Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics 2016020896, 9781477311615, 9781477311622, 9781477311639, 9781477311646

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Picturing Childhood

World Comic s and Graphic Nonfiction Series Frederick Luis Aldama and Christopher González, Editors The World Comics and Graphic Nonfiction series includes monographs and edited volumes that focus on the analysis and interpretation of comic books and graphic nonfiction from around the world. The books published in the series use analytical approaches from literature, art history, cultural studies, communication studies, media studies, and film studies, among other fields, to help define the comic book studies field at a time of great vitality and growth.

PICTURING CHILDHOOD Youth in Transnational Comics

Edited by mark heimermann and brittany tullis

University of Texas Press   Austin

Copyright © 2017 by the University of Texas Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America First edition, 2017 Requests for permission to reproduce material from this work should be sent to: Permissions University of Texas Press P.O. Box 7819 Austin, TX 78713-­7819 http://utpress.utexas.edu/index.php/rp-­form ♾ The paper used in this book meets the minimum requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-­1992 (R1997) (Permanence of Paper).

Library of Congress Cataloging-­i n-­P ublication Data

Names: Heimermann, Mark, 1981–, editor. | Tullis, Brittany, 1979–, editor. Title: Picturing childhood : youth in transnational comics / edited by Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis. Description: First edition. | Austin : University of Texas Press, 2017. | Series: World comics and graphic nonfiction series | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016020896 | ISBN 978-1-4773-1161-5 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1162-2 (pbk. : alk. paper) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1163-9 (library e-book) | ISBN 978-1-4773-1164-6 (non-library e-book) Subjects: LCSH: Children—Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. | Youth—Comic books, strips, etc.—History and criticism. | Comic books, strips, etc.—Social aspects. | Comic books and children. | Children in literature. Classification: LCC HQ784.C6 P53 2017 | DDC 741.569—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2016020896 doi:10.7560/311615

Contents

Putting Childhood Back into World Comics: A Foreword vii Frederick Luis Aldama Acknowledgments xv Introduction: Bridging Comics Studies and Childhood Studies 1 Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis chapter one . Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker 13

Pamela Robertson Wojcik chapter two . Competent Children and Social Cohesion: Representations of Childhood in Home Front Propaganda Comics during World War II in Finland 30 Ralf Kauranen chapter three . In the Minority: Constructions of American Dream Childhood in 1950s–­Early 1960s Little Audrey Comics 48 Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton chapter four . Comics and Emmett Till 70

Qiana Whitted chapter five . Out of the Mouths of Babes: Mafalda’s Interrogation of the Argentine Angel in the House 92 Brittany Tullis chapter six . Sex, Comix, and Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Zap Comix’s Attack on the American Mainstream 108 Ian Blechschmidt chapter seven . RAW and Little Lit: Resisting and Redefining Children’s Comics 128 Lara Saguisag chapter eight . Lolicon: Adolescent Fetishization in Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako 148 James G. Nobis

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chapter nine . Wise beyond Her Years:

How Persepolis Introjects the Adult into the Child 163 Clifford Marks chapter ten . Vehlmann, or the End of Innocence: Lessons in Cruelty in Seuls and Jolies ténèbres 181

Annick Pellegrin chapter eleven . Zeno, Childhood, and The Three Paradoxes 199

C. W. Marshall chapter twelve . Dancing with Demons:

Consciousness and Identity in the Comics of Lynda Barry 218 Tamryn Bennett chapter thirteen . The Grotesque Child: Animal-­Human Hybridity in Sweet Tooth 234

