pejorative of the substance of comics, suggesting frivolity and fantasy, I argue that by challenging the Code’s restrictive rules, these unsanctioned youth comics instead are liberatory even some fifty years after the Code was instituted.

Through their complex constructions and critical content, contemporary CCYA do, in fact, provide an “escape hatch” from the strictures of the Code: an opening to release youths from the tiny boxes in which the neat, clean, code-approved comics imprisoned them, as these authors literally break up the comics boxes and figuratively shake up the narrative world.

Chapter 3: “Falling in Stepping out of Little Red Formation: (Re)writing Images of

Gender in Lumberjanes”

As a comic, Lumberjanes works explicitly to convey the questioning of the construction of the visual, the initial step in a critical visual literacy that ultimately leads to the uncovering of imbedded ideologies. The first tool in this process for Lumberjanes is in how it emphasizes an awareness of the visual over and above its simply being a visual text. There are two reasons this literary analysis chapter comes first in my dissertation: the first is to show how the visual culture analytic framework serves as an umbrella for contextual graphic narratology, emphasizing the way the comic as a visual text works before clarifying how a medium-specific analysis can expand the reading of it as a comic; the second is in how Lumberjanes, unlike March which I address in my next chapter, initially adheres to many expectations for comics for children and young adults.

In this chapter, I will begin by detailing the affordances of a visual culture framework and its analytic processes. This framework forms a fundamentally valuable methodology that coordinates with other medium-based methodologies (like graphic narratology) and ideologically-based theories (like queer theory) in order to analyze any image text. Since weaving a specific critical theory into the visual culture framework becomes important, as was discussed in chapter one, I will then discuss the foundations of a queer feminist theory that will be important to my analysis of Lumberjanes, drawing on Judith Butler’s concept of subversive repetition in performativity. Using these

resources, I perform a critical visual reading of Lumberjanes to show how the series plays with the reader’s experiences and expectations in order to lay the foundation for unexpected imagined alternatives. I close by discussing how Lumberjanes develops a poststructural ethos for the child reader in its approach to comics, gender, and power as

(de)constructable via the image. Ultimately, Lumberjanes encourages the child reader to question what they see and discourages them from following pre-constructed identity scripts.

Synopsis

Lumberjanes is a comics series marketed for children but written with an an all- ages audience in mind. The series was initially conceived of and created by the all-female collaborative of Noelle Stevenson, Grace Ellis, Brooke Allen, and Shannon Watters22.

Lumberjanes at its core is a camp story featuring a crew of female protagonists who share the same cabin. Mal, Molly, Jo, Ripley, and April are all members of the Roanoke cabin at Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s Camp for Hardcore Lady-

Types. However, instead of the plot revolving around common summer camp antics or relationships as in realistic fiction, the driving force of the narrative are the supernatural creatures and fantastic adventures the girls stumble upon in the woods surrounding camp.

From three-eyed foxes to velociraptors, the series thrills are unexpected and the mysteries are compounded with every issue, be it settling a sibling squabble between two Greek gods or chasing a spectacle-stealing tiny dinosaur through a time portal.

22 Major shifts in authorship occur after volume two, however I have chosen to privilege the initial creators in the main text of my chapter. 86

Grace Ellis, one of the writers of the series, explains that from the primary conceptualization of the project she wanted to write a comic “about girls” (“An

Evening”). Indeed, this comic features almost entirely a cast of girls/women with boys/men not even appearing until the fourth issue. This group of girls represents an inclusive array of identities. Jo, the semi-leader23, is a trans girl of color, illustrated in a way to suggest24 possibly South Asian or Middle Eastern descent. Ripley is also a girl of color with light brown skin, revealed in volume five to be Hispanic25 and biracial. Mal may also be read as a girl of color, most likely East Asian or Pacific Islander, with this denotation being most apparent in the physical characteristics of Brittney Williams and

Carolyn Nowak’s later illustrated issues. Mal is also in a same-gender26 interracial relationship with blonde-haired Molly—one of two white girls in the group, the other

23 The group does not have an explicit leader and each adventure makes the equality of the girls an important focus. However, if any character could be seen as the leader, Jo most strongly fits the role, explained by Ellis as a confident character modeled and named after Louisa May Alcott’s determined protagonist of the same name in Little Women. 24 I denote the racial makeup of these characters as “possibly” due to the visual style used, a simplistic cartoonistic/iconic style, that minimizes realistic details—something I briefly discuss later this chapter and at length in chapter four. 25 I chose Hispanic over Latinx to describe Ripley due to words spoken by her parents. While specific labels are never used to describe Ripley, her mother (who appears white with pale skin, freckles, and red hair) refers to her as “nena” while trying to comfort Ripley before dropping her off at camp. Similarly, her father (who has dark brown skin and at first glance might be read as black) kisses her and calls her “mija.” With these linguistic markers being the only demarcated evidence beyond skin color, I decided to go with the identity marker that more specifically ties to language. 26 I chose the phrase “same-gender relationship” over “lesbian” because no identifying label is ever used to describe Mal and Molly and no other plot point has been brought in that would suggest any specific reading of the two as identifying specifically as lesbian over queer, bisexual, pansexual, etc. I also chose “same-gender” as opposed to “same- sex” as there is no signifier within the text that would denote Mal or Molly’s specific sex; instead, adhering to the theoretical foundations of this chapter, the only thing that becomes readable through the comic is the gendered identity that the girls perform. 87

being red-haired April. Closing out the core group of girls is the slightly older cabin counselor, Jen, who is drawn to appear black.

Theoretical Foundations:

A Visual Culture Framework: The Analytic Processes

Visual culture provides certain tools that are important for understanding how the visual is employed for the construction of messages. When thinking of the many valuable tools of analysis in a visual culture framework, one important consideration is the way the implied viewer of the image conceptually processes the image being viewed. There are various ways to do so, from narratively to topographically to temporally, but of these ways the one I will be using most in my argument is the analytic symbolic process. Kress and van Leeuwen write that this process is “about what a participant means or is” with

“participant” referencing the individual pictorial component within the constructed image

(105, emphasis in text). There are two types of symbolic processes for conceptual representations and processing: the symbolic attributive and the symbolic suggestive.

These tools, along with embodied representations as described by Stuart Hall and compositional analysis discussed by Gilian Rose as well as Kress and van Leeuwen, make up the combination of visual culture methods through which I make sense of the workings within Lumberjanes.

The Symbolic Attributive

The first, symbolic attributive, involves two participants, “the participant whose meaning or identity is established in the relation, the Carrier, and the participant which represents the meaning or identity itself, the Symbolic Attribute” (Kress and van Leeuwen

105, emphasis in text). One example they use is an ambiguous image of a man staring at

mushrooms. The man himself is the Carrier while the mushrooms are the Attributes that

“establish his identity as an expert on fungi” (105). In order to utilize the symbolic attributive in my own life, I might advertise myself as an intellectual or scholar by photographing myself within a library, drawing the characteristics of academia from a stack of books or a study carrel placed in the image with me. In this case, I serve as the

Carrier of studiousness having drawn the meaning from the library paraphernalia as the

Attributes.

While all the examples Kress and van Leeuwen give include the two participants

(Carrier and Attribute) as being visible in the same image, I propose another way to understand this relationship of the symbolic attributive: the visual allusion, also understood as illustrated intertextuality. Visual allusions, like literary ones, are where there is an intertextual nod in some way to a previously constructed image text. An example of this would be when in American Born Chinese Gene Luen Yang draws an image of his character Chin-Kee dancing and singing “She bangs!” While the image itself focuses on Chin-Kee as Carrier, Yang assumes that his reader has seen images in the media of Chinese American William Hung on American Idol singing the aforementioned

Ricky Martin song. Although not visibly present in the panel, the alluded to image of

Hung serves as the Attribute, conveying the characteristics of stereotypical Asian

American representation as the butt of the joke through oppressive laughing-at (as opposed to laughing-with) or top-down humor the mainstream media directed at Hung.

By alluding to this image, Yang is using Hung as the Attribute to evoke the same ideas and feelings towards Chin-Kee that he and many of the Asian American community feels towards Hung. Thus, even though Hung dancing never appears in the same image as

Chin-Kee, the construction of Chin-Kee as Carrier and the objective of this symbolic attributive conceptual representation cannot work (at least not as intended) without the viewer having seen Hung and then calling up the mental image of him as Attribute.

The Symbolic Suggestive

The second, the symbolic suggestive, involves “only one participant, the Carrier, and in that case the symbolic meaning is established in another way” (Kress and van

Leeuwen 105, emphasis in text). Comparing this symbolic type to the former, “Symbolic

Suggestive processes represent meaning and identity as coming from within, as deriving from qualities of the Carrier themselves, whereas symbolic attributive processes represent meaning and identity as being conferred to the Carrier” (Kress and van Leeuwen 106).

Kress and van Leeuwen emphasize that “in this kind of image detail tends to be de- emphasized in favour of what could be called ‘mood’ or ‘atmosphere’ ” and as a result symbolic suggestive has a “genericity, their quality of depicting not a specific moment but a generalized essence” (106). The example Kress and van Leeuwen use is

Expressionist landscapes that emphasize the overall effect and symbolic meaning over and above the specific details of the image. This corresponds with Scott McCloud’s discussions of icons. McCloud defines an icon as “any image used to represent a person, place, thing, or idea” and acknowledges the similar definitional basis here to symbols, arguing this terminology is too “loaded” for him, but that “the sorts of images we usually call symbols are one category of icon…the images we use to represent concepts, ideas and philosophies” are another along with the “icons of language, science and communication...icons of the practical realm” (27). “Finally,” he continues, “the icons we call pictures [are] images designed to actually resemble their subjects. But as

resemblance varies, so does the level of iconic content, or to put it somewhat clumsily, some picture are just more iconic than others” (McCloud 27). He adds that “in pictures, however, meaning is fluid and variable according to appearance” (McCloud 28).

Following these threads, one could perceive any subject in an image that works individually to convey an inherent idea over and above specificity of details, intertextual connections, or reality to serve as this role of the symbolic suggestive. People analyzing comics or other visual media that depend upon icons thus locate the representative pictorial icon and understand from it as Carrier an “inherent” symbolic meaning. So these symbolic suggestive Carriers, these visual icons and symbols, become valuable tools for readers to locate and interpret. Perhaps we could consider a frequently used icon like the heart (i.e., <3) as a symbolic suggestive Carrier of such ideas as love, affection, fondness, etc. If so, then the inclusion of any of these icons in visual media becomes fertile ground for understanding the constructed and intended messages of the image text. Furthermore, the repeated appearance of the same iconic Carrier throughout the image text, as in the form of a visual motif—or, to use language specific to comics scholarship, braiding— emphasizes the foundational nature of its message to the rhetorical objectives of the text as a whole.

Embodied Representations

Stuart Hall explains representation as when authors “use some element to stand for or represent what we want to say, to express or communicate a thought, concept, idea or feeling” (4). He goes on to emphasize that the most important thing about representations is not from what they are constructed (in order to challenge the privileging of the linguistic mode as signifier) but in how they convey meaning: “They

construct meaning and transmit it. They signify. They do not have any clear meaning in themselves. Rather, they are the vehicles or media which carry meaning because they operate as symbols, which stand for or represent (i.e., symbolize) the meanings we wish to communicate” (Hall 5, emphasis in text). Hall gives an example of how the visualized embodied representation of individuals attending a football game—both in how they decorate their bodies (e.g., painted faces, jerseys, etc.) and in how they perform with their bodies (e.g., chanting, waving banners, etc.)—needs to be considered just like more traditional means of signification as inculcating their bodies into the act of representation, particularly as one entwined with culture and identity. “Representation, here, is closely tied up with both identity and knowledge. . . . Without these ‘signifying’ systems, we could not take on such identities (or indeed reject them) and consequently could not build up or sustain that common ‘life-world’ which we call a culture” (Hall 5). Connecting Hall with Kress and van Leeuwen, the embodied representation of a character in a visual narrative can serve as Carrier for the messages of culture and identity, and any other meanings the author wishes to convey.

Hall’s ideas here on representation, identity, and the construction of culture are pertinent for discussing the way individuals identify themselves as part of a specific cultural group through their embodiment (i.e., appearance and actions). This understanding of embodied representation ties closely to Butler’s explanation of performativity, as I will discuss later. The very same embodied representations explicated above by Hall regarding fans in the crowd of a football game could also be read with

Butler as performative of gendered practices and, thus, gendered identities. Given the sociocultural assumptions of sports as gendered masculine, Hall’s football fans are not

just representing their belonging to a particular sports group identity (say, a member of

Buckeye Nation as a fan of The Ohio State University football team), but are also performing practices that will emphasize their masculinity to a reader.

Authors of visual texts might employ these same means of embodied representations to inscribe cultural identity upon the bodies of the illustrated subjects in their texts. This could be done for various rhetorical objectives. The author could be attempting to imbue the subject or character with a particular cultural identity for narrative purposes, to characterize the individuals in the story. In Hall’s football example, this could work to show a character’s identification as a sporty, athletic, masculine person. However, she might also be intending this for rhetorical purposes, using this embodied representation for the ideological purpose of socializing the readers to approve of and subsequently take part in the cultural identity through reproducing the same embodied representation with their own bodies outside of the text. An author could do this by presenting the character with this particular embodied representation—say, the same aforementioned sporty person—in a positive light in the narrative, a character with whom the reader can and should empathize, or even in a specifically admirable light as the story’s protagonist and someone the reader would want to imitate.

In contrast, the author could be asking the reader to critique the cultural identity, undermining the embodied representation through narrative fissures that prompt the reader to question, what I will refer to here as a fissured embodied representation.

Perhaps such visual fractures and contradictions might be intended to lead readers to become more critical of essentialized cultural definitions as inextricably tied to embodied representations altogether. In Hall’s football example, this could work by contrasting the

masculine expectations of a person with a sporty/athletic embodied representation by presenting that character later as hyperfeminine. In this way, I argue that a fissured embodied representation works much like Butler’s subversive repetition, by playing on the gendered assumptions and expectations of a familiar embodied representation and flipping the script. In this chapter, I am most interested in how authors use the visual to construct these fissured embodied representations so that they might serve as subversive repetitions of gender performance, countering expectations and undermining the seemingly natural relationship with the visual, gender, sexuality, and identity.

Compositional Analysis

The last method of visual culture analysis I will explicate is a compositional analysis. Gilian Rose posits, “The modality most important to an image’s own effects, however, is often argued to be its compositionality” (28, emphasis in text). Here, the printed alphabetic, the visual pictorial imagistic, and the spatial layout of these prior components all come together to create the overall object and, consequently, the complex visual gestalt of the image text. Kress and van Leeuwen point out there are “three principles of composition” (177). The first is “information value,” or the meaning that can be derived from where on/in the visual text the individual pieces are positioned, as in top/bottom/left/right placement. The second is “salience,” or the way emphasis on specific components of the visual text is varied based on elements like color, size, contrast to other components, foreground/background/layered placement, etc. Finally, they explain the third, “framing,” as “[t]he presence or absence of framing devices. . .

[that] disconnects or connects elements of the image, signifying that they belong or do not belong together in some sense” (Kress and van Leeuwen 177).

Combining the explanations of Kress and van Leeuwen with that of Rose, and then filtering the mode-specific analytics of a visual culture framework through that of the medium-specific affordances of a contextual graphic narratology, we can see that a compositional analysis lines up nicely with several comics structural elements. For example, Kress and van Leeuwen’s three principles of composition mirror that of the aforementioned comics mise-en-scene within a specific panel or the mise-en-page that occurs when all the panels on a page (or on a double-page spread) are taken into consideration. In particular, the third principle of composition, framing, very clearly connects to the means of connecting and partitioning within comics: the panel.

A visual culture analytic framework requires an attentiveness to the various modes employed, the extended relationship of the visual components across the entirety of a narrative visual text as Groensteen argues braiding and other comics-specific elements may be understood through arthrology (Structure), the semiosis of materiality, and the even the role of textual components such as narrative breaks, framing devices, and peritext. Altogether, these mode-based elements of a visual cultural analysis lay a necessary foundation for a medium-specific graphic narratological analysis of comics.

Queer Feminist Theory

As discussed in chapter one, a visual culture analytic framework necessitates a companion theory for understanding how the images are used rhetorically to construct power. Due to both the visible textual content and stated authorial intent of the comic, I have chosen to contextualize my visual analysis with queer feminist theory. I understand this theoretical hybrid as being guided largely by the understanding of gender as constructed and performative that is posited by Judith Butler’s instantiation of queer

theory. Queer theory understands and accepts gender and sexuality as complicated, socially and individually defined, and, thus, definitely in flux. My visual culture/graphic narratology-informed reading of Lumberjanes as incorporating visual repetition as intertextuality along with structural tools of disruption to denote deviations and alterations of representations supports the theoretical foundation of queer theory’s understanding of fluid gender and sexuality. Furthermore, I am utilizing the queer theory objective that such a fluid definition allows individual agency to choose how to identify in regards to gender and sexuality to ground my discussion of Lumberjanes as a text that presumes (and prompts) the implied reader’s own agency to critique, create, and choose gendered scripts.

However, I am also tying my understanding of queer theory to the counter- patriarchy objectives of feminist theory as it seeks to make apparent the oppressive nature of masculinity while embracing femininity as a strength as opposed to a weakness while simultaneously refusing to prescribe any one way of being a woman. Furthermore, the feminist objectives of empowering all girls (inclusive of any girl who identifies as such, defined in any way she chooses to define it) and complicating the definitional parameters of girlhood (as is defined by the presence of all girls who position themselves as making up the intersectional definition of girlhood) lie at the core of both the critical theory I am using to understand Lumberjanes as well as, I argue, the rhetorical objectives of the series itself.

Performativity and Subversive Repetition

When representing a social construction such as gender, which is so visually based in the cultural consciousness as Butler explains, the portrayal of that construction

in a visual medium, such as a comic, forefronts appearance in its construction and in the reader’s awareness. Butler explains that “the view that gender is performative sought to show that what we take to be an internal essence of gender is manufactured through a sustained set of acts, posited through the gendered stylization of the body” (xv). Thus this gender performativity is one that is manifested in the visible, and as such visual media fuels its “repetition and ritual, which achieves its effects through its naturalization in the context of a body, understood, in part, as a culturally sustained temporal duration” (Butler xv).

However, performativity may instead be characterized as subversive repetition if it serves as an approximate representation with a crucial alteration within the performative. “Just as bodily surfaces are enacted as the natural, so these surfaces can become the site of a dissonant and denaturalized performance that reveals the performative status of the natural itself” (Butler 200). An example might include a person enacting femininity in many ways read socioculturally as feminine—wearing high heels and a dress, sporting long flowy hair, speaking with a soft, lilting voice—but with some characteristic that throws the rest of the feminine identity into stark contrast—such as a beard and mustache. Depending on the way it is integrated into the performative narrative, the subversive repetition may be used by an author/actor for ridicule or for renovation. “As the effects of a subtle and politically enforced performativity, gender is an ‘act,’ as it were, that is open to splittings, self-parody, self-criticism, and those hyperbolic exhibitions of ‘the natural’ that, in their very exaggeration, reveal its fundamentally phantasmatic status” (Butler 200). The purpose is to unsettle, to

disentangle characteristics—particularly the visual—from meaning in a way that liberates identity from a limited view of performativity.

