Strong Bonds: Child-Animal Relationships in Comics
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Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics This publication an outcome of the COMICS project which has received funding from the European Research Council (ERC) under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme (grant agreement no. 758502) Couverture : Jinchalo ©Matthew Forsythe. Used by permission. Image courtesy Drawn & Quarterly. The editor and the publisher would like to thank Matthew Forsythe for allowing them to use an image from his graphic novel Jinchalo for the cover. Discussed in detail in Laura Pearson’s chapter in this volume, the image shows the child protagonist, Voguchi, fascinated by and merging with the plant and animal life around her. The image poetically captures this volume’s concerns with disentangling—and re-entangling—the connections between children and animals in comics. Dépôt légal D/2020/12.839/28 ISBN 978-2-87562-259-4 © Copyright Presses Universitaires de Liège Place du 20 août, 7 B–4000 Liège (Belgique) http://www.presses.uliege.be Tous droits de traduction et de reproduction réservés pour tous pays. Imprimé en Belgique Collection ACME 6 Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics edited by Maaheen Ahmed Presses Universitaires de Liège 2020 Table of Contents Introduction Maaheen Ahmed Child-animal Relationships in Comics: A First Mapping .................................. 9 Alternative Families Peter W.Y. Lee The Maternal Arf!: Raising Canines in the Roaring Twenties in Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie ............................................................................................. 29 Gert Meesters and Pascal Lefèvre Towards an Unexpected Equivalence: Animals, Children and Adults in the Popular Flemish Strip Jommeke .............................................................. 51 Jennifer Marchant Hergé’s Animal Sidekicks: The Adventures of Snowy and Jocko ...................... 71 Queered Relationships Olivia Hicks (Super) Horsing Around: The Significance of Comet in Supergirl .................. 91 Nicole Eschen Solis A Girl and Her Dinosaur: The Queerness of Childhood in Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur ............................................................................................ 109 Childhood under Threat José Alaniz “Winner Take All!”: Children, Animals and Mourning in Kirby’s Kamandi .............................................................................................................. 129 Mel Gibson “Once upon a time, there was a very bad rat…”: Constructions of Childhood, Young People, Vermin and Comics ................. 149 6 Table of Contents Shiamin Kwa The Panther, the Girl, and the Wardrobe: Borderlessness and Domestic Terror in Panther ............................................................................................................ 165 Politics Michael Chaney and Sara Biggs Chaney Animal-child Dyad and Neurodivergence in Peanuts .................................... 183 Fabiana Loparco The Most Loyal of Friends, the Most Lethal of Enemies: Child-animal Relationships in Corriere dei Piccoli during the First World War ............... 195 Poetics Emmanuelle Rougé A Poetics of Anti-authorianism: Child-animal Relationships in Peanuts and Calvin and Hobbes ..................................................................................... 225 Benoît Glaude Child-animal Interactions in Yakari’s Early Adventures: A Zoonarratological Reading ............................................................................. 239 Laura A. Pearson Graphic Cross-pollinations and Shapeshifting Fables in Matthew Forsythe’s Jinchalo ................................................................................................................ 257 Postscript Philippe Capart Boule & Bill: Unwrapped ................................................................................... 279 List of contributors .......................................................................................... 287 Index ........................................................................................................................... 