Mark Heimermann List of Contributors 251 Index 253

Putting Childhood Back into World Comic s: A Foreword Frederick Luis Aldama

We have gotten serious about comics. And in proving to the world that comics like Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar can be as sophisticated a narrative as Gabriel García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, we have lost sight of the beat that thrums at its core: the children. As Scott Robins and Snow Wildsmith sum up, “Somewhere along the line, in the comics industry’s struggle to have the medium taken seriously as a way to tell mature, sophisticated stories for adults, comics forgot about kids” (8). Youth as characters have been the life force in the shaping of our planetary republic of comics. To get a sense of this, let’s turn some clock hands back. In nineteenth-­century Europe, we see Britain’s Alexander “Ally” Sloper (1867) and Germany’s Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (1865) opening new venues of storytelling through visual-­verbal expression. In the Philippines, we see the same with José Rizal’s Monkey and Tortoise (1889). In the early twentieth-­ century United States, we see innovations in serialized verbal-­visual storytelling with the German émigré Rudolph Dirk’s The Katzenjammer Kids (1912) followed by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s superhero and Milt Caniff ’s adventure comics. After World War II, we see the coming into its own of Japanese manga with Osamu Tezuka’s Tetsuwan Astro (Astro Boy, 1951) taking this storytelling form to new aesthetic heights. And during Franco’s dictatorship, which banned all US comics, comics that appeared in the magazine TBO introduced all varieties of storytelling innovation. And we see with the Franco-­Belgian Hergé’s Tintin (1929–1975) the arrival on the world comic books stage of the particular style known as bandes dessinées. All these comics focus on child protagonists. As I summarily move through the history of our planetary republic of comics, with this focus on children also comes much transnational cross-­pollination. Comic book creators the world over grow within their national soils but always with an insatiable appetite to learn from others beyond their proximate experience, to step up to

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new aesthetic challenges as gauntlets are thrown by other creators around the world. It is a history of global aesthetic blends that includes the physical transmigration of artists and their styles and worldviews from one place (region or country) to another. Readers and creators grown in one country can be and are wowed by the work of those grown in other geographic spaces. Mexico’s comic book history, for instance, includes the important publication in 1903 of The Katzenjammer Kids. Its appearance in Mexican newspapers found a large readership and led to its huge influence on Mexican creators of los dominicales (Sunday strips), ushering in the golden age of Mexican comics with titles such as Paquín (1934), Paquito (1935), Pepín (1936), and Chamuco (1936). And if we skip forward to today, we see this planetary transnationalism in comics that center-­stage children and teens continue—and in some wonderfully unexpected ways. For instance, the Latina comic book creator Lea Hernandez steps into and then reshapes conventions of manga storytelling with her girl-­warrior protagonists Raven Tansania Ransom and her fellow Rumble Girls in Rumble Girls: Silky Warrior Tansie (2004). Hernandez works within the genre, but also against it, by resisting stereotypical representations of girls as docile objects that reinforce male dominance. In The Freddie Stories (2012) and other child- and teen-­focused comics by Lynda Barry, an Irish-­Filipina American, we see blends of underground styles with the sprawling, baroque style of Italian fumetti—and all this to convey the story of Freddie, who suffers deep anxieties about his pimply face and beatings on the school playground. We see a deliberate blend with the literary in the work of the British creator Rob Davis. Jorge Luis Borges’s metaphysics and Marx’s conspicuous consumption inform the vision of The Motherless Oven (2014). Davis’s teens, Scarper Lee, Vera Pike, and Castro Smith, live in a world where the parents are birthed by a motherless oven and exist in the world as animated objects such as hair dryers, wind-­powered sculptures, and talking boats. The US comic book format is given vital new shape in the hands of the Kuwaiti comic book creator Naif Al-­Mutawa. He uses a Middle Eastern aesthetic as the envelope for his team of Muslim superheroes, the 99, who fight supervillains by exercising principles of tolerance, wisdom, courage, and justice, among some of the Qur’an’s other ninety-­nine virtues. American Born Chinese (2006), a young-­ adult comic by the Asian American Gene Yang, draws on and makes new the Chinese palm-­size sequential art tradition known as lianhuanhua. This style becomes a dominant aesthetic as Yang tells the story of a modern Asian American protagonist’s struggle with racism. Yang uses this style to reboot the superhero comic aesthetic with The Shadow Hero (2014), revisualizing race in Asian American comics and overturning assumptions about Asian and Asian American experiences and identity. Marjane Satrapi uses a kind of German