Theory into Practice

Intertextuality and Performativity

Fracturing Intertextual Fairytale Narratives as the Symbolic Attribute

Despite sales numbers that prove the contrary, comics are often still perceived as boy books. Raina Telgemeier has for quite some time now reigned supreme with Smile,

Drama, Ghosts, and her graphic reinterpretation of The Baby Sitters’ Club ever-present at the top of best-seller lists (“Paperback”). Susana Polo argues that “the Times’ best seller list regularly featured books that aimed squarely at a young female and literary adult audience” serving as “incontrovertible evidence that a larger audience is there, just waiting to be catered to” as opposed to the “overwhelming assumption that comics should cater to its “ ‘core audience’. . . . young male adults interested in action-oriented power fantasies.” Even within my own classroom, as undergraduate students were asked to read several first volumes of popular comics series, students commented that

Lumberjanes was obviously a “girl comic.” Students demarcated it with the distinguishing signifier “girl” as opposed to the other superhero comics that were read and described solely as “comics” with the invisible implied “boy” serving as the comics norm.

When genres of children’s and young adult literature are discussed, people often gender adventure and superhero stories—the historical bedrock of comics—as appealing to boy readers and fairytales as appealing to girl readers. Given that Lumberjanes is a comic that does not fall into either the superhero or fairytale genre, the authors’ choice to

introduce the reader to the narrative world through visual allusions to a well-known fairytale becomes an important locus for interrogating meaning within the occurrences of intertextuality. The first issue of Lumberjanes begins with an allusion to the fairytale

“Little Red Riding Hood.” Visually, the first illustration has strong allusions to the tale. A little girl appears to be walking through the forest at night draped in a scarlet cloak.

Immediately, a reader who knows the fairy tale will recognize it and draw from it contextual information. This literary intertextuality becomes important to the rhetorical work of this visual text: playing on reader’s expectations of fairytale narratives, women’s passivity and vulnerability, and men’s activity and power.

Being a commonly (re)told tale historically and globally, “Little Red Riding

Hood”—or at least some instantiation of it—would most likely be familiar to the child reader of Lumberjanes. In fact, Leslee Farish Kuykendal and Brian W. Sturm point out that many schools in the U.S. emphasize folk tales and fairy tales in their curriculum

(38); thus, the visual tropes and ideological messages previously experienced in Little

Red (re)tellings shoud be easily accessible and capable of standing in intertextually as the

Attribute of the traditional fairy tale. As a result, the cloaked girl’s appearance on this first page positions her as the Carrier receiving the meaning provided by the red cloak as

“Little Red Riding Hood” Attribute: vulnerability, helplessness, danger, and, ultimately,

Little Red’s role as a “damsel in distress” who will most likely need to be saved by another participant (expectedly, a man). As Susan Brownmiller interprets the core moral of “Little Red Riding Hood,” “There are frightening male figures abroad in the woods— we call them wolves, among other names—and females are helpless before them. Better stick close to the path, better not be adventurous. If you are lucky, a good friendly male

may be able to save you from certain disaster” (qtd. in Tatar 8, emphasis in text). The cloaked figure is April—notably, the most visually feminine character in the troupe, as I will discuss in greater detail later.

The choice of “Little Red Riding Hood,” both generally as a fairy tale introduction and specifically for the individual tale’s history, is even more meaningful for the Lumberjanes series when the genre and tale’s role in cisgendered and heteronormative socialization is taken into consideration. “Literature in general, and fairy tales in particular, gender children” (Kuykendal and Sturm 38). Carrie Hintz and Eric L.

Tribunella discuss this genre as being used as a socializing heuristic for centuries particularly in how it presents gender and sexuality and rewards each example’s representation of that sociohistorical moment’s norms (126). “Little Red Riding Hood,” in particular, has been interpreted by scholars “in allegorical terms as depicting an eternal battle of the sexes” (Tatar 6). And while the story was “[o]nce a folktale of earthy humor and high melodrama, it was transformed into a heavy-handed narrative with a pedagogical agenda designed by adults” (Tatar 6). The lessons children can learn from

Little Red’s mistakes are those of obedience (to stay on the path), focus (not to get distracted), abstinence (not to give into temptation), and caution (to be wary of strangers).

Unfortunately, these lessons are learned in many versions of the tale, from Perrault to the

Grimm Brothers, “by making the heroine responsible for the violence to which she is subjected” (Tatar 6). This rationalization makes “Little Red Riding Hood” complicit in a long history of victim blaming that continues to haunt women27 even today in the forms

27 I want to acknowledge that women are not the only victims of rape or domestic abuse and are likewise not the only victims to be blamed for their own attack. However, women 100

of rape-culture fueled questions (e.g., “What was she wearing when she got raped?”) and dismissal of domestic abuse (e.g., “Why would she stay with him after he hit her?”).

Walking alone through a dark forest and terrified of the rustling leaves and snapping twigs, April appears vulnerable and isolated, at the mercy of whatever dangers lie in wait in the surrounding wood and beyond the turn of the page. Not only does her victimization seem imminent, but the culpability seems to be entirely hers for straying so deep into the forest alone.

The presentation of these images on the initial page of the comic, isolated from the rest of the narrative images, requires the reader to turn the page if she is to discover whether her reading of the symbolic attributive relationship is correct. The choice of presenting the symbolic attributive relationship between Carrier April and the Attribute

Little Red Riding Hood (via a scarlet cloak) prior to a revelatory page turn here is quite meaningful. The turn of the page in picturebooks, as Lawrence Sipe and Anne E.

Brightman write, has “ ‘complex semiotic significance’ which should not be neglected by teachers, researchers, or teacher researchers” (qtd. in Low 369). Sipe and Brightman further explain the value of the turn of the page writing, “Encouraging children to speculate about page breaks develops inference-making and positions them as co-authors, adding another element to their literary repertoires” (qtd. in Low 369). The Lumberjanes authors’ decision to structure the story with a page turn at this moment is even more important when David Low’s commentary on the parallel functions of the page turn, as

of all kinds are statistically more likely to be the victims in these kinds of attacks, and as such they are often raised with the explicit lessons that they must protect themselves from being attacked as opposed to adults directing lessons at boys not to be attackers. 101

Sipe and Brightman describe it, and the comics gutter, based on Low’s own graphic narratological analysis, as a place that “demands that readers produce inferences in order to construct meaning, and positions the reader in the role of co-author of the text” is taken into consideration (370). Based on the reader’s knowledge of the allusions, it would be easy to assume passivity and victimization will characterize the character’s experience on the following page. Indeed, the present images and the choice of where to break the story line with the “gutter” of the page turn almost beg this kind of reading prediction.

However, the turn of the page opens up to reveal via the full two page mise-en- page that April is not alone. Not only is she joined by the rest of the Lumberjanes crew, but the large panels at the bottom of both pages reveals that the Lumberjanes, being faced with danger, choose positions of fight instead of flight. While these bottom panels might seem to be further removed from the immediate transaction of the page-turn-as-gutter closure of which Low writes—as, presumably, the first panel in the top left corner of the first page should be the next read image—the all-at-once nature of the mise-en-page fails to police the linear reading of the narrative. As such, even though the effective panels of the scene are the bottom two of the multi-panel spread, the immediate contradictory role of the page turn is still effective. All the girls are posed in battle stances visually reminiscent of Charlie’s Angels, early fighting females in visual popular culture. With this new message of agency and ability that accompanies the Charlie’s Angels Attribute, this early visual allusion stands to position the Lumberjanes, the Carriers, as a powerful collective of women contrasting and contradicting the initial mock-intertextuality of the solo damsel-in-distress.

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Combining these two contradictory intertextual moments, the comic utilizes the symbolic attributive of the second visual allusion subvert the power of the former allusion. the more largely accepted (and often more promoted in socializing media to children) one closely connected to the fairy tale genres marketed at young children that paints female characters as vulnerable and ultimately non-agentic. Such luring the reader into false predictions based on the visual seems to be the modus operandi of

Lumberjanes; this is only the first example in the series of a long pattern of contradicting the very predictions the visual seems to prompt, playing on the reader’s socioculturally constructed assumptions before ultimately undermining them.

The intertextual fairy tale moment concludes with a bang while playing on the text of the traditional version. In the most known version of the tale, Little Red questions the awkward appearance of the Wolf-in-Grandma’s-Clothes. Perhaps setting up the

Lumberjanes series’ focus on seeing/questioning the visual, the only line of the older version quoted (somewhat) is that of Little Red saying, “My what big eyes28 you have, grandmother.” In the Lumberjanes version, however, the girls are attacked not by wolves but by three-eyed foxes. Mal, the planner of the group throughout the series, encourages the girls to get in “Little Red Formation” to fight off the foxes, but the rest of the girls launch into a hectic counterattack instead (much to Mal’s chagrin as she frustratingly exclaims in volume two, “Are we ever gonna actually do one of my plans or what”).

Ripley, the smallest of the Lumberjanes, discovers the foxes’ weakness: their third eye.

28 This chapter will continue discussing the importance of questioning the visual, but this early emphasis on the eyes as a symbol of seeing and critiquing the visual also supports the visual braiding surrounding eyes in the series, which I discuss in greater detail later in this chapter. 103

Leaping onto a fox’s back, she screams, “WHAT WACKED-UP EYES YOU

HAAAAAVE!” followed by, “All the better to punch you in! Yeah,”29 as Ripley punches the fox in the third eye. In the following succession of three panels, the fox “poofs” into nothingness following Ripley’s punch, further emphasizing the vulnerability of the eye— and, with it, the fragility of seeing.

Embodied Representation and the Subversive Repetition of a Princess: April

In addition to the role genre plays within the opening comic of the series, embodied representation also serves the development of subversive repetition to challenged gendered expectations and provide generative fissures within the narrative thread, reminding readers to be critical of visual constructions. A core objective of

Lumberjanes seems to be that of extricating girls from the social entanglement of the way they choose to visibly present themselves and the expectations society thrusts upon them based on that appearance. As such, I argue it is notable that April is the only Lumberjane whose representation becomes a locus of fissured embodiment and contradictory expectations due to her visual similitude to normative girlhood scripts. While the girls together represent an array of girlhoods, April is the character who most closely embodies a visual representation of traditional, “femme” femininity.

All of the Lumberjanes—Jo, Ripley, Mal, Molly, and April—combine to portray the diversity of girlhood. They are all strong, agentic, and supportive of one another, but their performativity of girlhood varies greatly. As a result, their collective presence serves

29 Lumberjanes is not actually paginated, so any of my references to the comics portion of the text will not have page numbers. The peritext, however, is paginated, so I will be including them there. 104

to diversify the potential embodied representations of girlhood. Girl-next-door, tomboy, youthful laissez-faire androgyny30, butch, and femme all appear across the main cast of

Lumberjanes. Even in the larger Lumberjanes universe (i.e., the other girls at camp) throughout future issues, the surrounding cast of girls appears equally varied and likewise supported and unquestioned for their individual representation. Furthermore, the skills each Lumberjane brings to the table is unique and often stands in contradiction to traditional, limited expectations for girls. Jo shows great knowledge with mathematics as she solves the challenge of the Fibonnaci sequence. Jen solves astronomy problems in volume two and laments not attending space camp instead after the girls get her wrapped up in another of the series’ many (mis)adventures. Mal constantly comes up with militaristic strategies for their missions (although, unfortunately, the girls in their eagerness rarely follow her instructions). The series seems to be suggesting that there are many ways to be a girl, and all are beautiful, unique, and perfect—as long as you stay true to who you are. In this way, the key to girlhood lies not in external presentation to and approval from society but in internal definition and devotion.

Despite this diversity of girlhood, all of the characters went through extensive visual alterations to Brooke Allen’s preliminary character sketches, coming out drastically different in the final product. All, that is, except April, the only one to appear in the final series entirely as she appeared in the rudimentary beginnings (Beware 127).

Of further note, April is drawn stylistically different from all of the other characters in the

30 This is my attempt to label Ripley. I think the very fact that I struggled to label her categorically shows the value in her indefinable nature to the authors’ intentions about gendered representation. 105

series. While every other character is presented in a more simplified and highly iconic style—namely, with a generalized facial characterization and small black dots for eyes—

April has the oversized eyes of a Disney princess. In fact, April bears striking resemblance to another Disney princess (whose name also has five letters, starts with an

A and ends with an l): Ariel, aka The Little Mermaid, the second fairytale heroine after

Little Red to be connected as Attribute to April. This correlation between April and Ariel is strengthened further in volume five when April’s life-long obsession with mermaids becomes a central plot point. Red bouffant bangs, prominent hair accessories, and oversized doe eyes create visual parallels between the princess and the Lumberjane.

Grace Ellis has even commented that April is meant to represent the “pinnacle of femininity.” I argue that the choice to stick with Allen’s original Disneyfied sketch of

April connects her to the monopoly of Disney princesses over the representation of femininity in girl culture. Furthermore, April’s drastic difference from the other

Lumberjanes’ embodiment is based on the need to fracture this visual representation in generative ways for the comics’ readership.

While April might largely present as visibly femme, Ellis also comments that she and her co-creators wanted to use this character to take the representation of femininity and “flip it on its head.” Nothing (other than her eyes) demarcates April as different, and largely she seems to fit into the expectations of her femme representation. However, in issue three, we are given a clue into something contradictory about April’s appearance: her super strength. When the Lumberjanes fall (or, actively jump) down a tunnel, they come across a giant talking statue. The statue informs them that “None may pass…unless they best me…in a feat of strength. One of you must best me at arm-wrestling for the

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privilege of passing through my doorway” (emphasis added). The talking statue dictates this all while performing a series of flexes evocative of hypermasculine bodybuilders like

Arnold Schwarzenegger. His words along with his embodiment suggest the “privileging” of physical strength and the coupling of that privilege with masculine bodies.

Much to everyone’s surprise (except for Jo, April’s oldest friend), April quickly replies, “Okay everybody, I got this. I’m a CHAMPION arm wrestler.” This elicits both concern from her own group (other than Jo) and ridicule from the statue. The talking statue bursts into laughter mocking April’s weak appearance saying, “Ho ho ho! You?

But you are the smallest of all your friends! Your arms are little twigs! I will snap your twig arms like twigs for your arrogance.” April responds to his commentary coolly with, “Dude, we get it. I have twig arms. We gonna do this or…” and “Yeah, yeah, let’s go, buster.” In the series of following panels, April proceeds to match and then best the talking statue, literally ripping off his arm and handing it back to him with a smile. In this way, April’s super strength does not just “flip [femininity] on its head” as Ellis hoped, it rips off the arms of oppressive, patriarchal masculinity and its devaluation of femininity and hands it back to them smiling.

In addition, April’s femme presentation stands as progressive for the way it is supportive of instead of competitive with the various possible girlhoods. Ellis describes her intentions for April as a character who is “really woke.” Perhaps this is an additional signification of April’s oversized eyes. While they do visually mark her as similar in appearance to Disney princesses, they also potentially suggest her existing as a femme feminist with (literal and figurative) open eyes to the world around her and the many ways to be. It might not seem the most progressive message to promote, but patriarchal

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forces often co-opt traditional femininity for criticism of those who do not conform to hegemonic normative gender binaries. Even Second Wave Feminism pushed women’s success in male-dominated realms in such a way that traditional femininity was often sacrificed for fear of its undermining feminist liberation (Baumgardner and Richards 59).

As such, April’s role in the story becomes equally important (but not more so) to those of her fellow Lumberjanes. Through her mutually supportive relationships with her friends, the antagonistic role of the traditionally femme to the plethora of feminine varieties is negated. Instead, there does not need to be a battle for the best of girlhood; they might all exist in a supportive sorority. Ultimately, the subversive repetition of femininity seen through April’s embodied representation reminds the reader that despite the cisgendered femme girl’s visual adherence to social expectations, there is still more than meets the eye.

Embodied Representation and Subversive Repetition of Hypermasculinity: Apollo

The character of Apollo serves as another fissured embodied representation.

When readers first encounter Apollo, he is disguised as the Mr. Theodore Tarquin

Reginald Lancelot Herman Crumpet’s Camp for Boys camp director. The motto of the camp, hanging under the sign and an etched drawing of an eye, is “Be watchful, be prepared,” continuing to remind the reader of the emphasis of the visual and critique it in the text. Jen, one of the girls’ camp counselors, marvels at the boys’ “orderly and obedient” nature, potentially making them prime targets for Apollo’s manipulation. One small “scouting lad,” Barney31, even remarks to April and Jo, “Something isn’t quite right

31 Barney will play a future crucial role in the series and its rhetorical objectives of questioning gender and sexuality constructs, thus making his early critique of Apollo here 108

around here, but I can’t quite put my finger on what. Just between you and me, I have this weird feeling about our camp director.”

Interrupting this thought, the camp director, Apollo in disguise, bursts through the door. His embodied representation serves as the Carrier of hypermasculinity. Erica

Scharrer describes “the hypermasculine male” as one who “eschews and even ridicules

‘soft-hearted’ emotions, celebrates and views as inevitable male physical aggression, blocks attempts by women or others to appeal to emotions by belittling sexual relations or women in general, and exhibits sensation-seeking behaviors that bring a welcome sense of vigor and thrill” (617). Quite accurately embodying this representation, Apollo’s physical appearance is that of rippling muscles, thick mustache and body hair, red face with veins protruding in rage, an arsenal of weapons visibly displayed upon his body, and even a black pirate eye patch (for good measure). Furthermore, whenever Apollo speaks, his words are printed in oversized, all-caps letters, emphasizing a booming, aggressive voice.

Apollo’s embodied representation evokes the same hypermasculine iconography that surrounds the “macho man” and the Hollywood celebrities adorned with the title.

The camp director even bears a striking resemblance to man’s man Burt Reynolds.

Reynolds, who Lindsey J. Meân describes as the “quintessential heterosexual male success,” not only serves as a visible icon for hypermasculinity but has throughout his career served the hypermasculine objectives of “re/produc[ing] hegemonically gendered

even more important. Barney later becomes a key character in the series as he starts hanging out with the Lumberjanes more. He eventually becomes the catalyst in the story that allows readers to learn that Jo is trans as she comforts Barney by empathizing with his feelings of not belonging in the boys’ camp. 109

discourses: constructing and policing masculinity; ‘othering’ homosexuality; and framing femininity” (152). With his masculine heyday being the 1970s, Reynolds might seem like a dated reference for a 21st century comic for young people32. However, this allusion does not come off as farfetched when compared to the inclusion of the Charlie’s Angels allusion earlier in the first issue or the countless number of historical intertextual moments from specifically naming figures like Bessie Coleman and bell hooks to visually alluding to Rosie the Riveter and Washington Crossing the Delaware.

In addition, Burt Reynolds’s 2006 appearance as the de facto leader of the Miller

Light commercials of the “Men of the Square Table”—an allusion in itself to the great patriarchal-type33 King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table, but with the round table’s emphasis on equality and inclusion replaced with the more masculine hard edges of the square one—resuscitated his representation of the macho man for a 21st century audience. The Miller Light ads feature an array of “manly men” (professional wrestler

Triple H, professional bull rider Ty Murray, professional football player Jerome “The

Bus” Bettis, etc.) with Reynolds most often directing the group or making the final decision on rules (Bosman). In addition to selling beer, the commercials serve to create the “ ‘Man Laws,’ the rules by which men should ideally govern themselves” (Bosman).

Debates over the rules include misogynistic and homophobic edicts that underscore

Meân’s aforementioned explanation of hypermasculine objectives like “you poke it, you own it,” “no baking on game days,” and a “touch bottoms” rule about which part of the

32 While the creators of Lumberjanes have frequently referenced the text as being intended for “all ages” and not just children, the title itself is often treating in marketing and awarding as solely a comic for children and young adults. 33 An archetype of the patriarchy 110

beer bottle to clink while toasting where Murray adds disgustedly, “No thanks,

Hollywood, I ain’t into that” (Claymore, “You”; MLMRodneyBlu; Claymore,

“Toasting”).

