Panel Check! Racist images in comics.

Before shelving a book in our collection, no matter the review nor recommendation, here at the Takoma Park MD Library we always run a ‘panel check’ on every graphic novel we add.

This means I read a great many comics of course, the point here is to confirm where a book belongs in our collection, and in our children’s section to avoid any upsetting surprises for patrons hunting for an appropriate book for their kid.  Adult language, realistic violence, sexually charged situations, mature topics– these are all reasons why a book may step up the ladder to the next higher age category.  (See promotion criteria at the bottom of this article).

Occasionally we get ambushed by a wolf-in-sheep’s-clothing and buy a book intended for a young audience, but discover a single panel of art that bumps it to a higher category.   Kid-to-grown-up ‘booby-trapped’ books are especially upsetting when an otherwise great story, appropriate for all ages, is derailed by unfortunate racial stereotypes or caricatures.

Here is a smattering of otherwise excellent books that are tainted by their own prejudices.

More action packed YA books for Girls (Celadore, Gunnerkrigg Court)

Many of the best comics produced today begin as webcomics.   The reason is simple, it costs little to nothing to post your content online seeking an audience, where back-in-the-day creators would self-publish only after maxing out credit cards for the initial print run, or going the ‘zine route and taking a job at a copy shop for the free print-outs.

Now the world is wide open, we’re in a renaissance for comics art as the technology provides both new tools for production and an instant outlet for an audience to find the work.

Granted the traditional publishing houses often overlook these series as they don’t fit the industry standards, however since the entire web-scape can track them down and lay eyeballs on the content, occasionally these books attract enough readers to encourage a real-world publisher to risk a print run.

(Better still, librarians who are searching for new books but want to get a preview may take a peek to see if the book fits their own standards).

Here are two in that category that I’d recommend you enjoy.

Rust: Visitor in the Field, by Royden Lepp (also: tidbits from the NYCC).

In that vein (hunting for stories that make my eyeballs dance) I recently walked the show floor at the New York Comics Convention with my sonar pinging, sculling the aisles for hidden treasures.   I tend to walk the floor to scope things out on day one, then return on later days to pick up things I must have.

On my last day, so far empty handed, I decided to load up before heading home and stopped by the Archaia booth.  They had a buy-one-get-one sale where I stocked up on hardcovers of favorite comics for my own home shelves.

There I discovered a book that opened that barn door in my head and let the prairie sky in.

The book is Royden Lepp’s  Rust: Visitor in the Field.

Criteria for judging quality in comics (from a talk at the University of Maryland).

I always enjoy our yearly session talking comics with the ‘gradual’ students at the College of Information Sciences at UMD, in large part because interesting questions get raised that I had not yet considered.  Here the question was:  ‘If you were developing an award for comics, what criteria would you decide if a comic is noteworthy?’  In other words, how do I tell if a comic is good?

Top 15 list for Reluctant Readers, and how to ‘Comics Jam’!

Here is another letter from a school media person:

Hello,
I’m planning on introducing a reluctant reader group to graphic novels and I am thusly wondering what would be your first 15-20 buys?  

I am planning on introducing the titles and then letting the boys select one title then maybe next session having them report on their book.

Do you have any experience with reading groups, and if so does this seem like a format that would work, or should I run it differently?

Ghostopolis by Doug TenNapel

Doug TenNapel (sorta rhymes with ‘ten-APE-hell’)  produces quirky and interesting books that challenge the brain.

I enjoy every panel of ‘em though they require some cataloging gymnastics because while they have an all-ages sensibility (an appreciation for the gross, an appealingly goofy sense of violence, enough action to keep the story moving, and kid heroes who have wit and cunning) still there’s usually one panel per book that causes me to promote ‘em to our Young Adult side.