291 Introduction Child-animal Relationships in Comics: A First Mapping Maaheen Ahmed Children and animals are recurrent, favorite characters in comic strips. Many of the most well-known young comics protagonists have pets or animal friends partaking in their daily lives and adventures: Charlie Brown has Snoopy, his independent, precocious dog, Calvin has Hobbes, a stuffed tiger animated by the boy’s imagination, The Beano’s Dennis the Menace eventually acquired an equally destruc tive canine companion called Gnasher, Tintin (successfully eluding the adult-child distinction, but remaining in many ways a child with a degree of agency accorded only to adults) has Snowy. Already the Yellow Kid was accompanied by several stray dogs, cats and other animals that accentuated the action and the humor. Decades later, the importance of animal sidekicks persists, as exemplified by the series devoted to Spirou’s fantastic Marsupilami. These children and their ani mal friends combine characteristics of both adults and children, which ensures their appeal to a broad audience and offers clues to the complexity underlying these characters, contradicting their flattened appearance and frivolous acts. Thus, for Umberto Eco, “Schulz’s children create a little universe in which our tragedy and our comedy are performed” and “Snoopy carries to the last metaphysical fron- tier the neurotic failure to adjust”. Even though child-animal relationships have been a staple of comics pro- duction, they remain overlooked by comics scholarship, which is only tentatively broaching the study of children and comics, as exemplified by recent publications (Abate and Sanders; Abate and Tarbox; Gordon; Hatfield; Heimermann and Tullis). In expanding on existing scholarship and combining it with studies of ani mals in comics (Groensteen; Herman; Yezbick), this anthology seeks to build stronger bridges between the fields of comics studies, childhood studies and animal studies 10 Maaheen Ahmed and takes a first step towards a more profound and holistic understanding of ani- mals and children in comics. Covering a historically and culturally diverse corpus, each chapter in this book elaborates on an original aspect of the bonds between chil dren and animals that are presented or, less frequently, ruptured. If animals are tropic, in the sense of embodying a central structural element of a story or a medium (cf. Ortiz-Robles), we might need an entirely new bestiary for comics that captures the transformation the animal undergoes in comics. The most dominant animal in this bestiary would be the funny animal. Only associated with chil dren since the 1930s, these funny animals, playing on their apparent innocence and childishness also voiced critique and satire (cf. Groensteen; Gardner). Embod- ying the childish characteristics frequently associated with comics, the funny animal also highlights the ambiguity of those associations. This is already discernible in charac ters such as Mickey Mouse, who are now assimilated as innocent, harmless components of children’s culture, but who started out with more adult, anarchic inclinations. The funny animal embodies crucial, often overlooked elements of comics history including the drive to animate and with it to anthropomorphize, as sug gested by Thierry Groensteen in Animaux en cases (which can be translated as ani mals in panels, boxes or cages). This drive coexists with the impulse to entertain, usually through provoking laughter. Narratologist David Herman, in many ways like Ortiz-Robles, suggests that comics with animals entail a rethinking of narrative structure. Animal studies scholar Glenn Willmott explains this complexity through the example of (the ani- mated) Donald Duck: Disney’s Donald Duck is neither a bird that talks, nor a human who quacks, but a unified organic figure with traces of duck and human drawn into each vocal syllable and graphic line, a figure whose identity and coherence is sustained not by the recognition of individual parts but by the dynamic and functional orchestra of parts in motion, organizing its own space and time (840). Both comics children (cf. Chaney, Reading Lessons) and comics animals are an integral part of comics vocabulary. A key starting point for exploring child- ani mal relationships is animation and its corollary, anthropomorphization. In placing animals and humans on comparable planes, anthropomorphization relies on a problematic illusion of comparability: is it a moment of restrained animal empowerment? Or is it inevitably shackled in an anthropocentric hierarchy? Scholars approaching animal studies from diverse angles such as Steve Baker, Éric Baratay and David Herman suggest that there is no categorical answer. Focusing on language, Mel Chen has admirably shown how animacy can confer agency and power. In reactivating the linguistic concept of animacy, which confers degrees of “liveness” to nouns and situates them in “an animate hierarchy” (3), Chen encour- ages indulging in the thought experiment of restructuring such hierarchies to under stand the extent to which animation also implies power and agency and how it is embedded in broader structures of control and even persecution. Child-animal Relationships in Comics 11 Hence, the animal’s perspective (while remaining aware of the role played by human interpretation in conveying such a perspective) is a pro ductive means of interrogating anthropocentric structures and presumptions. This book builds