Altogether, Reynolds and the other popular figures of his ilk, easily serve as

Attributes to pass their hypermasculinity on to Apollo via such similar embodied representation of hypermasculine drag. Disregard for domesticity and disrespect for others mark his actions as he stomps in with mud-covered boots ignoring the “Please Be

Neat & Wipe Your Feet!” sign the scouting lads have posted on the door. He immediately begins gendering and critiquing the boys’ actions as he yells, “I THOUGHT

I HEARD A TEA KETTLE. PATHETIC,” and “COOKIES ARE FOR THE WEAK.

REAL MEN SHOULD BE SPLITTING WOOD AND SMOKING PIPES.” He blusters through the cabin, calling the girls stupid and slapping cookie trays out of the boys’ hands, before he exits in disgust—but not before bolstering his hypermasculinity by screaming, “I AM GOING TO CATCH A FISH BY WRESTLING IT AWAY FROM A

BEAR”—a bear that could very well end up as a rug adorning his floor much like that in the (in)famous 1972 Cosmopolitan Burt Reynolds centerfold.

In so many ways, Apollo as the camp director seems to embody the rules of hypermasculinity that might be written down in Miller Lite’s Man Laws. His policing of the scouting lads’ behavior suggests the same masculine fragility apparent in the Miller

Lite advertising team’s intentions behind their campaign. Deb Boyda, Miller Lite’s in- house advertising lead, expressed concern that “in so many ways, male culture and beer culture was going away” (Howard). This objective positions the “Men of the Square

Table” advertisements as a Hail Mary pass with Reynolds as the tried and true

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quarterback—reminiscent of both his role as quarterback Paul “Wrecking” Crew in the

1974 The Longest Yard as well as Coach Nate Scarborough in the 2005 Adam Sandler remake—hoping to save masculinity against the onslaught of a contemporary feminization of the market and visual media. As Alex Bogusky, principle creative officer for Crispin Porter & Bogusky, the advertising agency responsible for the “Men of the

Square Table” campaign, explains, “Guys are really confused about how to behave. . . . A lot of unspoken rules are being broken, and guys are lost. Our research showed us that guys in bars are grasping for the right thing to do, the right way to act” (Howard).

Considering that each volume of Lumberjanes is set up peritextually as a handbook on how to be a Lumberjane (and the series as a whole is set up in contrast to the inflexibility of rules of being, as will be discussed later this chapter), drawing the antagonist Apollo as the Carrier of Attributes of fixed “Man Laws” throws the rigidity of gender rules into relief against the girls’ rejection of them.

This macho man embodiment, however, is very different from Apollo’s natural form, and thus the authors further imbue him with the necessary fissures for the readers to critique. When Apollo’s sister, Artemis (who has been pretending to be fellow

Lumberjane Diane) reveals her back story, Apollo is presented in an extradiegetic visual for the reader. Perched upon a throne and cloaked in Grecian garb, Apollo appears young, thin, and androgynous, also showing a striking resemblance to Jo. Perhaps this is further reason why earlier in the volume both the Bear Woman and Artemis confuse Jo for being

Apollo. Later in the diegetic narrative, Apollo’s true form is revealed during an argument with Artemis. After she pushes him, he “poofs” to his original size—smaller physically

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than Artemis despite their being twins—and the two proceed to engage in a slap fight, an often stereotypically feminized version of emasculated and ineffective fighting.

While Apollo represents the kind of constructed gendered performativity that individuals use to tap into the privileges and power of masculine discourses, many other characters in the series serve as fissured embodied representations to encourage readers not to be fooled by the visual or make assumptions based on stereotypes and visible representations. One of the many humorous visual contradictions is the “hipster yetis.”

Visibly the yetis are physically impending. They share the same burly bodily structure as

Apollo’s hypermasculine presentation, complete with handlebar mustaches and chest tattoos. However, their actions when surprised or not under known surveillance by the outside world is that more akin to stereotypically feminine behavior, not the expected brutal (read: masculine) violence expected of such a “monster.” When the Lumberjanes stumble upon the first yeti, she34 is leisurely picking blueberries. In the central-most panel of the page, the yeti and the Lumberjanes spot each other and share mutual shrieks of fear at one another, visually set up in the panel in relation to one another as their facial expressions and body poses are mirror images. After another panel that slows the narrative and provides her a moment to collect herself and present herself as is expected, the yeti roars ferociously and scares off the Lumberjanes.

However, when the yetis are once again caught off guard during their mercenary patrol duties, their actions—and their sociolinguistic markers—stand in contrast to the expectations of a yeti. The yetis present visibly as the ferocious monsters they were hired

34 I’ve chosen the feminine pronoun here because of my argument of the central feminized identities of the yetis in contrast with their masculine appearances. 113

to be; however, their linguistic markers are those of teen girls. For example, the same yeti that spotted the girls earlier remarks, “I’m telling you, humans are SO gross. They almost

TOUCHED me,” to which her friend responds with a simple “Ugh.” Sociolinguistic studies have “found that ‘so’ was the predominant amplifier among [teen] girls” (Murphy

126). In addition to the use of “so” as an amplifier, the yetis’ speech is marked by stereotypically gendered commentary of disgust and fear, with an “It’s the humans! Ew ew ew! Squish ‘em!” following the earlier girlish shriek. But in case the yetis’ language doesn’t contrast their masculine appearance clearly enough, one is demarcated with the feminine name of “Janice.”

Many elements within Lumberjanes are intended to disorient the reader by subverting their expectations in various ways, from the mildly unexpected to the fantastically shocking. However, I believe it is important to note that amidst all of the supernatural, the queer representations in the text are never utilized for this act. The identities, representations, acts, and scripts most often positioned as expected social norms (e.g. fairytale scripts, cisgendered femininity, hypermasculinity, etc.) are the ones fractured by subversive repetition. In contrast, the recognition of Jo as trans and the budding same-gendered attraction between Mal and Molly appear in the narrative without any of the typical outing-fanfare of the children’s or young adult LGBTQ narrative

(Crisp). It is only that which is taken for granted in U.S. sociocultural expectation that is revealed as constructed, undermining the invisible ideological basis of its assumed inherent naturalness.

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Braiding the Symbolic Suggestive: The Eye

The only thing remaining following this blow is a golden amulet that we later learn is Apollo’s Golden Eye. The eye becomes an icon in Lumberjanes, acting as the

Symbolic Suggestive as it signals the primacy of the visual to the reader along with many other critical messages of questioning that which we see and complicating our understanding of how visuals communicate to us. This occurs mostly through the presence of a “third eye” on the various monsters the Lumberjanes encounter and the many other appearances of Apollo’s “Golden Eye.” In the comics medium, this repetition of a visual element that occurs multiple times throughout the narrative, highlighting its importance thematically and symbolically to the text, serves as a visual motif and is referred to as braiding in the structural language of comics. This golden amulet serves as a strong, tangible beginning for the eye braiding that will continue throughout the series.35 Coupled with the opening allusion to “Little Red Riding Hood,” the first eight pages of the entire series spend a significant time setting up the primacy of the visual, the practice of not taking for granted that which we see, and the pertinence of questioning the visual.

The meaning behind the eye braiding is continued throughout the series in connection to the objects36 and objectives of their quests, each bringing in other icons of

35 At least through a significant portion of the currently released series, especially through volume 4. Starting with volume 5, the farthest I have read for the purposes of this dissertation, fewer instances of this eye/seeing braiding occur. 36 This actually continues in volume 3, Lumberjanes: A Terrible Plan, with another icon of visuality. The Bear Woman/Former Counselor has her glasses stolen by a tiny dinosaur. Mal and Molly accidentally follow her down the outhouse portal into a Jurassic world where they have to help the Bear Woman retrieve her glasses if they ever hope to 115

visuality that likewise serve the same rhetorical objective of the eye braiding. In the first volume, Jo, one of the members of the group, pockets the golden eye of Apollo when she sees it remaining behind after the fox attack. Her possession of this object marks the group as targets for the many three-eyed monsters in the forest, the avoidance of which leads the girls into a secret underground tunnel. Inside the tunnel, the girls face a number of adventures—from battling living statues to solving Fibonacci sequences—and conclude with a task that involves looking beyond the surface: anagrams. This final challenge of solving the anagrams on the wall leads Molly, who was just feeling out of place and confessing to Mal, “I don’t even know why I’m here” to provide the solution to the problem based on her ability to look at the writing on the wall and see more than is visibly there. She even starts her explanation of anagrams to Jo by saying, “Yeah, don’t you see it?” (emphasis added). Molly is the only one who is capable of rearranging the letters in her mind and overcoming the confusing nature of the letters’ jumbled appearance in order to see the reorganized solution to their problem. Immediately Molly has an epiphany about their earlier warning of, “Beware the holy kitten” and rearranges it to reveal the solution: “In the tower by the lake.” Quite appropriately for the series’ emphasis on the visual, the tower by the lake happens to be a lighthouse, a tool used to provide visibility for sailors in dangerous travel situations. The importance of this inclusion, easily perceived as another potential Symbolic Suggestive icon, could be read as the suggestion that these books themselves are serving as lighthouses, hoping to guide

return home. For the sake of time and space in this paper, I choose to not address this icon in detail. 116

young readers through the dangerous and obfuscating visually constructed world surrounding them.

The golden eye itself does not only serve the eye braiding but also represents the manipulative potential of the visual and the power it has over people. As we learn in

Volume Two, Apollo has been using his golden eyes to manipulate the monsters and members of the neighboring boys’ camp. When Apollo wishes to tap into his control of the boys, the golden eyes they use to secure their scarves begin to glow and the boys become violent pawns for his bidding. Signifying their loss of control, the boys’ eyes shift from the simplified cartoonistic black dots that are used for the majority of the characters’ eyes in the series to large, white, vacant holes37. In this way, the symbol of the manipulative power of the visual—the golden eye—blinds the boys from critical judgment and makes them subservient and violent.

Poststructural Ethos through Compositional Graphic Tools of Disruption

Layering/Overwriting within the Text

Lumberjanes uses many Visual Culture heuristics in order to explicitly picture and present a questioning of the constructs of society, from visual allusions and iconic braiding to fissured embodied representations. However, the text goes beyond this in the way it utilizes its overall visual composition in order to suggest an understanding of texts as constructed, an awareness of the fallibility of texts, and the capability of the young reader to be agentic in rewriting the text herself. The Lumberjanes characters help

37 At least once, Mal’s eyes are also presented in this form. This happens when she is terrified, suggesting that the vacant eyes signify more specifically a loss of control and inability to see the world critically as a result of whatever overpowering agent—be that Apollo’s mind control of the scouting lads or terror as an inhibiting agent for Mal. 117

develop the young reader’s agency by serving as models of agentic questioning and critical engagement with texts and representations in the diegetic narrative. But this is largely done in the extradiegetic realm of the narrative, and particularly in how the compositional elements of the text employ the mimetic effect. Laura U. Marks describes the mimetic effect as a “ ‘radical formalism,’ which pays such close attention to the form—or composition—of an image that it goes beyond representation and towards ‘a trace of an originary event’ ” (qtd. in Rose 75). Thus as the visual text’s construction hints at a reality, the trace of the real hand that constructed the image, then the mimetic effect created by such techniques seemingly erases some of the boundary between the text and the real world. This is also what Kress and van Leeuwen highlight as they describe the role of the materiality of the text in a compositional analysis, including an awareness in analysis of the sociohistorical and cultural importance of the actual medium used to construct the text, the genres with which the text engages, and the acts of production and consumption relative to the text (175-179).

In Lumberjanes, the most crucial locus for compositional analysis that fulfills these objectives of critical literacy and agentic positioning is the peritextual frame. Mike

Cadden explains that “[t]he peritext is a good example of an aspect of narrative theory of special interest to those who study children’s literature exactly because it has so much to do with assumptions about the implied reader, itself a central concern in children’s literature” (viii, emphasis in text). Furthermore, he argues “a playful peritext” as “the measure of what the author and the publisher in combination believe to be true about the audience(s) of a children’s book” (ix) Lumberjanes begins and ends each volume and issue with peritext that sets up the book the audience is reading as being the official

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Lumberjanes Field Manual. The special Lumberjanes To the Max Edition even alters the materiality of the physical object to more closely resemble a scouting book. This version has a thick, textured-fabric, off-white hardcover with khaki green imprinted lettering

[Figure 7]. Regardless of this special edition, in all versions and volumes of Lumberjanes, the copyright page, title page, preface (a changing “Message from the Lumberjanes High

Council” in each volume), and chapter/issue introductions are all written to convey the possibility that the comic has been inserted into the pages of the actual handbook itself.

Of importance to my compositional analysis of this peritext is the way the authors use the handbook as a framing device separate from the comics narrative upon which they construct the mimetic effect of the girls-as-agentic-authors who alter said text as well as the contrast of the prescriptive formal handbook genre with the girls’ embodied representations as contrarily variable and descriptive. Thus the inclusion of this peritext as it contrasts with the interior comics narrative and provides moments of critical literacy and engaged, agentic interactions speaks to the authors’ beliefs that this is precisely the kind of thing the implied young readers are quite capable of doing.

The first suggestion that the text is constructed, fallible, and can thus be altered comes on the preface page. Here, in every volume, is a reprinting of “The Lumberjanes

Pledge” [Figure 8]. Similar to that of the Girl Scout promise and law, the Lumberjanes

Pledge encourages bravery, strength, community, honesty, and service. Quite poignantly, the sixth and seventh lines in the pledge serve as a foundation for the visual ethos of the

Lumberjanes text: critical literacy. These lines state that the Lumberjanes swear “to pay attention and question/the world around me” (4). Following this ethos, only a few lines later there is a clear alteration to the text. While the pledge is printed in italicized font to

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suggest a printed, formal text, the tenth line of the pledge has been altered. In what appears to be an extradiegetic alteration, the tenth line has been scratched out with thick, black, uneven lines that mimic that of a sharpie. To the right of this line in the same apparent medium and in a font that suggests the mimetic presence of the hand through handwriting has been added the following: “Then there’s a line about god, or whatever”

(4). This font signifying individual choice and alteration is continued later in the first issue when Jo recites the pledge for their camp counselor Rosie.

This is not the only time the girls have altered the text and the space around them.

On the title page the name of the camp has been altered in the very same fashion, with what is clearly intended to be “Miss Qiunzella Thiskwin Penniquiqul Thistle Crumpet’s

Camp for Girls” scratched out and alternatively titled “Camp for Hardcore Lady-Types”

(3). However, this act of subversion is not to be overlooked or underestimated as small or individualistic. Several pages after the Lumberjanes have battled the three-eyed foxes, they return to camp. In a half-page panel, the reader is positioned looking up at the camp entrance sign. The sign is a tall wooden entryway, adorned with floral flourishes and dainty script. Yet what would have been the original name of the camp, that same title that was scratched out and altered in the handbook, has been physically altered in real life

(or, at least the diegetic narrative). Over the top of the carved script “Girls” is a wooden plaque. This plaque is of a different color wood, further accentuating its ex post facto addition. The plaque has been carved with more simplistic (and less gendered) lettering to say “Hardcore Lady Types” and crudely nailed into the original at an angle. In the same alternate wood coloring, a sign hangs from the main entrance with the same lettering stating the camp motto: “FRIENDSHIP to the MAX!”

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It is not likely to assume that the adults running the camp would be unaware of this alteration to the original sign. Altogether, these moments of physical overwriting of their texts and surroundings suggests adult acceptability in this environment of the girls as agentic cowriters. The Lumberjanes face fixed texts that literally tell a girl how to be in the world (such as the Lumberjane Manual), but they also face the figurative social texts that prescribe what it means to be a girl in society. When the girls find the messages they are receiving to be dated or unacceptable, they alter them to better reflect who they are and their own construction of their lives vs. their pre-constructed surroundings (both the explicitly rule-dictating handbook and the implicitly rule-expecting world in which they live).

Layering/Overwriting within the Text

Throughout the series, the girls actively question and reject the prescribed structures of society. The fallibility of the text to speak to their real lives comes up explicitly in the diegetic narrative in addition to the peritext. As the girls choose to go further into the mysterious tunnel in issue three, Mal remarks, “I’m pretty sure there wasn’t a chapter in the Lumberjanes handbook about stuff like this.” Indeed, the handbook seems quite incapable of preparing them for the “real” world—real here, of course, being their world filled with fantastic, supernatural creatures. But even as the handbook seems inadequate at preparing them for their real-world experiences, the girls also reject some of its dictates. In addition to Mal’s critiquing the ability of the text to inform and the above discussed rewriting of the text to better fit their world, the girls directly reject its rules in other places. The most central rejection in the text related to the construction of girlhood is that related to the peritextual handbook’s dictates. Unlike the

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chapter/issue introductions that change and provide a different page from the handbook related in some way to the coming comics chapter, the peritextual conclusion of each chapter/issue remains the same. This page is always one that focuses entirely on the proper way to wear the Lumberjanes uniform. Emphases on this page are that of conformity and uniformity, particularly of the “selfishness of a few individuals” who might choose not to adhere to these dictates. The directions for appearance include wearing a skirt of appropriate length for “height and build,” wearing “shoes and stockings

[that] are in keep[ing with the]38 uniform,” “necklaces, bracelets, or other jewelry do not belong with a Lumberjane uniform,” and always wearing the beret and keeping one’s hair

“neat and kept in place with an insonspicuous39 [sic] clip or ribbon.”

Notably, the girls never appear in uniform in the diegetic narrative of the text.

Only Jen, the Roanoke cabin counselor overly concerned with the rules—and who bears a striking resemblance textually to the superego role of the authoritative fish in The Cat in the Hat as she constantly reminds the girls of their breaking the rules and the disastrous

(albeit never realized) effects of their actions—ever wears the uniform. The girls appear only once in the series wearing the uniform. When Jo recites the Lumberjane pledge, the

38 This might say “in keeping with the,” but the pictures that have been taped over the text obfuscate it in a way that makes knowing that is what is said for certain impossible and thus meaning the reader would have to rely on assumptions and interpretations on what limited bit is visible. This is very fitting with the overall ethos of the text and something I address for its further importance shortly. 39 It is possible that this is just a typo; then again, this typo is continued in every single volume, all of which are reprints of the original issues. Plenty of time would have been available to find this mistake, particularly as the makers would have to continue revisiting this page in order to add the new pictures to the closing peritext of each chapter. Alternatively, I think it is possible to consider—regardless of the original intentionality or accidental nature of this—that it was kept in in order to continue undermining the script of what it means to present as a girl, to further underscore the fallibility of the text. 122

girls all appear in a panel clearly not realistically following the prior diegetic narrative. In the pledge where Jo agrees to recite the pledge, all of the girls are standing inside Rosie’s office having just been marched in for breaking eight different camp rules. The girls all appear wearing the iconic outfits they don in every issue. However, the next page and panel accompanying Jo’s recitation show each of the girls standing outside in front of a backdrop of pines wearing the Lumberjanes uniform. The edges of the illustration are faded and foggy, possibly attempting a similar cloudiness to the edge of the panel that is used in various visual media to denote this portion of the story occurring outside of reality, such as a dream or mental projection. While the girls are wearing clearly recognizable Lumberjane uniforms, each uniform is altered to reflect the individual girl’s personality and how she presents herself and her idea of girlhood to the everyday world.