Reading through the panels you’ll occasionally hit a speed bump in an errant curse word, a realistically rendered birth scene (Earthboy Jacobus), a splotch of realistic gore (Frink), or a full size Tyrannosaur dropping  steaming heaps of dung on a neighbor’s car (Tommysaurus Rex)…

His relatively recent (2010) Ghostopolis tip-toes this line well.  There are just enough lines of low-brow slapstick humor to engage the Captain Underpants set, and sufficient interesting plotlines (and even romance!) to appeal to older readers.   This is a book I can read to the masses at our monthly Comics Jam (comics read-aloud programs) to hold them in rapt attention — without worrying too much that I’ll hit a squeamish bit.

G-Man: Learning to Fly, by Chris Giarrusso

It’s tricky to find good all-ages superhero comics that stand alone.  Many purporting to be kid-friendly still don’t quite get it– filling their pages with those excessively bulgy men and women who tend to solve problems by slamming each other through walls (or else, bereft of their ability to commit mayhem in the name of justice, they race around battling non-sentient menaces: natural disasters or general misunderstanding, waving a stern finger in rebuke).

Another subgenere of all ages super-types  parodies the titles of mainstream comics via cartoony caricatures of the heroes, usually morphed into kid bodies.  The pint-sized wisenheimers prank each other and behave as naughty brats, while sporting the powers of their grown counterparts.   These satirical stories work best if you already know the characters and the Universe of their storylines.  The japes and wisecracks tend to fall flat otherwise.

Chris Giarusso has penned a couple of this sort of book (Mini-Marvels, in the Marvel comics universe), and manages to wring a snicker out of  a well-read comics fan.   But the books don’t stand alone on their own merit.

By contrast  Giarusso’s superkid comic G-Man: Learning to Fly (Image Comics 2010, and the 2nd volume G-man: Cape Crisis ) not only stands alone, but flies around in giddy loop de loops divebombing the neighbors and chasing pigeons out of the sky.  Or something like that.

Zita the Space Girl, by Ben Hatke

Zita receives dubious consolation

Honorable, fiercely determined and a good friend, the titular protagonist of  Zita the Space Girl has many admirable qualities as a hero for youngsters.  She’s also the sort of person who pushes a big red button just to see what happens.  

The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook, by Eleanor Davis

We have many new graphic novels just added to the collection, but I want to clear out a backlog of excellent kids books I was holding aside to add to the ‘canon’ of really top-notch timeless all-ages books that should not be missed.

One more in the category of ‘instant classics’  is Eleanor Davis’  action-science nerd-’venture:   The Secret Science Alliance and the Copycat Crook (2009, Bloomsbury USA).

Ultra-nerd Julian Calendar fears persecution in his new school, and tries to hide that proverbial light under a bushel basket.  His clever plan is to play dumb in order to fit in at the new school.  And ‘plan’  is the right word, he approaches the problem like a science experiment, an anthropological study of other tweens:   what is the science of ‘fitting in’ ?

Amulet, by Kazu Kibuishi

After reading Bone by Jeff Smith I am often asked ‘what’s next?’     These next few posts are reviews of a few All-ages comics that join the canon of  stellar works I’d recommend to anybody.  Some are not new, but maybe new to you:

Amulet, by Kazu Kibuishi

In his ‘Hero with a Thousand Faces’ Joseph Campbell postulated that the Hero of  classical mythology must lose his parents early in life.  Perhaps the reason tall heroes have dead parents is that it opens up the boundaries of possibilities and exposes the youth to danger.  Perhaps the hero myth is simply the coming of age we all undergo.

In any case Kazu Kibuishi’s Amulet hits every note of the classic hero’s journey.  Within the first ten pages he has offed one primary caregiver, as the father drives off a cliff in a car accident.  Attempting to leave their old life behind, Mom moves the two kids to an eerie home in the woods, left to her by dead grandpa Silas.   Daughter Emily finds a luminous necklace (the eponymous Amulet) in the library then shortly thereafter the two kids lose their second parent as Mom is snatched by a fleshy squid-spider.