Putting Childhood Back into World Comic s   ix

Expressionist achromatic palette and minimalist line work to give shape to a complex and sophisticated coming-­of-­age story in Persepolis (2000–2003). In this random, brief sampling of comics from around the globe, it is the children and teens that are the focus—and generators of aesthetic innovation. There are many layers to this story, including the fact that comics about and for children can and do speak about forbidden subjects. In an Aesopic mode they speak doubly and polyphonically. I think of René Goscinny’s choice to set Astérix in the Roman epoch, all while providing signposts for us to sleuth out beneath the adventuring Astérix, Obelix, and Dogmatix the presence of a political critique of modern France. If we scratch the surface of those juvenile-­centric comics created by the Mexicans Gabriel Vargas Bernal (La Familia Burrón) and Ríus (Los Supermachos and Los Agachados), we see how these seemingly “lightweight” visual-­verbal narratives offer poignant critiques of Mexico’s corrupt sociopolitical scene. And while the Argentinian creator Quino’s Mafalda (1964–1973) appears at first glance to be a fun romp focused on a light-­skinned middle-­class kid, it nonetheless offers a biting critique of Argentinian politics. Today, we see much of this in comics by and about youthful experiences in African nations. On the one hand, the Belgian artist J. P. Stassen’s Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (2000) can be read as a teen romance, and on the other, as a powerful narrative that peels back the horrors of the Tutsi genocide in Rwanda. Marguerite Abouet’s six-­volume Aya (2005–2010) is a coming-­of-­age story set in the Ivory Coast, but only as surface adornment to a biting critique of Western colonialism and its aftermath. I pause here to mention that worldly aesthetic blends that center on children have not always been imaginatively expansive, polyphonic, or progressive. The visual-­verbal shaping devices used by creators can be used for the opposite: didacticism and racism. As much as Hergé’s bandes dessinées style opened doors of creativity for comics creators around the world, his portrayals of Asians (“The Blue Lotus”) and Africans (Tintin in the Congo) are more than suspect. The same can be said of Will Eisner: a powerful shaper of world comics whose portrayal of the African American character Ebony (The Spirit) is xenophobic. We can say the same of the Brazilian comic book author Mauricio de Sousa, whose Cebolinha (1960) and Turma da Mônica (1970–­) uncritically reproduce racial hierarchies of difference with whiteness at the top and blackness at the bottom. To this day, it is hard for me to stomach one of Mexico’s greatest and most popular comic characters: Yolanda Vargas Dulché’s Memín Penguín, modeled after a minstrel-­like pickaninny. Whether we locate origins and blended trajectories as Latin American historietas, German comicbuch, Filipino komiks, Korean manhwa, Chinese lianhuanhua, Italian fumetti, or US superhero comics, what we see is that the