The suggested image of the “ideal Lumberjane” appears on the preface page accompanying the Lumberjane pledge. Only Jo appears to be wearing a uniform closely adhering to the rules of the manual, further emphasizing along with many other moments in the series (including the fact that only Jo is reciting the pledge) that Jo is, as Ellis has commented, the “leader” of the group. Both Molly and April are wearing relatively close representations to the stated rules of the uniform, but their alterations of the basics and additional accessories make them stand out from the rules. Molly’s uniform is almost spot-on, but she has replaced the standard green beret with a definitely not

“insonspicuous” Davy Crockett raccoon40 hat. April’s uniform has added femme

40 Note that I said “raccoon” and not “coon skin,” the more vernacular and common way of referencing this accessory, as the hat later turns out to be her living pet Bubbles in Volume 2, so no animals were harmed in the embodied representation of her wilderness girl identity. 123

flourishes, with the simplistic pencil skirt altered to have pleats, the top including puffy shoulders, and her wearing noticeable drop earrings, with jewelry forbidden by the dress code. Mal and Ripley both have traded out the dictated skirt for shorts instead. Mal, like

April, has added jewelry to her uniform, and both Mal and Ripley sport more noticeably alternative hairstyles with part of Mal’s head being shaved and part of Ripley’s hair being dyed blue. The girls here show their respect of the Lumberjanes pledge, standing along with Jo, left41 hand over their hearts, but do not follow the dictates of performative dress, choosing instead to emphasize supportive acceptance of individualistic disunity in their community. This image, standing in contradiction to the peritext, suggests the ideological pulse of the piece is that girlhood should be approached as variously descriptive instead of singularly prescriptive. Such an ideology matches Roberta Seelinger Trites’s explanation of the objectives of feminism:

A major goal of feminism is to support women’s choices, but another that

is equally important is to foster societal respect for those choices. And

since childhood is the time in our lives when our options seem most

unlimited, it is a time when respect for choices about self and about others

can have serious import. Because feminism and childhood are both

41 I think the choice to illustrate the pledge as involving the girls’ left hand over their heart as opposed to the more commonly known U.S. tradition of the right hand over the heart that is associated with the Pledge of Allegiance is really important to a critical visual reading of this text and the potential allusions it has to pre-pledge oath practices with Marxist roots in U.S. labor union developments as well as a variety of other valuable comments on the way it opens up a culturally sacred and fixed text like the Pledge of Allegiance to an awareness of sociohistorical, contextual construction and alteration. I believe this is a fruitful thread to explore to greater extent at a later date. 124

imbued with issues of freedom and choice, they complement each other

well. (2)

Lastly, the peritext serves another final role to suggest the criticism of the text and the agency of the girls. The aforementioned final page of each issue—the “uniform” page—is another example of the traditional text being altered. As mentioned before, the page itself creates the illusion that the book the reader is holding is actually the official

Lumberjanes handbook. However, the official text is mostly obscured by Polaroid photos of the girls’ adventures affixed into the handbook with tape. The cartoon-represented medium of Polaroid photography adds immediacy to the act and removes from the equation of production another necessary authority as the girls would not need to bring the film to another person or location in order to get it processed. Instead, the girls could be entirely in control of its production. Like the other peritextual sections, the presence of the girls’ hands is visible in the captioning of each of the photographs. As opposed to assuming that the pictures are recaps provided by an omniscient external presence, these pictures can be located as having been placed in the text by the girls themselves. For example, in the peritext of issue one, the polaroid of Jen is captioned as “Jenny, our cabin leader!” (29, emphasis added). The “our” positions the girls as the authorial hand behind the alteration of the peritext. Finally, the compositional layering of the pictures over the top of the handbook with tape suggests a kind of rudimentary alteration of the sacred text into the profane. Instead of taking the word of the handbook as the hallowed Word of how to be, they placed reproductions of themselves into the text. The girls present themselves as agentic in writing their own words and their own world.

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Altogether, these examples of taking the text and making it their own suggest that the female readers, like the girls in the text, can alter the script they are told to live by, making it their own. These readers are provided with a modeling of questioning what they see and the texts they read, including models of girls enacting agency over and above the actual prescribed texts and cultural scripts of girlhood. Ultimately, by utilizing this visual text that visibly shows traces of altering the traditional construction of girlhood (something that is itself often constructed and inculcated visually in society), the text suggests that the girls reading this text can reconstruct traditional texts in their own lives. Girlhood does not have to fit into a written, traditional ideal of girlhood. Each girl can rewrite girlhood as she sees fit. Perhaps this is why the peritext itself asks the female reader to induct herself into the Lumberjanes tribe symbolically. On the copyright page is a place for the reader to fill in her name. The spaces for completion include “Name,”

“Troop,” and “Date Invested” (2). This can be perceived as a call to action, a moment where the reader is being asked to pick up her own writing device and alter the text in front of her. It might be a small move to be asked to write one’s name in a book, but it is a strong first step to placing oneself into the world symbolically. Furthermore, acknowledging the date one is “invested” is important. The date all girls are “invested” into the conversation of girlhood is the day they are born, perhaps even earlier as the doctor reading the sonogram announces “it’s a girl” and the unborn child is symbolically inducted in the “womb to tomb” gendering of kids that will bombard her personally at birth with the flourishes of “relentless color coding of babies” (Orenstein 183, 2). But the date a girl chooses to become invested in the conversation of girlhood, the day she chooses to not be conscribed by what has been written before about girls but to write her

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own definition is an important move towards agency and independence, something our society provides in very small doses for children and females alike. Thus a child’s choice to read this book, to answer the call to action from the Lumberjanes, and to take up the pen to write herself into the ever-evolving book of girlhood is a date of investment indeed.

Texts that promote normative ideologies, whatever they might be, try not to provide breaks or moments that can be read counter. They try to reinscribe the norm and erase the presence of their ideology as if it merely is, not as if it is only a possibility. The infallible and monolithic nature of these texts is forefronted in order to discourage the reader’s critical engagement and potential disagreement with the texts’ philosophies.

Lumberjanes, on the other hand, is a good textual example of a work attempting to take steps towards facilitating youth engagement and activism. It is a good place to begin because it is already modeling subversive work—it is creating the slippages and breaks for the reader to see and providing spaces to second guess and interrogate popular narratives and their traditional ideologies. Texts like Lumberjanes start by overtly showing readers how this agentic subversion is done in the textual, diegetic world. These explicit moments of textual contradiction thus nurture critical engagement with the text, which is later pushed further by the construction of implicit compositional contradictions.

In this way, both the specific ideologies presented in the text are under interrogation as well as the concept of the fixity of texts altogether, making the possible implications not just how the child reader can benefit from texts like Lumberjanes and the previously detailed interdisciplinary Visual Culture analysis, but also how future children’s literature

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texts might be likewise constructed in ways that show the texts of the field are evolving by letting go of their insinuated infallibility.

Together, a visual culture analytic framework and a graphic narratological tool box provide young readers with the means to question the fixity of the visual within a comic text. Karen Coats explains that throughout a child’s development, repeatedly seen images are internalized as normative, are made more concrete and fixed by this incessant repetition. Since ideals are created in individuals through repetitive encounters, “racial and gender stereotypes become a kind of ideal, and a child’s identifications with these images thus become problematic and worthy of critical attention” (Coats, Looking 5).

Homi K. Bhabha corroborates this as he describes the construction of and power behind stereotypes: “[T]he ‘stereotype’ requires, for its successful signification, a continual and repetitive chain of other stereotypes” (376). By repeating such shallow representations, texts create the illusion of the stereotype’s fixity, making it a static image imbued with a seemingly inherent yet ultimately fallacious “truth.” Bhaba explains that “colonial discourse produces the colonised as a fixed reality which is at once an ‘other’ and yet entirely knowable and visible” (371). By not challenging such damaging images through proving both their “false representation of a given reality” and their fallacy of simplification as “an arrested, fixated form of representation that den[ies] the play of differences”—meaning the reality of a complex and constantly evolving subjectivity—we do little more than unsuccessfully “dismiss” them rather than “displace” them, what

Bhaba believes is necessary in order to disempower them (374, 370).

Visuals that have breaks or cracks in them create a moment for the reader that does just as Bhaba hopes—to help them challenge the seemingly-innate fixity of visuals.

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To, furthermore, illustrate that no person, group, or ideology has to be fixed. And, as a result, readers can then perceive all of the texts in their lives—from traditional text to visual texts and even to their own bodies as texts—how they want to without reinscribing the oppression of fixity. Reading texts that are not fixed can help model for readers the fallibility and flexibility of texts so that they can later approach those that are not as transparent about their constructions with more agency. This kind of Visual Culture analysis is important for the child reader as it emphasizes paying attention to subtle visual shifts and how it makes the child reader more aware that small elements of the visual hold just as much meaning as the socially privileged written text. This leads to their ability to open their eyes and see more to the visual than what is assumed at first glance.

As long as we continue to overlook the visual and what a heightened awareness of it can bring to our understanding of texts, then we continue to run the risk of underestimating the power of the visual. We might assume that it is just reinforcing the same thing that already exists in society. That nothing is new and nothing is challenging the norm—a practice of neglect that, perhaps, even implicitly suggests the belief that nothing could or should challenge the norm. But if we learn to read how the visual is being subversive, how it is utilizing the same visuality that socializes normativity in subversive ways, then we get the chance to see where there are slippages, breaks, or gaps in the power structures that surround us. We have the chance to be empowered through looking. Certain texts, like Lumberjanes, are telling children they can be empowered and they have the right to look, something that can provide them with the chance to challenge those other texts that discourage their looking, that beg of children they “pay no mind to that man behind the curtain.”

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Ultimately, this kind of textual construction and the analysis that can take place of it using the tenets Visual Culture is one that reaches towards a hopeful, agentic future for young readers. Perhaps this is another reason why the authors chose to start with “Little

Red Riding Hood.” Hintz and Tribunella describe the general mood of fairy tales as

“optative” or a wishful, hopeful “what might be” (137). Could it be this initial allusion was chosen not just for the genre’s problematic history of oppressive gendering, but simultaneously for its mirroring of Lumberjanes’ optative view of gender and sexuality and the agentic role children might take in regards to them? Grace Ellis describes the inspiration for Lumberjanes as the initial thought of, “Hey, what if you just went to camp and everyone got along?” Even though an objective like this seems, logically, so simplistic, she immediately remarked that this goal and the overall worldview of the text are “pretty radical ideas we’re putting out into the world.” Perhaps the text is pretty radical and unrealistic. But I agree with Charlotte Finn as she writes:

In a world where LGBTQ youth still struggle for acceptance, it may not be

that realistic to present a world this accepting of the marginalized — but

then again, shamanistic bear-women and Greek gods aren’t that realistic

either. Depicting a world as we want it to be is a fine calling for fiction. I

wouldn’t want every story featuring LGBTQ youth to be pure escapism,

but I’m glad that this one is.

However, I challenge Finn to view Lumberjanes not just as escapism, but an escape hatch—a magic outhouse, like that shown in Volumes two and three, that provides children with an escape from their passive, oppressed existences to an optative future

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where adults respect children’s texts and visuals as complex and children themselves as agentic beings.

We hear Mal propose her attack plan titled “Little Red Formation” at the very beginning of the series, but in the group’s eagerness to do something they throw themselves into the fray with the three-eyed foxes. A few pages later, Mal critiques their

“plan” of attack saying, “That wasn’t the plan though! That’s not what Little Red

Formation IS!” But the audience is never explicitly told what it is. What if “Little Red

Formation” is based on this optative mood? What if it is the picture of hope envisioned in the narrative, embodied in the text, and enacted in the analysis of Lumberjanes? Perhaps by stepping out of formation instead of falling in, the reader may realize that there is more than meets the (eye/I). After all, hope itself is a pretty radical idea, but an honorable one around which to ally.

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Ch. 4. “To the Past and Future Children of the Movement”: (Re)seeing Race and

History through Stylistic Variation in March

Writing about comics artists’ styles, Pascal Lefevre explains that “[a] graphic style creates the fictive world, giving a certain perspective on the diegesis. . . . The artist not only depicts something, but expresses at the same time a visual interpretation of the world, with every drawing style implying an ontology of the representable or visualizable” (16). In this regard, the visual style of a comic or graphic narrative displays the ideological foundation and rhetorical goals of a text. As such, Hillary Chute’s claim that “[t]he fact of style as a narrative choice—and not simply a default expression—is fundamental to understanding graphic narrative” becomes crucial for a structure-based analysis of comics (“Texture” 99). The March trilogy, Congressman John Lewis’s textual

Civil Rights memoir turned graphic narrative, like all transmediations, utilizes its own unique style and tone in order to fulfill its individual objectives. Lewis and coauthor

Andrew Aydin adapted Walking with the Wind: A Memoir of the Movement (1999) into a graphic narrative script to be later realized as a comic by an outside illustrator (Spurgeon, par. 15). Some scholars like Will Eisner would argue that the ideal scenario of graphic narrative creation would come from the mind of a single author/illustrator: “I have always been strongly of the opinion,” he argues, “that the writer and artist should be one person” (Comics 135). For authors in Lewis and Aydin’s position then, choosing the right artist is crucial as visual style imbues the illustrations with their own relative layer of

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meaning. But what happens when the opus is read as intentionally contrary stylistically to the history and trends within comics and resists being boxed in to a single visual style? I argue that this is what Nate Powell’s unique visual style brings to the text. The choice of

Powell for his unexpectedly overt realistic style with its covert synthetic elements was important for Lewis and Aydin in how his style aids the text in fulfilling their objectives for the piece as authentic history and ethical address.

Powell’s artistic style markedly deviates from the expectations of comics for children and young adults. CCYA is largely filled with a clear line, cartoonistic/iconic style and bold colors. These stylistic elements draw on the long history of comics’ dual audience as well as producers’ expectations of a juvenile audience’s taste. Instead of drawing his characters to match Saturday morning cartoons, Powell aims for a higher level of realism. His high-value illustrations provide more recognizable representations of the historical figures he draws, while the stark contrasts of an entirely black and white narrative hits his readers with an immediate sense of gravitas. In this way, the choice of

Powell as the illustrator marks the graphic narrative trilogy as an outlier within the field of CCYA otherwise dominated by the similar visual stylings of Raina Telgemeier, Gene

Luen Yang, Faith Erin Hicks, and other CCYA illustrators. Considering the popularity of these authors’ works as well as the overall visual style of media intended for a young audience, Lewis and Aydin were taking a bold chance by going with the grittier stylings of the less main-stream comics artist Powell; and yet, this risk paid off in dividends as the trilogy has received numerous accolades in the separate fields of both comics and children’s and young adult literature.

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Powell’s distinguishable style within CCYA is not the only way Lewis and

Aydin’s choice of artist stands out. Despite being marketed as a “graphic novel” which implies fiction, March takes its place within a long line of the comics genre that helped the medium claw its way into academia and, concomitantly, “respectability”: the graphic memoir. Graphic memoirs do not have any one definitive style, but trends within the genre do exist, particularly as can be seen in notable preceding graphic memoirs such as

Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, and Lynda Barry’s One! Hundred!

Demons!, among many others. While each of these canonical comics has its own distinguishing style and structure—including anthropomorphism (Spiegelman), a minimalist clean-line style (Satrapi), and an “ugly” vignette collage (Barry)—all of these graphic memoirs share a highly cartoonistic or iconic illustrative style. As such, Powell’s realistic illustrations would further mark Lewis’s memoir as an outlier within the adult tradition of its genre in addition to the overall field of CCYA. Altogether, the heavy, realistic March seems to be playing by a different set of rules than those dictated by the trends, expectations, and history of comics that came before.

Beyond an awareness of the immediate realistic style, readers must attend to

“stylistic rupture[s]” (Mikkonen 110) of the work, specifically how the natural reality of the text is complicated through the jarring synthetic. Kai Mikkonen theorizes this kind of move writing, “A common effect resulting from the use of heterogenous graphic styles in one narrative, as Groensteen argues, is that style is no longer conceived of as a simple mark of the maker and that, subsequently, drawing demands to be regarded as a subtle medium that offers an infinite variety of expressive possibilities” (112). Consequently, I posit that by exploring Powell’s stylistic deviations from the suggested realism of the 134

mimetic to the suggested artificiality of the synthetic we may be able to better visualize the ways the text engages with the tenets of new historicism and critical race theory to ask young readers to be critical consumers in addition to potential protesters.

In the following chapter, I will explore the significance of Powell’s realistic style with its synthetic stylistics ruptures. I will begin by further specifying why Powell’s realistic style is notable for its publication in CCYA, using new historicism to discuss how the text style attempts to reconcile under-taught and overlooked histories in the K-12 curriculum. In addition, I will analyze specific realistically illustrated images in order to discuss the text’s construction of the implied child reader as someone capable of handling graphic images of the harsh realities of racism. Following this, I will explicate Powell’s use of tools of disruption and thus development of a synthetic style. Occurring in varying ways throughout the text, these stylistic elements emphasize stories and histor(ies) as constructs, further supporting the tenets of new historicism. Finally, I discuss how

Powell’s implementation of these stylistics elements positions March as a part of what

Christina Sharpe calls “ ‘wake work’ as [a site] of artistic production, resistance, consciousness, and possibility” for black identity (back cover), adding critical race theory to the other theories with which this text engages. Altogether, March sets up the implied child reader to be a capable knower, a critical questioner, and a controversial doer in an age that privileges the protection of (some) children’s innocence—largely at the expense of other children’s lives.

Synopsis:

The March trilogy is the graphic narrative telling of Congressman John Lewis’s youth as a key figure in the Civil Rights Movement. His story is woven through with the 135

frame narrative of President Barrack Obama’s 2009 inauguration. In between this historic moment, the narrative focuses on Lewis’s childhood in Alabama amidst the beginnings of the Civil Rights Movement. Lewis’s journey from rural kid to college boy is detailed, and his role in key moments in the Civil Rights is shown in graphic (in more than one meaning of the word) detail: the desegregation of lunch counters, the volatile Bus

Boycott of the Freedom Riders, his speech alongside Dr. Martin Luther King in

Washington, D.C., and finally his march along Edmund Pettus Bridge. The series closes by returning to the frame narrative, implying both how far the United States has come in civil rights and how far it still has to go.

History through Mimetic Graphic Memoirs

Nonfictionality and the Mimetic

As I previously touched on, March is notable in both CCYA and graphic memoirs for its largely realistic illustrative style. The choice of this realistic style—and, as I later argue, the touches of synthetic infused throughout—can be interpreted by how it aims to fulfill the text’s rhetorical objectives, particularly the kinds of reactions the implied reader may be guided to have. James Phelan explains that within a narrative authors use a variety of techniques to create a balance of three “readerly interests and responses”: “the mimetic, thematic, and synthetic” (“Rhetoric” 297). Phelan delineates these three interests/responses, saying:

Responses to the mimetic component involve an audience’s interest in the

characters as possible people and in the narrative world as like our own. . .

. Responses to the thematic component involve an interest in. . . the

cultural, ideological, philosophical, or ethical issues being addressed by 136

the narrative. . . . Responses to the synthetic component involve an

audience’s interest in and attention to the characters and to the larger

narrative as a made object. (“Rhetoric” 297-8)

Each of these responses describes the relationship across the reader, the text, and the context in a specific way. Specifically, the mimetic is tied to the real/reality, and elements used to effect this suggest a natural, organic, and even truthful or nonfictive quality. In texts where the mimetic is foregrounded, the people in the text are presented as real humans for the reader to get to know, and the text as container/construct falls into the background. In contrast, the synthetic is tied to the artificial, and elements used to effect this imply a man-made and fictive quality. The synthetic de-emphasizes the concern with the people in the text as real humans and instead positions characters along with any other narrative element as one of many tools or pieces of the text as container/construct.

