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.

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?

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.

City of Spies

By Susan Kim, Laurence Klavan; art by Pascal Dizin

Think:  ‘Nancy Drew times  Tintin’ to get a sense of this book.   Set in World War Two-era New York City, spunky and imaginative tweenager Evelyn is sent by her father to spend the summer with an artistic and distractable maiden aunt in her Upper East Side apartment.   The father has a new fiancee to squire around the country club set, and Evelyn just may be in the way.

As Aunt Lia has little experience or expertise in parenting,  Evelyn has a great deal of free time to become bored, to mope, then to explore and get herself into trouble.  Some trouble manifests in a new friendship with the working class son of the building superintendent.

As kids do, they fall into a natural conspiracy– or,  it being World War Two:  counter-conspiracy.    Aunt Evelyn’s apartment building stands in the heart of the Germantown neighborhood of 1940′s Manhattan, thus to a ten year old girl  it’s entirely plausible there are Nazi collaborators wherever they look.   Perhaps this is a ‘girl who cried wolf’ situation, but perhaps not…

All-Action Classics No. 3: The Odyssey

adapted by Tim Mucci; layouts by Ben Caldwell, Rick Lacy; color by Emanuel Tenderini.

Adaptations of classics are rarely high quality.  Often they read as vanity projects for the artist, showcasing vivid rendering skills and painterly sensibilities but lacking narrative drive.  They rarely take advantage of the kinetic momentum possible in panel-to-panel art.  The story takes a back seat to the static prettiness of the art itself.

Elsewhere  they may read as overly earnest if dumbed down distillations of  a larger more complex or nuanced work.    Here they tend to lack depth, like set dressing for a puppet show.  They read clearly as though  some publisher, distraught that kids aren’t really reading nowadays, thought it a good idea that we publish a book with more pictures and the like.   You know:   kids have no real attention span for anything else.   ‘We’ve got to get into this comics deal.  Kids are actually reading those.  Get me an artist who can do comic books’.

Adaptations that work are generally books with a plot that translates well to the medium.   Sequential art works great with action sequences, driving plot, witty dialogue, fantastic terrain and settings.  Like any other good comic.  ‘Who gives a rip if this is is a hoary old classic, the point is it’s a cracking good story!  I want to draw that! ‘

This attitude animates comic veterans Tim Mucci and Ben Caldwell’s excellent adaptation of the Greek classic Odyssey.