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planetary history of comic books is built on and around children as characters and readers—and as budding creators. This should come as no surprise. Common sense and a cursory look at the biographies of comic book author-­ artists tell us that they were children when this visual-­verbal storytelling form first enthralled them. They were children when they first woke to comics as a way for them to tell stories. And many were children when they decided to commit themselves to hours of practice with pencils and paper, drawing and writing to master and then to make their own the styles of their favorite comics. I think readily here about the early experience of all our US Latino comic book creators. It was the mamá of Los Bros Hernandez who introduced them to comics, using this as a means of distraction rather than TV. Jason Gonzalez (“J. Gonzo”), author of La Mano del Destino, grew up on Spider-­Man strips that his grandmother would cut out and save for him to read and relish. For Raúl González (Lowriders in Space), living in El Paso with easy access to Mexican comics across the border contributed fundamentally to what I would characterize as his brown desert borderland lowrider aesthetic style. The same is true for Javier Hernandez (El Muerto), who grew up in Mexicali, equally influenced by Mexican luchador culture and Marvel comics. For Alberto Ledesma (Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer), it came from reading Mexican comics like Memín Pinguin, El Payo, and El Charrito de Oro. For Carlos Saldaña (Burrito) and Frank Espinosa (Rocketo), it was equal parts Marvel and manga. Of course, we don’t need to know biographical influences to identify the way these creators who focus on childhood blend comic book forms from around the world. Rhode Montijo uses a minimalist bandes dessinées style in Pablo’s Inferno—a story that in its content moves across different cultural spaces of the Americas. Montijo’s protagonist, Pablo, is run over and killed while on a Big Wheel. But this is just the beginning of his story. He journeys through Mictlán, the Aztec underworld, all while receiving a deep education about his precolonial ancestry. With Gum Girl! Chews Your Destiny, Montijo uses conventions of young-­adult superhero comics to create a young Latina protagonist, Gabby Gomez, who discovers super-­duper gum in her pocket that allows her to blow huge bubbles that catch bad guys and save the day. Like Rhode, Jules Rivera chooses the superhero storytelling form to create Latina-­empowered comics such as Valkyrie Squadron, which is aimed at younger female Latina readers. Raul Gonzalez takes the color styling of Mexican lotería cards and Latino lowrider culture, along with the line work of the Mexican political printmaker and cartoonist José Guadalupe Posada, to create Lowriders in Space—a story that features the anthropomorphic Latino code-­switching characters Lupe Impala, Flapjack Octopus, and

Putting Childhood Back into World Comic s   xi

Elirio Malaria. Hector Cantú draws on the aesthetic style of Gus Arriola’s comic strip Gordo as well as Tex-­Mex culture generally in Baldo (created with Carlos Castellano), which follows the everyday foibles of the pubescent Baldo Bermudez, his “Viva Che!” and Frida Kahlo–­loving younger sister, Gracie, the lotto-­playing curandera Tía Carmen, and his guayabera-­wearing father. Ivan Velez uses influences from Latin American telenovelas, Japanese manga, and the alternative comics scene in his coming-­of-­age and coming-­out young-­ adult comic Tales of the Closet Vol. 1 (2005). Gilbert Hernandez’s stand-­alone childhood-­set stories such as The Adventures of Venus, Marble Season, and The Children of Palomar intermix a south-­of-­the border macabre and metaphysical aesthetic with the simplicity of line seen in Archie comics. Latino creators are not alone in this process in which we see webs of influence beginning in childhood. They speak to a common experience: that childhood for creators around the world is the alpha to omega in the creating of a world republic of comics. Of course, the growing of comic book creators takes place in time and place. Perhaps it is hard to imagine the time not so long ago when in the United States there was an all-­powerful Comics Code that censored what made it onto newsstands. Fredric Wertham’s paranoia about a queer Batman and Robin and a lesbian Wonder Woman (with a penchant for bondage) greatly diminished the palette of experience for young readers and would-­be creators. For Wertham, on anything other than a childhood diet of Donald Duck, we would surely grow into sex-­addicted queer adults. Even as this extremist position began to fade, there continued to be a deep-­ seated fear of comics in the United States. Many readers had to find clandestine ways to get their hands on comics. Even in households where parents actively encouraged their presence (I think of Los Bros Hernandez), some were allowed and others, like the more risqué underground comix, were not. By contrast, countries like Mexico actively promoted and even funded the publication of comics to increase literacy levels across the nation. But in the United States and elsewhere, campaigns vigorously discouraged the reading of comics. Some of us live in countries where this legacy is still palpable. It is why when I teach comics in a university setting, many of my students (and even more so their parents) think that they aren’t doing something serious and rigorous in the classroom. This can be doubly taboo for those creators traditionally kept at the publishing margins: Latinos, African Americans, Asian Americans, and the like. As a result of many past struggles, we are seeing today more creations of comics about children and for children by authors of color. Dan Santat, a Thai-­