A text engaging with the mimetic often utilizes compositional elements to encourage a believability and acceptability of the narrative as real. Meanwhile, a text engaging with the synthetic interrupts the smooth consumption of the story by reminding the reader frequently that the narrative is not necessarily real—or, at least, that the narrative lacks some organic realness in the sense that it has been manipulated or altered for a specific purpose in regards to the reader. Thus the external reach of the book is not that of the mimetic, where the narrative and characters within the text extend contextually outside of the text and into the reader’s “real” world (e.g., “These characters could be my friends,” or “This book feels so true to life”). Instead, the text’s outreach comes from the structural and narrative elements becoming obvious to the reader as a device allowing the author’s craft to extend outwardly, unsettling the reading-as-reality experience and 137

replacing it with a reading-with-questions experience (e.g., “Why doesn’t the author use capital letters?,” or “What’s the purpose of making this one chapter black and white while all of the others are in full color?”). As a result, the rhetorical nature of the synthetic text is highlighted and made an intentional target for the reader to question.

Ultimately, the text’s mimetic or synthetic elements may thus, to an extent, be intertwined with the text’s fictionality or nonfictionality; particularly if the mimetic

“realness” of the text implies to the reader that the story is not just possibly real but actually happened and is believable as opposed to the synthetic “artificiality” of the text that is not supposed to be taken as real. Given this, I propose an understanding of the mimetic as emphasizing reality and nonfictionality where the encouraged readerly- response is one of accepting the narrative; conversely, I argue an understanding of the synthetic as emphasizing constructedness and fictionality where the encouraged readerly- response is one of questioning the narrative.

I want to clarify here that a text’s quality or characteristics of fictionality or nonfictionality are both flexible as well as distinguishable from a text’s categorical genre

(i.e., fiction and nonfiction genres). Henrik Skov Nielsen, James Phelan, and Richard

Walsh explain that “fictionality/fictive discourse is formally closer to irony/ironic discourse than to an individual genre such as comedy or tragedy, though of course its effects are different” (62). Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh highlight the flexibility of fictionality over the rigidity of fiction writing, “Where a genre designation provides a global framework for understanding a text as a whole, irony may be either global or local” working to “provide a framework for thinking about a text” as a whole or

“appear[ing] intermittently with a text governed by a different generic framework” (62). 138

If fictionality and nonfictionality, are extricable from genre, then authors can use them throughout compositions free from conventional rules. Instead, they can work intentionally and rhetorically in the service of “multiple functions” that “infor[m] an audience’s response to the fictive [or nonfictive] act” (Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh 62-3).

With this understanding, texts that fall into genres typically associated with modes of fictionality or nonfictionality should not be presumed to solely utilize one particular mode.

Realism and the Textual Needs of a History Curriculum

March is largely illustrated in a more realistic style. Unlike the notable aforementioned autographers who came before him and worked largely in a cartoonish/iconic style, Nate Powell’s illustrative style in March is one that skews closer to the realistic side of the pictorial icon scale. Scott McCloud explains that images can be placed on a scale ranging from extremely realistic—represented most ideally by a photograph—to extremely cartoonistic—represented by the kind of cartoon abstraction of a simple smiley face (28-9). This stylistic choice is important for the achievement of many of the text’s rhetorical objectives. In particular, the impact of detailed, realistic illustrations is that of bolstering the role of the text as an important and impactful informational history text that could be used both in/out of contemporary schools.

Speaking of the role March could play in the world of children’s literature and children’s lives, Andrew Aydin discussed the importance of the text for history instruction, especially given the dearth of effective (and affective) material for teaching the Civil Rights Movement (Lewis, Aydin, and Powell, “March: An Evening”).

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Aydin adds to the list of educational goals for the text that includes nonviolence, social activism, and justice the dire importance of a renewed presence and accuracy to the instruction of the historical movement. He draws his call to improve Civil Rights education from a 2011 study performed by the Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC).

The SPLC’s study explored the breadth and depth of mandated Civil Rights information implemented across U.S. public schools. In this initial study, thirty-five states received a failing grade with “sixteen [of those failing] states requir[ing] no instruction at all about the civil rights movement” (SPLC, “Teaching”). In the 2014 follow up of the SPLC study, growth appeared when “20 states received grades of ‘F’. . . includ[ing] five states. .

. that neither cover the movement in their state standards nor provide resources to teach it” (SPLC, “Civil”). As Teaching Tolerance director Maureen Costello proclaims, “Even though some states have made improvements, and many offer valuable resources to help teachers explore this important era, this report shows that coverage of the civil rights movement remains woefully inadequate in most states” (qtd. in SPLC, “Civil”). The

SPLC acknowledges that required state standards and the actual teaching and learning of ideas are not clearly proven correlative. However, they emphasize the importance of standards for conveying institutional support and sympathy: “Symbolically, a state’s standards and curricular framework makes a strong statement about the shared common knowledge considered essential for residents of that state” (SPLC, “Teaching”). By overlooking the Civil Rights Movement within the curriculum, states and school districts are speaking loud and clear about whose history matters and whose is expendable.

In addition to the implications of such thin institutional support, the SPLC comments “that textbooks and core materials too often strip out context and richness to 140

present a limited account of the [Civil Rights] movement” (“Teaching”). Instead, the narrative of the Civil Rights Movement many students get—if they get one at all—is

“boiled down to two people and four words: Rosa Parks, Dr. King, and ‘I have a dream’ ”

(SPLC, “Civil”). Furthermore, when these singular individuals are mentioned, their actions are often presented as “depoliticized” and “recast in a cooperative frame” (SPLC,

“Teaching”). For example, in these reconstructed narratives, Dr. King is painted as a hero who was accepted by the government from the beginning of the movement, detracting from the oppositional role institutional forces played in the Civil Rights Movement and thus exculpating political authorities. As Michael Kammen posits, “[T]here is a powerful tendency in the United States to depoliticize traditions for the sake of ‘reconciliation.’. . .

Memory is more likely to be activated by contestation, and amnesia is more likely to be induced by the desire for reconciliation” (qtd. in SPLC, “Teaching”).

This is where March comes in. If March is to challenge this pervasive cultural and historical amnesia and be, as one French reviewer dubbed it, “a weapon of mass instruction” (qtd. in Lewis, Aydin, and Powell, “March: An Evening”), then it needs to fulfill several concerns in regards to a history education of the Civil Rights Movement: it should contextualize the movement, go beyond just the notable individual figures/heroes who receive the most attention, emphasize the collective public who contributed to the cause, position social justice as playing a crucial civic role, explain methods/tactics for social justice, present the moments of opposition to the movement (including institutionalized violence and racism), and provide connections to contemporary society and other social movements (SPLC, “Teaching”). Altogether, these concerns could work towards historical accuracy with ethical responsibility as best as any constructed text 141

possibly can. The March trilogy works together to meet all of the above SPLC guidelines for a Civil Rights history curriculum.

March’s Ethos of Reality

Powell references an intentionality towards historical responsibility as a looming presence over his work: “[T]here’s an historical component to remain as faithful to as possible, and to maintain a certain level of responsibility” (Spurgeon, par. 20). But comics artists have approached this responsibility and obligation to veracity in graphic memoir in unique ways that sometimes blur the generic lines. First of all, “even though memoirs are nonfictional, . . . they differ from other works of nonfiction in that, while fidelity is the overarching constraint, most memoirists relax this constraint to produce a desired effect on readers” (Pedri 128). Quoting Leigh Gilmore, Nancy Pedri explains that

“ ‘to render transparent her own anxiety about being able to respect the fidelity constraint and abide by memoir’s ‘preference for the literal and verifiable’ is one of the key strategies adopted by. . . graphic memoirs to communicate nonfictionality” (134). This acknowledgement of potential-fictionality via the fallibility of the memory in memoir is part of many author’s strategies to protect against claims of falsehood. Fictionality is not inextricably tied to the synthetic; however, elements that acknowledge, to an extent, the subjectivity of the memoir often function to lay bare the trappings of a text’s telling to support its honesty in transparency of potential-fictionality. Lynda Barry’s illustrations in her memoir One! Hundred! Demons! are one case in point. Characterized much more on the cartoonistic/iconic side of McCloud’s spectrum than Powell’s illustrations and described by some as “ ‘ugly’ drawings” (Sweeney 25), Barry’s style heightens the reader’s awareness of the (un)aesthetic as an intentional authorial choice for effect 142

(Sweeney 24). Her drawing and composition style embodies the synthetic, “reveal[ing] the constructedness of mediation (visual or textual)” (Chaney 39). Hillary Chute interprets her use of these elements, arguing Barry “materially emphasizes that the concept of the composition of the book itself, like the fabric of subjectivity, is a procedure rather than a product” (125). Her drawing style therefore clearly highlights her rhetorical intention to complicate the delineation of autobiography by troubling veracity.

This stands out in the way she posits relabeling her work’s genre as

“autobifictionalography” and asks, “Is it autobiography if parts of it are not true? Is it fiction if parts of it are?” (Barry 7).

In contrast, Powell’s realistic illustrations develop the mimetic in lieu of the synthetic that is frequently employed by other autographers. His humans are drawn with higher value than the visually flat characters of Barry or Bell, and the looming visual weight of darkness in Powell’s illustrations turn into shadows and shades of grey, detailing and defining the figures that populate the pages. Powell’s dominant visual aesthetic is the mimetic, developing an overall ethos of reality in the trilogy. I argue that this is intentional and strategic for two important reasons: the first in how it serves to counteract the lingering assumptions from the stigmatized history of comics in education and the second in how it attempts to challenge the problematic discourse of post-racism in the U.S.

The Stigmatized Children’s Comic

As was discussed in Ch. 1, the field of comics split into two tracks post-Code: controversial adult comics which went underground and ultimately gained legitimacy, and children’s comics which remained mainstream but were heavily sanitized and 143

considered trivial by most comics artists and critics. As the field of comics studies developed, opinions of children’s comics remained dismissive at best. Carol Tilley explains that along with the Wertham-fueled rage against comics, librarians also played a role in stigmatizing and rejecting the medium. Pre-Code, many librarians agreed with the common opposition to comics as morally corrupt. But as the Code settled into place, librarians continued to shut comics out of their hallowed institutional shelves. Librarians from the 1930s-60s, as Tilley remarks, viewed it as their professional responsibility not just to provide people with reading material but also to protect readers from inappropriate content by pruning out unacceptable texts . Ultimately, whether they found comics to be bad influences or just inferior books, librarians gave little attention to the form and thus kept comics from the communities they served.

Children’s comics’ stigmatization continued throughout the 20th century even persisting to significant varying degrees in the early 21st. The legacy of these negative reactions can easily be seen in the need to start discussions of children’s comics with a precursory defense. As Robin E. Brenner writes of the title of the CCYA resource No

Flying No Tights website she started in 2002, the title for the site was chosen specifically to convey “the idea that graphic novels can be a whole lot more than what a regular joe might expect from them.” As Drego Little wrote in 2005, “Comics are still not considered

‘reading by too many educators” (Little). Even as late as 2012, Kathryn Strong Hansen titled her English Journal piece on the form “In Defense of Graphic Novels.” Hansen spends the entire article detailing the most common oppositions to comics from assumptions that comics are merely “easy texts for lazy readers” to “the teachers who only view graphic novels as the handmaidens to ‘real’ or ‘good’ literature, those who. . . 144

treat graphic novels as inherently lesser than any other work of art or literature” (61).

Even within the contemporary undergraduate classrooms in which I teach and discuss

CCYA, similarly dismissive phrases persist such as comics not being “real reading.”

When positioned within this historical context of an educational setting unwelcoming to comics, the visual style of March carries weight rhetorically as attempting to ground the series as more serious by separating itself from the more frivolous CCYA predecessors upon which these criticisms were heaped. Stylistically, the cartoon is easily assumed to be intended for children’s consumption and often viewed equally “juvenile” in its literary merit. By positioning the visuals farther down the stylistic spectrum away from the cartoonistic/iconic, Powell attempts to distance March from the same assumptions of triviality that plague the cartoon.

Stigmatized assumptions were attached to the comic from its inception. Aydin and

Lewis discuss the first conversations about comics between the two that led to their decisions to collaborate on the book project. Aydin explains that in 2008 he and other staffers working in Lewis’s office were sharing their post-election celebration plans.

After Aydin told everyone he was planning to attend a comics convention, the rest of the staffers began laughing at and teasing him. Lewis, however, piped up and said, “You shouldn't laugh. At another time in another period there was a comic book called The

Montgomery Story ― Martin Luther King Jr. and the Montgomery story — that inspired me” (qtd. in Dirks). To emphasize this even further, as Aydin and Lewis are drawn conferring with one another on the closing page of the trilogy, Aydin reacts to Lewis’s statement that they should turn his story into a comic book with, “You’re serious?!

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People are gonna laugh at us. They’re gonna say you’ve lost your mind” (March: Book

Three 246).

The teasing Aydin received and the concern he expresses reflect certain negative assumptions of comics (and even comic readers) that his political peers held, those I have borne witness to in my own classes and of which Sean P. Connors writes that lead to his students making statements like the following: “For my teaching goals, I want to include literature that will do at least one of three things. . .: encourage students to read, teach something, and broaden the reader’s world view and encourage critical thinking. I do not believe that graphic novels do these things” (68, emphasis in original). The visual aesthetic of March works to challenge the persona of non-instructional of comics that might otherwise keep the trilogy from being seen as a credible tool for classroom instruction. The realistic style pushes against the misconceptions of comics inherent childishness, uselessness, and fictionality with a visual style that elevates the mimetic and instead works toward developing non-fictionality.

Counteracting “Post-Racial” Rhetoric

In addition to its role in altering assumptions about comics’ credibility within the classroom setting, the realistic aesthetic of March also puts the text into conversation with contemporary rhetoric that debates the presence of race in a post-Obama—and, thus,

“post-racial”—United States. Sensoy and DiAngelo write about the prevalence of “color- blindness” and “post-raciality” as common phenomena in contemporary society and something that, when employed, serves to turn discussions away from racial injustice.

Henry A. Giroux argues that the President Obama’s election was largely hailed across social groups and political parties as “not only represent[ing] a postracial victory but also 146

signal[ing] a new space of postracial harmony” (“Youth” 574). Queries over whether or not the watershed moment of Obama’s election would make a significant change in U.S. race relations overwhelmingly took the side of the affirmative within the general national discourse. Christopher Metzler wrote of the fledgling potential this moment could have as

“a sea change event, just like the Supreme Court’s decision to Brown v. Board of

Education” (16). However, Metzler did acknowledge the work that would need to continue from post-election, writing, “Brown also promised a ‘post-racial’ America, and it did not deliver. This is because sea change events without attendant, sustained, substantive change end up being events, not durable change” (16).

More problematically, conservative commentator George F. Will, writing hopefully of Obama’s political career from senator to president, that he might “bring down the curtain on the long running and intensely boring melodrama ‘Forever Selma,’ starring Jesse Jackson and Al Sharpton” (emphasis added). Will’s dismissive commentary of Civil Rights Movement discussions as drawn out and exhausting gives weight to the SPLC’s concerns over a Civil Rights curriculum that would erroneously paint the movement as a thing of the past, embodying Waldo E. Martin Jr. and Patricia

Sullivan’s concerns over the way the movement is taught: “For many young people, it looms as a shining moment in the distant past, with little relevance to contemporary issues concerning race, democracy, and social justice” (qtd. in SPLC, “Teaching”). The

SPLC posits that “students need to know that the dream to which Dr. King gave voice was not realized simply by the election of a black president in 2008. They need to know that as long as race is a barrier to access and opportunity, and as long as poverty is commonplace for people of color, the dream has not been achieved” (“Teaching”). 147

Given this understanding of how the 2008 election was taken up in public discourse as proof of the U.S. as a post-racial nation, it is no coincidence that President

Obama’s 2009 inauguration is set up as the frame narrative of Lewis’s memoir. The presence and prevalence of contemporary colorblind/post-racial discourses “den[ies] the nation’s legacy of institutionalized oppression” and “the everyday reality of millions of today’s students—that the nation is not yet perfect and that racism and injustice still exist” (SPLC, “Teaching”). As Lamar Johnson writes, “[I]t is clear that the spirits of racism and of state-sanctioned racial violence still linger in our present time” (Baker-

Bell, Butler, and Johnson 126); yet, we continue to work in a world filled with post-racial rhetoric, one that attempts to argue Dr. King’s dream has been realized and race is a thing of the past for our colorblind society. Most social justice/cultural studies scholars acknowledge the fictionality of this maxim based on continued institutionalized prejudice; unfortunately, the rhetoric continues to be consumed and produced— particularly by those members of dominant groups who have the privilege of not personally facing the dire realities of this problem within the 21st century.

This contemporary contextualization of March reveals possible intentionality behind Lewis and Aydin’s choice of realistic artist Nate Powell. With the “reality” of present-day racism being frequently questioned, a narrative style that emphasizes fictionality over nonfictionality could serve to backfire—working to perpetuate the past tense view of racism and privilege the post-racial myth that supports its continued, covert existence. This move seems to be in tension with Nielsen, Phelan, and Walsh’s explanation that “[i]n testimonies and other texts of cultural memory, fictionality is sometimes an indispensable part of telling about a historical past that involved atrocities 148

that are extremely difficult to represent in standard nonfictive discourse” (68). A prime example of this use of fictionality in history texts is Spiegelman’s Maus which “uses fictionalization [in the form of anthropomorphism] in order to capture aspects of that atrocious past that could not be as effectively captured with nonfictive representations”

(Nielsen, Phelan, Walsh 68). Spiegelman’s choice to illustrate his Holocaust narrative using anthropomorphized animal characters has been argued to create “dissonance and estrangement…[which] are vital to the work of representing traumatic memory in the comics” (Whitlock 977). As Charles Hatfield describes the narrative workings of the text,

“Maus’s drawings succeed by indirection. By defamiliarizing the already familiar details of the Holocaust, Spiegelman’s ‘funny animal’ drawings reacquaint us with the horrors of genocide in the most offhand and intimate of ways” (Alternative 140, emphasis added).

Yet, as has already been discussed this chapter, the U.S. population is not that familiar with the details of the Civil Rights Movement, definitely not to the extent that they are with the Holocaust. Furthermore, the aforementioned rhetoric attempting to position contemporary U.S. racism as fictional is a formidable force that is not served well by a narrative predominated by fictionality and all that mode might imply. Thus while the fictionality of Maus served the role of disorienting readers, it does not risk undermining the audience’s belief in history as it might for the Civil Rights Movement and current understanding of U.S. race relations. Understandably, then, nonfictionality is the dominant mode that functions best in March to serve the past, present, and future of interpersonal and institutional race relations. Powell’s realistic illustrations serve to support the visual aesthetic of realism, emphasizing the mimetic and developing the texts

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strong nonfictionality. Without it, the dismissiveness of post-racial rhetoric might shut down the conversation that March is trying to start with young people.

Realistic Individuals and the Ethics of Empathy

For so many canonical graphic memoirs, their visual style functions similarly in how it is employed to develop empathy. Empathy is an oft-discussed concept when it comes to many of the core fields this chapter deals with—from literature to social justice, education and beyond. I do not negate the power memoirs like Maus and Persepolis have for increasing both an awareness of and compassion for global/historical issues; however, given the intended history objectives of the text, March would not be served as well by a visual style known for this kind of effect upon the reader. To show this, I will explore first how McCloud argues visuals along the realistic-to-iconic style spectrum work, discussing the iconic’s implementation in earlier notable graphic memoirs, namely that of intending to develop empathy for another and facilitate understanding of the other. I will follow that by complicating the concept of comics for empathy and economic messages, showing how Powell’s realistic style counters these stylistic problems.

The Cartoon as Vacuum: The Iconic, Simplification, and Empathy

As I briefly introduced earlier, Scott McCloud addresses drawing styles as existing on a spectrum from realistic to iconic. Those images that lean more towards the iconic are often described as cartoonistic. Instead of aiming to create an image that looks like the real world object which it represents, artists using an iconic style are trying to use simplified drawings that suggest efficiently and economically the essence of that which it displays. This understanding reveals one of the intentions behind utilizing this drawing style. McCloud explains that more simplistic iconic drawings could lead to increased 150

attentiveness to the message of the text. Referencing his own cartoonistic avatar drawn as the narrator of Understanding Comics, McCloud states, “If who I am matters less, maybe what I say will matter more” (37). Texts drawn in this style emphasize the conceptual over and above the details, making the illustrations perfect conduits for conveying big ideas. McCloud describes this as “amplification through simplification,” an illustrative method that might be understood as privileging the thematic—an emphasis of a text’s themes, messages, and ideologies—over both the mimetic and the synthetic. It seems understandable, then, that a text interested in promoting messages of equality might be better off using the more simplistic iconic/cartoonistic style for how it both emphasizes big messages.

McCloud also argues that the cartoon—using this term interchangeably for the iconic style—facilitates more of a personal, empathetic connection for the reader: “We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it” (36). He writes of the difference between a realistic image of a face and a cartoonistic drawing of the face in the way it positions the reader in relation to the narrative: “When you look at a photo or realistic drawing of a face,” he argues, “you see it as the face of another. But when you enter the world of the cartoon you see yourself” (36). His explanation positions the iconic as effective at facilitating an empathetic relationship between the reader and the characters. Utilizing the vacuum effect of which McCloud writes might place the reader in the story, allowing her to experience the horrors of the tale by proxy and create a stronger emotional impact.

Perhaps an artist’s more iconic and/or stylized version of drawing (as opposed to one that aims for more detailed, recognizably realistic illustrations) would better suit highly emotional, painful topics like trauma and racism. This might even seem ideal for hesitant 151

readers in that McCloud argues the cartoonistic drawing style helps a reader make personal identifications with characters in a way that allows her to “safely enter” the story world through the ambiguous “mask” of the iconic character (43).

Such a stylistically simplified visual aesthetic can be seen in Spiegelman’s anthropomorphism. With the details of the peoples’ faces streamlined into simplified animal masks to denote groups, the individual identities of the actors recede and the collective identity of each group takes prominence. Such stylistic tools would emphasize group identities in a narrative intending to highlight otherwise seemingly disparate individuals’ common histories and aim to strengthen in-group bonds and relationships, amplifying group unity by simplifying individuality. Furthermore, this visual tool of stylistic simplification would make it quick and easy to see the antagonistic relationship and oppressive power differentials between Germans and Jews with the economy of the cat and mouse visual metaphor. The use of this hybrid animal-human imagery draws on

Will Eisner’s concept of the “residue of human primordial experience to personify actors quickly” that happens when human visuals are created based in any way on animal stereotypes (Graphic 14).

This amplification through anthropomorphic simplification might also amplify the

Jewish experience during the Holocaust—the message—over the individual Jewish victims—the messengers—in order to facilitate empathy. As Suzanne Keen posits, the use of anthropomorphism within Maus creates this kind of empathetic reading experience, elevating the thematic and forcing the reader to reckon with the following:

“What if you felt what these doomed victims feel, and could not dismiss their plight as only a story?” (141). This simplified anthropomorphism of Maus—much like the recently 152

published children’s graphic memoir El Deafo by Cece Bell—functions similar to the streamlined clear-line style of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic memoir Persepolis. McCloud’s cartoonistic vacuum effect of reading is exemplified in how easy it is for the reader to see herself in Satrapi’s drawing of the iconic Marjane avatar. Arguably, the memoir can be perceived as ideologically Western and even understood as written for an implied audience outside of the Middle East, one dependent upon Satrapi’s explanation of Iranian cultural and historical details. Taking all of this into consideration, Persepolis’s iconic illustrations can be seen as not intending to emphasize her identity as uniquely “other” than the reader, but instead as attempting to collapse the distance between the Western

“outside” reader and the Eastern Marjane narrator.

The Problem with Simplicity and Empathy

To begin with, Spiegelman’s anthropomorphic illustrations work to emphasize trauma and the subjective emotions and attempt empathetic positioning in a way that potentially inspires a viewing of victimization in accompaniment with the empathy, but in a way akin to pity. Pity the victims, for they are less human and need protection. The concept of the dehumanization performed by Nazi soldiers upon Jewish prisoners runs the risk of further dehumanizing. Furthermore, “[t]he fast track to empathy initiated by the affecting illustrations causes discomfort that yields to personal distress” (Keen 152), however, I would like to argue that this distress is more of a reader’s self-centered phenomenon at having experienced the discomfiting feelings of trauma more so than one based in/nurturing a selfless concern for others. A similar privileging of the reader’s experience of the violent life experiences of the narrative so much so that it erases the actor—meaning the actual author, narrator, and real human being behind the narrative 153

who actually experienced the violence first hand—also occurs with Satrapi’s illustrations as the cartoonistic drawing gives way to the vacuum experience that draws in the reader and allows her to see herself in the text possibly over and above the author’s autobiographical avatar. Barry’s limitations are quite interesting in that they are the very same as her affordances: that of troubling the veracity of the text. While her style works for her artistic purpose and for a reconsideration of the genre of autobiography, especially as presented in comics, for an author who would wish to stress reality and authenticity in storytelling, this emphasis of the constructedness of autobiography would be counterproductive.

Overall, the cartoonistic/iconic visual style is heavily utilized in memoirs, and its suggested ability to effect empathy is a strong reason for this. March, however, is not illustrated in this style and directly opposes this construction of empathy. I will argue not that this is a failure of the style nor that this is anti-empathetic, but that for the authors’ objectives of the text serving as a credible history text for an often undertold/overlooked history and people, empathy does not serve it best.

Realism and Individualism

Powell’s illustrations exist on the opposite side of McCloud’s spectrum, characterized as being in the realm of the “complex, realistic, objective, and specific”

(46). In comparison to Spiegelman’s, Powell’s consistent adherence to a realistic drawing style aims to avoid the pitfall of pity. Through his illustrations, a respect and humanization of all involved is strictly adhered to. In comparison to both Spiegelman’s and Satrapi’s iconic vacuum’s, Powell’s emphasis on realism performs a few actions by stressing the “face of another” as McCloud puts it (36). He stresses the individuality and 154

identity of the people he is illustrating in a way that furthers the historical reality of the people in the narrative, a task that took more research and practice to perform than he had ever had to perform with his previous fictional texts (Herbowy, pars. 8-10). These people’s lives or stories are not meant to be appropriated for a reader’s self-serving narrative experience. They are real people with real lives and real complexities he is attempting to convey in order to pay respect to the historical role of the text. The reader is forced more to see the faces of another—that of important historical persons like the main narrator/author John Lewis as well as Martin Luther King Jr.—than to see herself in the story. Furthermore, the emphasis on the complexity of the physical world that McCloud describes as intrinsic to realistic modes (41) underscores the overall complexity of the nonviolent fight for civil rights, one that involves fighting without fighting and loving one’s enemies. Through this, not only is the complexity of civil rights addressed, but also the complexity of humans altogether. They are not reduced to universal icons, as humans are not universal beings. They are individual, unique, and complicated, each and every one.

Powell’s illustrative style thus attempts to avoid stereotyping-via-simplicity.

According to Eisner, a stereotype is defined as an idea or character that is standardized in a conventional form, without individuality” (Graphic Storytelling 11). Despite the history of stereotypes for pejorative and oppressive purposes, Eisner argues that “the stereotype is a fact of life in the comics medium. It is an accursed necessity—a tool of communication that is an inescapable ingredient in most cartoons” (Graphic Storytelling

11). These stereotypes make more sense for Eisner’s argument when ideas are being privileged over individuals, as McCloud argues occurs when cartoon images in highly 155

iconic styles are used, and when the ease of readability of the story is privileged over the actors in the story. For Eisner, this includes, unfortunately, utilizing cultural hegemonic ideologies as recognizable narrative devices instead of attempting to challenge them which might, as his scholarship suggests, confuse or complicate things for the reader. But for Lewis, Aydin, and Powell, the specificity of the actors and the story are important. In fact, by lumping individual humans into stereotypes, the cartoon style would directly contradict the encouragement of the text to see others who came before, who really existed and whose stories are often not told, and to know these individuals and their stories.

According to Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story, the “Montgomery

Method” of nonviolence for change is predicated upon the establishment of one’s humanity—both actions that emphasize the humanity of the protester and the requirement to remember the humanity of those opposing the protester as a means to remain nonviolent:

God loves your enemy, too, and that makes him important to you. You

have to see him as a human being, like yourself. You have to try to

understand him and sympathize with him. To see your enemy as a human

being you have to stop seeing him as your enemy. Even when he does

cruel, heartless things to you, he is a child of God. He is your brother,

even when he hurts you. Hardest of all, you have to help your enemy to

see you as a human being. He has to see you as a person who wants the

same kind of things he wants: love, a family, a job, the respect of his

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neighbors. It will be easier for him to see you this way if you act like a

brother. (Resnick 13-14; emphasis in text)

These messages are told the reader while being accompanied with more realistic (or at least falling in the center of McCloud’s spectrum) illustrations of the individuals participating in the civil rights movement.

But Powell’s realistically styled illustrations do not merely repeat that of the prior text: they participate in the actual humanizing act that both the elder and the younger text have at their cores. As mentioned before, as opposed to the cartoonistic illustration that deemphasizes the human actor in an attempt at reader identification—or, worse, an anthropomorphism that emphasizes animality over humanity—Powell’s illustrations that strive for a more mimetic appearance to human physicality thus serves as a continued reminder of the humans participating in the narrative. Furthermore, it reminds any readers of the story that should they ever find themselves in such similar protest experiences in the real world—regardless of what side they are on—that all participant are indeed human, undergirding the nonviolent imperatives of the “Montgomery Method.” The closure that needs to be completed for the photorealistic face to be recognized as real and human is much less than that of the cartoonistic one. Presumably, the closure that it would be necessary between the experience of reading a realistic style comic book and that of real world experiences like those displayed in the text should likewise be minimal in comparison to that of a more iconic illustrative style.

Finally, the role realism plays in emphasizing humanity goes hand in with photorealism’s emphasis on individualistic visual portrayals. Knowing not just that the other participant is, indeed, a human, but that he is a unique, individual human whom the 157

initial actor knows personally is a powerful deterrent to violence. Eisner avers the following about the role of faces: “I have often mused that if animals’ faces were more flexible, more individual, more reflective of emotions, they might be less likely to be killed by humans” (Comics 114). He describes the face itself as useful for its “role in communication…to register emotion” and its being “the part of the body that is most individual” (Eisner, Comics 114). A parable style side story included in March parallels this emphasis on knowing the other as an individual as a means of caring for them. He recounts how he used to raise chickens on his parents’ farm as a young boy, caring for them, preaching to them, and even naming them. In contrast, when young John visits

Buffalo, he remarks on the extreme difference between his relationship to his chickens— and the subsequent guilt he felt when one ended up on the dinner table—and the seeming lack of guilt of those city folk who purchased chickens from a store. He states, “I wasn’t even bothered by the fate of these chickens. Maybe the fact that I didn’t know them had something to do with it. I don’t know. I do know that I had no problem cleaning my plate that evening” (45).

While Lewis’s parable emphasizes the importance of knowing the other as an individual, Powell’s contrasting illustrations between the scenes where young John cares for his own chickens versus the one where he and his aunt purchase one from the store instantiates Eisner’s point about the role of faces for individuality and humanization. The farm chickens are given extreme closeup shots with characteristic lines on their faces to imply emotions, thoughts, individuality, and, I would argue, humanity. The city chickens, however, are seen from a distance lacking distinguishing characteristics of emotions, individuality, and any humanity resultant from the details of the realistic style. It is no 158

surprise then that the distancing between the individuality and humanity of the latter chickens facilitated their emotionally disconnected demise. Thus this parable on knowing, individuality, and humanity primes the rest Lewis, Aydin, and Powell’s text for an emphasis on the humanity of the actors involved, refraining those messages from the original Martin Luther King and the Montgomery Story comic. Strategically, Powell’s adherence to a realistic style, and even extreme devotion to details for individuality sporadically throughout the text, further promotes this message.

Powell attempts through his illustrations to not just portray history accurately but also honestly to the targeted youth audience of the text. He does so not only through his realistically styled illustrations but also through his choice to starkly illustrate traumatic images of violence, moments of honesty that are often sacrificed on the holy alter of childhood innocence. This concept of the innocent child in need of adult protection drives the censorship of children’s and young adult texts: “Censorship in its various forms is often catalyzed by the conception of childhood as a time of innocence: a childhood that needs to be protected from the pressures of the adult world” (Hintz and Tribunella 428).

According to Pamela Reynolds, this such desire to view the child as innocent leads to a self-inflicted cultural blindness towards the reality of children and childhood to such an extent that “it is likely that children’s literature will be constrained in its ability to reflect on the issue;. . . with a more widespread understanding of the situation of children, the literature may touch on a greater variety of perspectives of war than it might otherwise and, in turn, influence attitudes to war” (253). While she speaks specifically on the topic of children in war, her comments might be expanded to reference children in relation to violence, or to connect back to March, children’s roles in violent social movements. 159

March attempts to perform this rethinking of children and their roles in social movements. While not explicitly a characteristic of Powell’s illustrations, the text does emphasize child agency. The narrative reveals this child agency through its presentation of John Lewis—the central actor in the text and of concern in this memoir of the civil rights movement—not only as an adult fighting for equality but as first a child who was inspired by religion and later as a strong-willed teen whose parents’ warning of “Don’t get in trouble. Don’t you get in the way” (March 54) fell on deaf ears. Lewis furthermore directly contradicts this attempt to protect the young John—and, as a result, revoke his individual agency—by telling youths he wants them “to find a way to get in the way. At sixteen I got in trouble. Good trouble. Necessary trouble” (Lewis, Aydin, and Powell,

“March: An Evening”; emphasis added). Not only does the text encourage this kind of involvement, but Lewis and Aydin make explicit that it is imperative that children perform that agency in order to enact social change. The former states, “It is our hope that these books will inspire the next generation to speak up and not be afraid,” and the latter followed this expression by stating his hope that this kind of inspiration on today’s youths would reveal they were “given the opportunity to just maybe change this country”

(Lewis, Aydin, and Powell, “March: An Evening”).

Powell’s illustrations, then, serve a collaborative purpose of empowering the youth readership of March by choosing not to buy into the idea of childhood innocence as needing protection and children as fragile beings. His illustrations reveal an understanding that children are mature enough to handle the interpellation that such violent or traumatic visuals will cause: that of a call to join in the fight as opposed to being passive consumers. The most poignant of all illustrations included in March, and 160

the one most likely to face fire from concerned parents, is his illustration of Emmett Till

(57). This interpellation is initiated with the opening text on the same page: white font appears over a heavy black background at the top of the page saying, “That August, an incident occurred which no one could ignore” (57; emphasis in text). Three wide panels proceed beneath it, slowing the pace of the reading and emphasizing the wide reach of the central event through their horizontal orientation. Positioned in the center of the page-as- panel is a panel displaying the prostrate and deformed body of Till. The reader is thrust into the position of witness not just by seeing the panel but by its perspective: the reader looks down from an aerial position, with the only other actors in the panel being distinguished by their shoes around the perimeter of the panel, as if the reader is one of the many standing around looking down upon his body and witnessing this not just in a book but in person.

Of interesting contrast to the illustration is the text. The text itself spends no time elaborating on Till’s death. The reader is only given textually a bare-bones cause and effect script: “Emmet said ‘Bye, baby’ to the white woman behind the counter. The next day he was dead” (57). The abuse that led to his death is not described and neither is the state of his body when he was found. However, Powell’s illustration does not allow the text to silence the violent reality of this scene. Till’s left arm and wrists lie at awkward angles from his body. Most notable is his face which Powell has illustrated as true to the historical descriptions of it being “mutilated beyond recognition” (“Emmett”, par. 10).

On this page and through this panel, the reader is looking upon the dire reality of the situation—that of the death of a fourteen year old boy. Presumably, the mutilated face into which the reader stares is not much older or younger than the reader is. Powell 161

describes this scene as difficult for him as an artist, but his reaction of “[t]rying to find the appropriate and powerful way to respectfully depict the murder of Emmett Till” (qtd. in Dirks, par. 21) further reveals the seriousness with which he takes his illustration, both in value and veracity. Powell thus continues working towards his ethos of the real through this illustration, not bending to social pressures based on cultural expectations of childhood and youth readership that would push for a sanitized or mollified version of history.

(His)tory through Synthetic Tools of Disruption

These moments of stylistic slippage from the realistic to the cartoonistic work along with other narrative strategies to momentarily shift the mimetic balance of the text to the synthetic. Powell deviates from his style and devotion to mirroring reality. While these could be interpreted as flaws in the text or moments of rhetorical weakness, they could alternatively be viewed as utilizing a separate narrative effect in order to perform one of the same rhetorical goals as the realistic: namely, that of preparing children to be future activists for social justice. In these moments where style and narrative effect change, Powell seems to be subtly and strategically utilizing the affordances of the synthetic via panel alteration and an unpredictable mise en page in addition to braiding and the iconic style. I will discuss the latter two synthetic elements at the end of this chapter, and will focus upon the synthetic macro-compositional elements within this section.

By the very nature of the comics medium, the synthetic is, to some extent, foregrounded: “The comics form necessarily and inevitably calls attention through its formal properties to its limitations as juridicial evidence—to the compressions and gaps 162

of its narrative (represented graphically by the gutterspace between the panels) and to the iconic distillations of its art” (Gardner, “Autography’s” 6). Some of this March attempts to counter with Powell’s more realistic drawing style, but even at that, as a result of the medium, there is only so much of the synthetic that can be counteracted. With its focus on civil rights, the thematic runs throughout March; however, the objective of that thematic is altered depending on the shifting emphasis of the mimetic and the synthetic.

But when the text skews towards the synthetic, the reader is asked to actively participate in the thematic. Much like the very same closure that the reader has to perform in comics across the gutter and with the iconic illustrations, the synthetic moments ask readers to pause and reconcile what is happening in the text. The reader is reminded of the presence of an author and the construction of the text is foregrounded. A kind of closure via analysis is thus needed, and even the very enactment of this forces the reader out of passive consumption into active construction with the text—an act ideologically in concert with the thematic element of social justice and activism.

One means of emphasizing the synthetic is through complex styles of page composition. Robert C. Harvey argues that style is the “visual result of an individual artist’s use of the entire arsenal of graphic devices available, including the tools of the craft” (qtd. in Mikkonen 111). While style is typically thought of as the “trace of the hand, the graphic enunciation that is the drawn line” (Gardner, “Storylines” 54), Kai

Mikkonen “extend[s this] from the individuality of the graphic trace to the structural organization of mise-en-page, that is, the broad functions of narrative organization, selection, and arrangement of both words and images in the space of a page” (111).

Complex page composition, such as a complicated imbrication of panels or a variation in 163

panel arrangement from page to page, disrupts the kind of automatic and somewhat linear reading experience that might suffice for more simplified or homogeneous page compositions (Horstkotte 38). This kind of composition “invites the reader to take more time than usual to figure out the links between panels” (Lefevre 29).

The page composition within March varies to such an extent that the reader never settles into a visual rhythm, leading it to feel at times “all over the place” (Spurgeon).

With few exceptions, even the most straightforward page composition refuses to be evenly ordered or solidly framed as panels are arranged slightly askew or barely overlapping (13, 17). The page itself frequently becomes a larger panel with smaller panels scattered upon it, and transitions from narrative events that occur at the top of one of these full page panels to the bottom often occur without a concrete traditional gutter to distinguish the separate points (31). The variation of composition from page to page is even, at times, so different as to be jarring; one page will be heavily layered with multiple panels, and then the turn of a page reveals a single page-as-panel full page spread (77-8).

Jared Gardner posits that readers are always brought back to a stage of early literacy when they open a new comic as they must take the time to familiarize themselves with the individual comics artist’s composition and overall visual style (Lecture). However,

Powell’s style of increased composition variation asks the readers to readjust their reading of the comic frequently throughout the text, keeping readers aware of the text as a constructed object they have to work to understand.

The extreme complication of Powell’s page construction works in tandem with this composition variation to even thrust the reader out of the book and make her bodily react to the book as object. Michael Joseph explains how an artist’s use of “exceedingly 164

small frames and image details” and “double-page illustrations” lead the reader to physically adjust her hold of the text, pulling the book in to squint at the minute details or pushing it out in order to scan the entirety of the larger spread (460). Powell has become known for his use of illegible word balloons, something he intentionally incorporated into the many riot scenes of March despite (although, I would suggest, possibly because of) reader complaints of visceral reactions like headaches (Spurgeon). When a reader has to pull the book up to her face in order to read a word balloon, and even then it is illegible, the book as (frustrating) object has become evident; thus even this complicated stylistic inclusion ties to the synthetic.

Another stylistic visual element Powell frequently employs is that of the violated frame. Silke Horstkotte avers that “the position, color, shape, and framing of a panel are just some of the factors that contribute to its meaning” (45); following this logic, the violation of a frame should contribute meaning to the text as well. Michael Joseph argues that the breaking of the panel “effaces the border between the actual world and its representation, and hence discloses the Aristotelian logic and rationalistic schemas guiding perception” (461). In March, there is little sanctity to the frame as Powell frequently expands beyond it, penetrates it, or deletes it altogether. One way he does this is by overlaying a long string of speech bubbles across multiple panels on a single page

(120); even when the speech bubbles are not part of a continuous string, they rarely remain confined inside a panel (18). Joseph further states that an author’s use of this narrative device is a “fundamental challenge. . . specifically to readers, and his transgression is against the book in general, and the culturally constructed invisibility of the reading artifact in particular” (463, emphasis in text). Like his other devices which 165

project the synthetic, this disregard for the structuring rules of the frame, and one that he visually represents in a variety of ways, continues to remind the reader of the text as object.

Joseph also describes this visual trope as “seeming to join with the external three- dimensional reality of the viewer, . . . assert[ing] a touch-and-feel existence, breaching their metaphorical banks” (461). Noticeable in Powell’s breaking of the frame is his repeated use of a hand interjecting into the panel. Early in the narrative as the protest upon the Edmund Pettus Bridge devolves into violence, John’s hands thrust outward, crossing the frame in a seeming attempt to grasp onto the panel for safety (9). The reader is positioned from a perspective that makes the hands appear to be her own, desperately reaching into the story. In subsequent pages, hands disrupt the continuity of the frame as they turn on showers (14), pick up cell phones (15), adjust radio dials (55), and shake other hands (67). Once, a hand actually crosses over two panels of different times—the narrative present and narrative past (26). The young narratee of John’s frame narrative thrusts his hand—and, along with it, himself—into both the past and the present. The narratee reaches into the story he is being told; the actual reader might do the same, and sure enough the facing page offers Powell’s first silhouetted representation of young John into which the reader can project herself.

All of these hands breaking the frames also remind the reader of the tangibility of these historical events to the present day. Gardner posits that “[n]arrating life and its traumas makes the past continuous with the present, bleeding its wounds into our daily life. . . the blending of fact and fiction, image and text, a blending that allows the present to be productively continuous with the past” (“Autography’s” 18). The breaking of the 166

frame allows us to remember the tenuous barriers between the past and the present. The

Civil Rights Movement might have been over fifty years ago, but systemic racial inequality, police brutality, and protests exploding into violent riots are very much a thing of the present. By erasing the exclusionary effects of the frame, hopefully readers will understand the parallels of the past to the present, and even more so hopefully the past may help to heal the present.

Powell has repeatedly commented on the “responsibility” he felt to the history of

Lewis’s memoir as he was contributing to the text’s construction (Howerby; Spurgeon).

The synthetic element Powell brings to March is important for this balancing act of the graphic memoir’s “fidelity constraint.” However, it also reminds the reader of Powell’s authorial hand in constructing the narrative as the visual mediator removed from the lived experience of the memoir. Ultimately, March is both memoir and history, and Lewis,

Aydin, and Powell have stressed a desire to see the text as one that will teach history. The

“responsibility” Powell feels regarding the text is an important one to consider in this goal. When dealing with history, artists do not just have a responsibility to historical accuracy, they also have ask themselves, as Hillary Chute queries, “What is the texture of narrative forms that are relevant to ethical representations of history? What are the current stakes surrounding the right to show and to tell history?” (462). In regards to this,

Chute argues that “An awareness of the limits of representation. . . is integrated into comics through its framed, self-conscious, bimodal form; yet it is precisely in its insistent, affective, urgent visualizing of historical circumstance that comics aspires to ethical engagement” (457). Furthermore, there is an imperative to engage with Soshana

Felman and Dori Laub’s request for a “contextualization of the text” as well as a 167

“textualization of the context” (qtd. in Chute 457, emphasis in original), a means of understanding the weaving of historical events, constructed texts recording historical events, and the contexts in which those texts are constructed. Chute believes that

“Graphic narrative accomplishes this work with its manifest handling of its own artifice, its attention to its seams. Its formal grammar rejects transparency and renders textualization conspicuous, inscribing the context in its graphic presentation” (457).

Powell’s inclusion of narrative devices that evoke the synthetic response performs this act of contextualizing the history as reaching the reader through a text via the visual

“textualization of the context” of narrativity.

This contextualization not only achieves a sense of ethical representation of history but also engages with the ethical responsibility of teaching history to kids. Part of participating in the act of instruction is that of making it not only informationally effective but also deeply affective. Lewis, Aydin, and Powell attempt to heed Steve

Sheinkin’s advice for writing history for kids: “The point is, it’s hard to remember anything about stiff, two-dimensional paintings, but it’s easy to remember stories about real people you know” (463). The comics medium goes a long way to support this, and

Lewis himself has commented on his belief that Powell’s illustrations “make the words come alive. . . gives the words the ability to breathe” (Cavna). Bringing affect into the history curriculum is a debated move in regards to ethical representation. Keith C. Barton and Linda S. Levstik explain with disapproval that some believe “authentic history education must avoid the shoals of care, lest rational understanding be drowned out by emotion” (228). However, they condemn this approach of “Care-less history” calling it “a soulless enterprise, a constraint on motivation that warrants reconsideration of the 168

subject’s place in the curriculum” and reminding authors and teachers that “[w]e cannot interest students in the study of history. . . if we reject their cares and concerns or if we dismiss their feeling and emotions” (Barton and Levstik 228-229). Sheinkin’s views of the role of narrative—and Lewis’s view of the role of graphic narrative—in affectively engaging readers with the history leads to the potential to create transformative interactions with history. According to Barton and Levstik, “[W]e can care for people in history when we want to respond to suffering by the victims of injustice or oppression, and we can care to change our beliefs or behaviors in the present based on what we have learned from our study of the past” (229, emphasis in text). This motivational affect is important for rallying child readers to choose to act upon what they read and participate in the fight for social justice, one of the rhetorical objectives of March.

However, Barton and Levstik gesture towards the same concerns Chute has addressed regarding ethical representations of history when they clarify that “[b]ecause narratives are so common, so widely used in our attempts to make meaning of the world, it is easy to forget that they have been intentionally constructed. . . . Because narratives are such powerful cultural tools, we may forget that they are only tools and that they mediate our access to history” (137). They critique the kind of passive ingestion and uncritical approach to history that sometimes occurs in classrooms as making it “difficult to say that [these students] actually know anything at all” and argue that “[t]o use history to understand the present or to solve modern problems, students must be able to analyze the creation of historical accounts (Barton and Levstik 83). Allan Kownslar posits that a curriculum reminding students of the constructedness of history meant students were

“less likely to be fooled or misled by vague statements, myths, or stereotypes in 169

textbooks, or those advanced by some politicians, journalists, salesmen, teachers, neighbors, or friends, and, equally important, by the students themselves” (qtd in Barton and Levstik 84). When viewed at in this light, Powell’s infusion of the synthetic through cartoonistic stylistic deviations, complex and varied page compositions, and violation of the frame all provide moments of reminding the reader of the constructedness of the text they are holding. In so doing, Powell’s illustrations facilitate active readings of the text and a critical understanding of history and the world.

Linda M. Christensen explains that “[t]eachers must draw students into what

Brazilian educator Paulo Freire described as a ‘critical dialogue about a text or a moment of society…to reveal it, unveil it, see its reason for being like it is, the political and historical context of the material’ ”( 211). Analytical readings, like the one performed within this essay, are exercises in learning to explore the contextualization of a text that will then lead to critical questions behind the intentions of that text, scaffolding the workings of critical literacy. It is imperative that students learn how to “use the tools of critical literacy to expose, to talk back to, to remedy any act of injustice or intolerance that they witness” (Christensen 211). Texts like March are useful tools for facilitating this critical literacy as they provide moments of stylistic disruption in the form of synthetic elements that become critical literacy doorways into the text for readers.

“Good Trouble, Necessary Trouble”: Chaos, Braiding, and “Being in the Wake”

Discussing the combination of the mimetic and the synthetic, Phelan writes, “As usually happens when both the mimetic and the synthetic components of the protagonist are emphasized, the thematic component of both character and narrative gets foregrounded” (Living 15). Performing a similar role of veracity of storytelling for the 170

youth readership that the unflinching depiction of Emmet Till’s body does, Powell’s heavy use of blackness and shadowing as well as stark illustrations of police brutality portray the gritty side of realism, a quality that tips the literary classification from realism over into its cousin naturalism, a natural connection as McCloud argues that those artists whose images are more realistic are more devoted to the values of nature and the natural

(57). In addition to privileging the natural, it could be said then that Powell’s use of his realistic style connects his work not just to reality but to that literary style of naturalism which in itself holds roots in African American literature. Henry Louis Gates Jr. and

Nellie Y. McKay explain the tipping point of realism into naturalism as the latter’s

“franker, harsher treatment of that reality” (qtd. in Low and Campano 27). David E. Low and Gerald Campano explain that “[i]n the African American literary tradition, naturalism is concerned with, among other things, poverty, violence, racism, criminalization, and social protest” (27). While Powell himself is white, he is responsible for the visual narrative elements of the previously constructed oral (and then subsequently written) tale of African American John Lewis’s memoir. In this way,

Powell uses his realistic style with tinges of naturalism to minimize the gap between himself as the outside illustrator and Lewis as the author. Throughout the work, Powell’s images reveal the heavier reality of naturalism symbolically through the overwhelming use of blacks and grays, something not common to most comics but that Powell credits as becoming a characteristic of his art in more recent years (Spurgeon, pars. 24-26). Finally, his illustrations reveal more literally the imbrications of politics, violence, injustice, and naturalism through their recording of the violent responses to the protesters’ nonviolent actions. 171

I believe that the complicated narrative structure of the March trilogy is a text that embodies the very complexity of what Christina Sharpe describes as “being in the wake” where “the wake [serves] as the conceptual frame of and for living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery” (2). Sharpe’s explanation of “the wake” is one of a Derridean nature in which “the wake” is made up of multiple, contextual understandings of the definition of “wake”: the rough waters churned up by a boat, the aftermath of turmoil, a mourning period after a loss, to awaken from sleep, and an awareness of one’s surroundings. Sharpe discusses that the creation and analysis of works that display the black diasporic experience all function simultaneously in all of these ways. So far, my analysis of March has attempted to show that the trilogy is engaged in “the wake” in various ways: through the presenting of necessary historical facts to be aware of the frequently erased and definitively brutal past of the United States and the mournful remembrance of those who died in this disturbing past.

One way the concept of the wake works in March is also in how the trilogy uses that history to “wake up” the reader and to simultaneously pull them in to the work that needs to be done, to make them see their responsibility, once “seeing” to engage in the work. This occurs in March: Book One through the synthetic use of the shillouetted protagonist John Lewis himself as a young boy. When Powell illustrates the congressman at the beginning of the flashback narrative, young John often appears silhouetted or obscured by shadows and angles. Perhaps the most abstract representation of this occurs when John is depicted reading the bible and subsequently preaching to his pet chickens

(27). In this illustration, John is completely drawn in silhouette, sitting on the porch reading his bible with the words of God literally imprinting themselves upon his figure. 172

The illustration itself is devoid of defining characteristics, making it much closer to the cartoonistic icons of which McCloud writes. As a result, it is possible to see this moment and the others like it as performing the role of the cartoonistic style. As McCloud explains, “The cartoon is a vacuum into which our identity and awareness are pulled.

An empty shell that we inhabit which enables us to travel in another realm. We don’t just observe the cartoon, we become it!” (36, bold in text). In this panel, Powell is utilizing the cartoon at a strategic moment to pull child readers into the text. The story is just beginning, and John—the future activist—is a child himself at this point. For child readers, this becomes a moment of strengthening reader identification with the protagonist so as to increase general interest in the narrative; however, it also supports a kind of identification in which the child reader can see herself inside the nondescript image of the child who will become a valuable member of the Civil Rights Movement. In this way, Powell’s momentary deviation from the realistic style becomes an invitation for the child reader to compare herself to John and see herself as a future activist. Together with the previous shadowed representations of John as he works in the barn and cares for the chickens (20, 22-24), this scene shows the seeds of social justice are in responsibility, morality, and compassion for others, all attainable goals for the child reader.

These moments of religious devotion and caring for chickens are not the only ones to portray young John in silhouette. Two other notable moments obscure John’s figure with shadows. The first is when John the narrator comments on his disappointment at the ultimate fate of his chickens. Speaking with disapproval of his parents’ choice to barter the chickens for services or kill them for Sunday suppers, John explains, “I’d cry, refuse to speak to them for the rest of the day—even skip that evening’s meal” (34). The 173

panel reveals John hunched in the shadows, turned away from his parents, yet somewhat indiscernible in the darkness beyond his disappointed eyes. In this scene, John reveals the first hints of protest in the face of injustice, so Powell poignantly illustrates him here in shadow, similar to the vacuuming silhouette, in order to pull in young readers to the act of remonstrance.

John continues his practicing of protest several pages later when he disagrees with his parents’ demands that he stay home from school to help work the fields. The image of

John over the next several panels is one that starts with him in clear detail drawn in the light, then shows him recede into obscurity in the darkness as he chooses to hide from his parents, and next has him simplified through a distant perspective as he runs to catch the school bus (51-2). This simplification and shadowing continues on the next page as he returns from school to face his father’s verbal but empty scolding (53). These visuals imply the importance of children seeing themselves as capable of protest, yet they do not pretend that these acts will always be successful (after all, the chickens are still sold or killed) or that they will not have potential consequences. Altogether, the silhouettes and shaded or simplified drawings of young John allow children to project themselves into a character who not only has a moral compass and devotion to others but also a penchant for protesting what he disapproves and getting into what Lewis has described himself as

“good trouble, necessary trouble” (Lewis, Aydin, Powell, “March: An Evening”). If

March is to serve the purpose of preparing children for activism and social justice, it must help them see themselves as having agency and making the choice to, at times, actively disobey adults. As John narrates in this scene, “This was a life decision I had made, and it was near-impossible to turn me away from it” (53). Of course, this does not mean others 174

did not try, and the very next page has John, once again in silhouette, being told by his mother, “don’t get in trouble. don’t you get in the way” (54, lowercase in text). John and the child reader projecting into this scene must see themselves as prepared for disobedience.

Conclusion

Works like March that are structured purposefully to help educators start that conversation within their classrooms. Teachers must take responsibility for directly addressing the presence of systemic racism and neither accept nor allow the rhetoric of post-raciality. An understanding of the history of racial injustice within the U.S. and an acknowledgement of that history’s relevance to present day conditions supports this call.

Johnson specifies this call for English educators:

What should be the responsibility of all English educators in the wake of

terror, death, and racial violence? In asking this question, we realize that

we, as educators, are complicit in some of these acts of racial violence

when we ignore the pain and overlook the wounds that Black and Brown

youth bear as they sit in our classrooms, trying to listen to us lecture while

the viral footage of Black and Brown death is repaying in their minds.

(Baker-Bell, Butler, and Johnson 123, emphasis in original)

Permitting post-raciality to permeate the classroom—whether explicitly or implicitly in one’s teaching, curriculum, or classroom cultural allowances—is thus a denial of these students’ realities.

The epigraph at the beginning of March states, “To the past and future children of the movement” (n.p.). From this statement it can be assumed that the interest of the text 175

goes in both time directions: to remember those who fought for civil rights in the past as well as to teach and inspire those who will fight for civil rights in the future. Within this epigraph is the powerful positioning of children as agentic—not just potential knowers but also potential doers. The text provides them with the tools to realize this power: requests to see themselves as activists, affective interaction with others, and practice points of critical engagement with history, texts, and the world. Standing over all of this is the imperative of the book, hidden in plain sight: march. March is at once many things—a title, a noun, a verb, and a complete imperative, not just informing readers of content but providing them with an urgent direction to go out and become part of the movement themselves, to go march. And in times like these, how truly imperative that is.

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Chapter 5: Conclusion: (Re)making Comics for Children and Young Adults

Throughout my dissertation, I have worked to delineate contextual graphic narratology and to utilize it as my methodology of study in comics for children and young adults. The sample of comics I worked with herein is small, encompassing only two different titles;42 however, Lumberjanes and March are strong examples of the quality contemporary comics for children and young adults. Furthermore, they represent the contemporary CCYA that stand in contradiction to the conservative ideologies at the core of the Comics Code, showing how CCYA is no longer weighed down by the legacy of the Code and its limited view on young readers’ capabilities.

I started this project with several questions that built upon one another to develop the layers for understanding in a fully critical and contextualized way CCYA today, both as general representatives of the form and specific examples of the texts available for young readers.

1. How does the structure of the comics medium work?

2. How does the history of the broader world of comics lead up to and further

influence comics for children and young adults?

3. How does a visual culture analytic framework enable new perspectives about

comics written for children and young adults

42 Although, as the titles are both series, I actually looked at eight separate primary texts (the first five of the Lumberjanes series and the entire March trilogy). 177

4. How can critical theories be used to understand comics as a valued literacy

and valid literature?

5. How do contemporary authors of comics for children and young adults utilize

the comics medium to construct alternative concepts of childhood?

In exploring the above questions, I sought to build a structural, historical, interdisciplinary, critical approach with which to attain a holistic view of contemporary

CCYA and their implied child readers.

Of course, each of these facets can be used on their own to analyze a text and will produce specified insight into that text. As I discussed in the introduction, most work on

CCYA falls into one or two of these questions and their areas of interest. The one area that has started developing more recently is the structural approach. Although, as previously mentioned, this is also on the rise in the various fields that incorporate CCYA

(e.g., children’s literature, comics studies, literacy education, etc.). However, by taking my cues on interdisciplinarity from a visual culture analytic framework, I have worked within this dissertation to describe and display the dialogic results of bringing together multiple foci and fields in order to understand how contemporary CCYA are made, for whom they are made, and why they are made. I argue that in doing so, my analysis connects otherwise frequently siloed fields and asks them to talk with one another in order to use comics for young readers to perform the analytical and pedagogical work of social justice.

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A Call to Action: Contextual Graphic Narratology and CCYA for Social Justice

Who Is My Audience?

The implications of my work are most important for teacher educators working in a wide variety of fields. Of course, children’s literature courses and literacy courses are often located in education departments and thus largely aimed at preservice teachers to begin with. The teacher educators in these fields often design their courses with objectives regarding application of methods, lessons, and texts in their preservice teachers’ future classrooms. The work I have done here is intended to ask these teacher educators to reconsider CCYA within their own courses and reframe how they talk about and teach these comics texts. Specifically, my goal was to provide these teacher educators with a framework through which they could better understand the comics they were teaching and a toolbox to facilitate the integration of comics within their classrooms. This work is particularly important since these teacher educators’ audience— the preservice teachers who will be using CCYA in their future classrooms—would benefit from an explanation of how all of these components inform a reading of comics.

This objective includes how the tools of disruption could be recognized and used (both within the text by the author and within the classroom by the teacher) to disrupt students’ passive reading, facilitating the classroom rhetorical exploration of how the tools are being used, to what effect, and why.

I am also addressing scholars publishing within the various related fields who analyze CCYA and whose scholarly audience includes the aforementioned teacher educators working with the texts the scholars are explicating. Publishing usually requires a specialized—and, thus, unfortunately limited—scope. This approach is fruitful for

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authors and publications attempting to tailor their work to a very specific audience who might have a particular compositional style they are comfortable with (e.g., the reporting style of education journals or the varied expository style of humanities journals) (Belcher

47). Furthermore, writing in this way towards a limited scope of scholars helps authors avoid unnecessary recapitulation of well-known foundational concepts to their fields.

Unfortunately, this practice also perpetuates an exclusionary siloing effect that shuts down interdisciplinary communication. If academics stay in their siloed fields and publications, they run the risk of speaking into echo chambers of academia and working with a narrowed focus and understanding. In addition, sometimes placing the well-known foundational concepts of one field into conversation with the audience and objectives of a completely separate field can provide new insight in both fields that was previously unseen. This is what Karen Coats argues for in her piece on plurality and children’s studies approach to children’s literature (“Keeping”). This is also what Charles Hatfield asks of children’s literature and comics studies (“Comic”). Altogether, I hope that my use of contextual graphic narratology, informed by a visual culture framework, in order to explore comics for children and young adults might serve as a model of this kind of interdisciplinary epistemology that breeds new conversations and connections.

I admit one limitation of my study is that literacy scholars are more broadly referenced throughout instead of interwoven with details. Future goals for this research could be to better flesh out the relationships between the fields as I have set out within this dissertation in greater detail with New Literacy Studies (Street), multiliteracies (The

New London Group; Serafini), and pedagogy (Freire; L. M. Christensen). Therefore, an important next step to continue this conversation is to have more direct communication

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and collaboration with literacy and education scholars interested in the same goals, developing a dual plan of attack where we reach towards one another, with the theoretical work I am doing here that looks at the implied reader of the text, and the empirical work that others are doing (Low; Dallacqua) that looks at the actual reader of the text. Ideally, a model of this kind of interdisciplinary epistemology for exploring CCYA would look something like this:

What Is My Message?

I argue there are several possibilities for what this framing can do as an intersection of literacy education, literature studies, and youth studies all working towards the objective of an engagement with social justice. Achieving these possibilities, however, depends upon the individual’s choice to engage with the relevant calls to action: to counter the marginalization of texts, to construct childhood as agentic instead of

Romantic, and to concede that all literacy/literary acts—writing, reading, teaching—are political.

Counter the Marginalization of Texts

As discussed in the introduction and chapter two, CCYA has a history of being delegitimized. CCYA’s respectability faces various fronts of attack in that it is a visual text, a comic, and children’s literature—all historically maligned categorizations.

Recapping some of my prior points, one of the core tenets of visual culture as a study is the respect and analysis of visually composed texts regardless of their cultural capital

(Sturken and Cartwright). In fact, the field seeks to understand the profound rhetorical effect of even the seemingly most innocuous “low brow” visual texts, notably including visual ads, comics, children’s visual texts, and other mass media visual popular culture

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pieces that had historically been eschewed by “legitimate” academic scholarship

(Mirzoeff). This history of comics, however, shows a particularly problematic positioning as it was not only devalued based on being perceived as low brow, cheap publishing but also because of its relationship to a juvenile audience (Wright). Even into the early 21st century, comics authors and scholars were still attempting to claim respectability through rejecting any association with the child (Groensteen, “Why”; Hatfield, “Comic”;

Heimermann and Tullis).

Comics are not the only texts to suffer from their relation to young readers. The denigration of young adult literature as a whole has been widely vocalized by some and silently internalized by many. Perhaps most well-known is the 2014 Slate article by Ruth

Graham titled “Against YA.” Graham pulled no punches in her condemnation of YA texts, chastising the adults who read them by writing, “Read whatever you want. But you should feel embarrassed when what you’re reading was written for children,” and,

“Fellow grown-ups, at the risk of sounding snobbish and joyless and old, we are better than this.” Graham’s disrespect for YA might have been loud and harsh, causing a stir with its publication, but her critique that people who are choosing YA as opposed to “the complexity of great adult literature. . . are missing something” is also reflected in the general hesitance to place YA in classrooms with actual adolescents. Regardless of the fact that YA is written for an actual young adult audience and that these books could engage students in critical conversations about their own contemporary world, YA books are often avoided in the high school curriculum. Numerous articles published over the last couple of decades have implored educators to give YA a chance in their classrooms

(Gibbons, Dail, and Stallworth; Bushman; Alsup).

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When they are promoted for use in the classroom, comics and YA alike are often touted as the sources to “engage struggling readers” or an “easy” and “fun” way to get teens reading (Worthy; McVicker; Fisher; Gibbons, Dail, and Stallworth). While all of these arguments are true and valid in their own right, in order to do the kind of work I am calling for here, teachers need a respect for CCYA as both comics and literature for young people. The teachers and scholars doing this work must give comics for children and young adults more of a chance—not just because they are “easy” to read or because young people “enjoy” visual texts, but because these texts can do the really critical work that we need to do right now with readers. CCYA today have great diversity in character representation, are engaging with critical social themes, and are carefully constructed in a way that challenges the young reader both in literacy and in critical thinking. In order to do this, educators must not approach comics as if they are readily accessible just because they are visuals. They need to respect comics as constructed pieces of art with their own unique compositional means.

Construct Childhood as Agentic

In order to view CCYA as valid tools for social justice, educators must reframe in a respectful way how they view texts intended for young people. This is an issue that both children’s literature and comics scholarship have as two entirely separate fields: both are assumed to be easy because they are written for children. This belief, in itself, is a devaluation of the child as implied reader. The implied reader of both comics and children’s literature is the child, and when adults devalue these forms of literature they are making judgements about what children are capable of based upon the ideological construct of the child as the naïve, unknowing, and un-contextualize. In other words, they

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are assuming the implied reader of these texts is/should match their ideological construction of the actual child in the world as the Romantic child. What becomes important, then, in this new “defense” of comics is not just to defend comics but to respect the form and push it forward. This, however, should not be done through creating the legitimacy of CCYA sans child readers; instead, it should be done by putting the child back in comics and valuing what the child can handle.

This historical and continuing disempowering of the actual real child through the ideological construct of the child is precisely why the construct must be deconstructed in order to reconstruct our understanding of children and fix some of the broken aspects of our society dependent upon the “ideal” over the real. As Sánchez-Eppler asserts,

“[B]ooks written for children remain one of the best gauges we have for a particular society’s views of childhood, and one that we know children themselves engaged with directly.” “The idea of the child is repeatedly made and remade in the stories told to children” (Sánchez-Eppler), and the censorship of children’s texts is not only driven by adults’ rigid adherence to the Romantic child but also one factor for how the concept has been maintained for so long.

However, authors are already creating an empowered alternative to the Romantic child. Authors in children’s and young adult literature writ large—including CCYA in the early 21st century—have been troubling the representation of the implied reader by putting things into the text that are highly uncomfortable. Books like March, and many other contemporary CCYA like Yang’s Boxers & Saints, are often challenged as being too “graphic” for children and teens and that even adolescent readers need to be protected from some of the harsh images and cruel histories within them. Indeed, as the March

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trilogy continues, the images are painful to see as systemic racism becomes grotesquely violent and the pages begin to fill with more and more bodies—many of young people.

While these scenes might push my students and many adults to question these texts’

“appropriateness” for young reader, I adamantly argue that these books are not intended for an adult audience; they are intended for a children’s and young adult audience. For example, there is an implication at the end of March: Book One that the end of the book is not the end of the story but merely the end of book one. Audiences need to read book two, which also concludes with “end of book two” and not the end of March. Even in

March: Book Three, Lewis emphasizes that this is “the end of my story as I knew it” not the end of the story of Civil Rights. All of this reminds us that the child readers—the

“future children of the movement” to whom Lewis dedicated his series in book one— who read book one will still be seeing the grim images in book three: elementary, middle, teen. These images are important for people of all ages to see because of the fact that they happened. These events happened, do happen, are still happening to children and young adults. Seeing the images may make readers feel uncomfortable, but refusing to see them will not erase their reality.

“Uncomfortable” has been an important repeated phrase by bold and innovative children’s and YA authors: from Sherman Alexie saying that the best children’s books are those written in blood, to Ashley Hope Pérez writing in ALAN about the need for readers to feel uncomfortable (“Embracing”). Gene Luen Yang adds to this encouragement of the uncomfortable with his Reading Without Walls campaign to try unfamiliar texts (forms, authors, and characters) and his most recent declaration for the need to be uncomfortable (“Comfort”). For all of these authors, engaging with the world

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requires embracing a discomfort. Ultimately, this means we must get comfortable with discomfort. Pérez reveals this as part of the rhetoric that is the discomfort woven throughout her novel. She argues that learning to deal with this discomfort is:

a life skill and a way of exploring the ethical implications of how and why

and what we read. This subject of “difficulty” or discomfort in reading is

an area of overlap between my fiction, which makes some people

uncomfortable, and my academic work, which often examines how

difficult topics are handled in literature. Some treatments of violence, for

example, are horrifying but cathartic in a way that lets readers “move on”

from the tragedy. Other treatments don’t give the reader that kind of

release. It’s terribly uncomfortable to be put in that position as a reader,

and yet I also think it’s important. (qtd. in Stevenson and Davis, “Part 2”)

We must face the uncomfortable realities of children seeing violence and being a part of violence. Yet even as the world demands us to open our eyes, wake up, and stay woke, adults who have the privilege of letting their children remain in the dark are standing in the way of this imperative call to save and protect all of our children because they fear it threatens the innocence via naiveté of their own children that they have been trying so hard to protect.

Robin Bernstein’s writes about protection and childhood in her 2017 op-ed for the

New York Times, using her ideological framework of racial innocence that I have used as the foundation of my concept of the Romantic child. It this article, she posits that when it comes to literature and children, adults need to move away from innocence and protection. As long as we keep talking about what we cannot show kids because we have

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to protect them, in other words what we censor, we are immediately erasing lived experiences. Bernstein argues that we must start with questioning “innocence”: “When we argue that black and brown children are as innocent as white children, and we must, we assume that childhood innocence is purely positive. But the idea of childhood innocence itself is not innocent: It’s part of a 200-year-old history of white supremacy”

(“Let”). Bernstein puts the U.S. nostalgia over and passion for protecting (some) children’s innocence in critical perspective: “By understanding children’s rights as human rights, we can begin to undermine the political power of childhood innocence, a cultural formation that has proved, over and over, to be one of white supremacy’s most potent weapons” (“Let”). As long as we argue that we must protect the innocent child from the world, we are ensuring that there will be droves of children who must be excluded in order for that to happen. We don’t live in a world in which this innocence is possible (and, I would further argue, this innocence is not actually ideal in the way it restricts children’s ability to grow critically). As long as we live in the world that we do, our naïve devotion to the Romantic child, our belligerent refusal to let go of the privilege this construct bestows upon some children, will continue to create ghettos of youth that are unprotected because they do not fit into the ideological construction of innocence.

Instead of protection, Bernstein calls for us to “create language that values justice over innocence” (“Let”). I believe that in the fields of importance to CCYA—children’s literature, literacy education, and youth cultural studies, we can work towards Bernstein’s call to replace this rhetoric of innocence with a rhetoric of social justice by emphasizing children not as naïve innocents but as knowers and doers, much like how childhood is constructed in the CCYA I explore in this dissertation. All of this connects back to John

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Lewis’s encouragement to children to get in “good trouble, necessary trouble” (“March”).

I am not arguing that all contemporary CCYA do this, nor that only CCYA can do this.

What I am hoping to do is provide readers, teachers, and scholars with a framework for understanding the visual way that these comics artists are contributing to growth within children’s and young adult literature right now to make the reader uncomfortable for the purposes of social justice, to avoid the rhetoric of innocence.

Concede Literacy/Literature as Political

An engaged reader is one who may at times connect with the text but also questions the text, so there’s the balance between being inside the text and outside the text, between the aesthetic transactive reading of the text (Rosenblatt). When it really boils down to literacy for social justice and texts towards social justice, there must always be a questioning of a text as a construct, to some extent, whether greater or lesser. An

Althusserean approach sees all things as ideological, as I discussed in chapter two, and a

Freirean approach to pedagogy that sees all teaching as political. What becomes clear is that everything in relation to literature and literacy is political: the books we teach (or do not), the forms we privilege in our publishes analyses (or overlook), the representations we highlight in our work (or erase), and the literary methods of textual engagement we encourage (or discourage).

If we set up children of any age to assume that any reading does not need to be questioned, in one way or another, then this is the moment when those ideologies are made invisible and normative, when they can be easily internalized without being questioned. This is the work of ideological analysis that is important to critically engaging with contemporary CCYA: making ideology visible. As Althusser explains,

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“[T]hose who are in ideology believe themselves by definition outside of ideology: one of the effects of ideology is the practical denial of the ideological character of ideology by ideology: ideology never says, ‘I am ideological.’. . . . [On the other hand], the accusation of being in ideology only applies to others, never to oneself” (700). Thus, in performing the ideology of the agentic child, of encouraging our students—and their students—to question, of deconstructing their own marginalization by challenging the othering of others, it becomes necessary for the ideology of the agentic child to perform with the transparency of its being an ideology—an ideological paradox in and of itself.

Althusser posits that “ideology is eternal” and “ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects; which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always- already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are always-already subjects” (700, emphasis in text). The inevitability of our actions constructing the ideology that will thus interpellate us into the very same ideology to which we are actively contributing means that to live outside of an ideological position is impossible. Even by proclaiming a rejection of all ideology, one is still enacting an ideology. Thus, in rejecting the choice of an ideology due to a personal belief that it is too political—much like the actions of isolation that support the principle of the Romantic child as apolitical—we are ultimately choosing the ideology of neutrality. And, as Elie Wiesel reminds us, neutrality is still choosing a side: “We must take sides. Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim. Silence encourages the tormentor, never the tormented.”

What Is My Purpose?: Surviving Troubling Times

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As Phil Nel has writes, “Movements of wildly different political aspirations have long understood if you want to change the world, you start with the children” (282). The concept of the child guides how we write for, interact with, and what we expect from the child. The understanding of the child who will be picking up the text drives the authors in their construction of the children’s book. Furthermore, the understanding of the child’s capabilities determines what teachers expect their children are capable of handling, thus altering book choice and the way a book is taught. Texts and courses guided by the ideological construct of the Romantic child continue to deny the power, presence, and potential within the real lives of children. But this is not the way that our pedagogy and publications should remain—not if we as responsible teacher educators and scholars of texts like CCYA have anything to say about it. As Mindi Rhoades asserts, “Educators must acknowledge oppression, recognize students’ current and potential agency, and create safe spaces to research and strive for social justice” (320). CCYA are already doing this, from March with its stark visual representation of the brutalized body of

Emmett Till43 to Lumberjanes with its refusal to adhere to hegemonic constructions of gender and sexuality. And through contemporary texts intended for young readers—from traditional prose texts to the powerful CCYA that I have addressed herein—the continued evolution of the child is happening, bringing us out of the darkness that is the willing blindness of the Romantic child and into the light of the Agentic child—if we are willing and brave enough to see. As Pérez points out, discomfort is “important because it

43 Katherine Capshaw further discusses the importance of photographs to the Civil Rights Movement, including the visualization of Till at his mother’s insistence, in her work Civil Rights Childhood: Picturing Liberation in African American Photobooks (ix-x). 190

shouldn’t always be easy to ‘read past’ suffering. I’d even say that reckoning with discomfort often has an ethical dimension” (qtd. in Stevenson and Davis, “Part 2”).

On July 6, 2016, Diamond Reynolds live-streamed the death of her boyfriend

Philando Castile, the result of another traffic-stop-turned-deadly for a black man.

Echoing Pérez’s point, I was reluctant to watch the video, afraid of participating in the objectification of another black man’s body as well as the hesitance to engage with what I knew would be an emotionally uncomfortable video. However, I also felt that I owed it to

Castile and Reynolds to bear witness to the trauma. Reynolds narrated the event and explained that her daughter was in the back seat, witnessing the entire thing. One chilling moment in this video, however, is when with only one minute left of filming, Reynolds’s daughter Dae’ann becomes the voice of comfort for her own mother’s grief. When the terror begins to set in and Reynolds’s veil of composure falls, a small but steady voice chimes in beside her: “It’s ok mommy. It’s ok. I’m right here with you.” Dae’ann

Reynolds, the witness of this death and the voice of comfort, was four years old at the time (Domonoske and Chappel). The construct of the Romantic child and how that concept is used to protect the innocence of some and not of others throws into stark contrast the pervasive claims in our society that “all lives matter” and that the most vulnerable populations including children must be protected with the stark proof that not all lives matter and not all children are protected. Dae’ann’s experience as a child is excluded from such childhood protection by the cruel realities of systemic racial violence in the U.S. today.

The idea that any child at all should have to see the blood stain her father figure’s chest should be enough of a rallying cry for adults that we must do something different if

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we truly care about childhood and want to protect children. We must empower children, recognize their realities, and give them the tools to make this a better place. By giving them the agentic, antiracist tools of the right to see/be seen, to critically analyze the ideology present in the texts they read and the society that surrounds them, and to aid them in acquiring a necessary comfort with discomfort, we “protect” them by empowering them to be agents of change, by respecting their place in the critical conversations of contemporary society. I agree with Pat Enciso’s observation, that “I think I have learned to be a better educator as I have gained a surer sense of my intention to interrupt and deny the veil of racism in schooling” (174). Enciso asserts that “what it means to teach and do research in an unjust society” requires working with “insights from linguistic, antiracist, and poststructuralist theories of identity and social relations” (150).

Altogether, her approach to a social justice pedagogy “in the midst of social inequities and daily, local constructions of discrimination” are built on the same important interdisciplinary foundation I argue for here (150). In particular, Enciso’s research and pedagogical objective that “[r]elations can be transformed by making ‘the making of meaning’ the object of study” (150) are fundamental for my work throughout as I’m asking the scholars who read my work, the educators who engage with my theories, and the students who take my classes to make the “making of the meaning” of innocence, ideology, and many other social and textual constructs visible for analysis.

What I am hoping to do with the tools of disruption and the potential of CCYA is to follow both Enciso’s objective above as well as John Lewis’s: “to make it plain”

(Lartey). Lewis internalized the importance of “make it plain” as a tenet of civil rights activism from advice he heard frequently from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. And while

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Lewis believes that choosing to create his story for young people “in the form of a graphic novel is making it plain and making it simple”—and he even asked Powell to use this concept in guiding his illustrations—no one can call March “plain” or “simple” by any derogatory meanings of the words. The construction of March is highly detailed and complex and the concepts being reckoned with in the series are deeply complicated still today. But what the chaos and complicated construction of the illustrations do is make many things “plain”: that comics can be powerful tools, that young people should not be taken for granted, that any construction can be deconstructed and reconstructed, and, ultimately, if we are looking for a hero to save us we are going to have to be agentic and save ourselves. I believe that comics for children and young adults can be a tool in service of that messy work of surviving troubling times and changing the world for the better.

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