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Chinese American multicultural comics creator and children’s book author, understands not only that he is writing for children and not “at children” (48), but also that his infusion of multicultural themes and creation of characters of color—even in a comic book such as Sidekicks, which is about superhero pets—are important for our increasingly diverse national demographic to relate to. As mentioned earlier, we exist in time and place. And while today we have more comic book creators of color creating comics with extraordinary children as protagonists, there is still institutional gatekeeping. Once a creator manages to overcome all the obstacles to publishing (often by working with homegrown presses like Rochon Perry’s Cedar Grove Press), institutional challenges remain. First, the comics can be hard to find—even in well-­stocked libraries, whose librarians often don’t know where to place comics and graphic novels for children and shelve them in the teen section; often, too, we will see a work like Jeff Smith’s Bone but not an Afro-­futurist comic like Tim Fielder’s Matty’s Rocket. Second, we don’t have an official award for comics for young readers. The American Library Association doesn’t put comic books and graphic novels in their own category, but instead treats them as a type of picture book. Third, awards and recognitions like the Caldecott Medal seem to sideline creators of color. As Dan Santat remarks, in a radically racially diversifying US population and “in a world where multiethnic literature has grown significantly in terms of cultural and commercial relevance” (50), it is even more shameful that authors of color are not being recognized. Even in an industry that marginalizes creators of color in the United States, comics with children as subjects (and as ideal readers) are seeing something of a sea change in other ways. Comic books now are aimed at adults more than children, not just within the alternative comic book scene, but also within the mainstream superhero world—including all the Marvel Studio iterations. And we see the continued use of “highbrow” literature as a crutch for comic book creation; see Russ Kick’s The Graphic Canon. Picturing Childhood comes at a time when the academy needs most to be reminded about childhood as the sine qua non in the making of our planetary republic of comics. The scholarly essays that make up this volume urgently put childhood back into the world of comics. The resplendent and rigorous scholarship herein provides a necessary corrective. As we move gracefully between disciplines in their constructions of a grammar for understanding the richness of childhood as it informs comics from around the world, they anchor us in sociohistorical and political specifics. Picturing Childhood reminds us that in comics there is the extraordinary possibility of making new our per-

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ceptions, thoughts, and feelings about childhood. It reminds us that within a comic’s pages and panels we experience the complexity of childhood, eloquently expressed by the editors, Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis, “as a dialectical institution that both shapes and is shaped by various cultural and social factors across time and space.”

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. “The Wondrous Sights, Sounds, and Imaginary Journeys Created by Dan Santat.” Journal of Children’s Literature 42, no. 1 (2016): 44–51. Robins, Scott, and Snow Wildsmith. Parent’s Guide to the Best Kid’s Comics: Choosing Titles Your Children Will Love. Iola, WI: Krause, 2012.

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Acknowledgments

Thanks to Joe Austin for the idea and to Frederick Aldama, Brannon Costello, Christopher González, and Qiana Whitted for their guidance. We also wish to extend our gratitude to all the contributors, for sharing their work with us, and to everyone at the University of Texas Press who contributed their time and effort to bringing this project to fruition.

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Introduction: Bridging Comic s Studies and Childhood Studies Mark Heimermann and Brittany Tullis

The past few decades have seen the emergence and growth of comics studies as a field, which has rapidly expanded in recent years. Comics scholarship, of course, is not a new phenomenon. In the United States, it can be traced back to the early years of the twentieth century,1 but it coalesced in the 1940s and ’50s when the perceived negative effects of the medium on children received widespread attention (Heer).2 In the wake of this public attack on the medium, early proponents of the academic study of comics such as Umberto Eco, Donald Ault, M. Thomas Inge, and David Kunzle made important strides in establishing an incipient scholarly corpus surrounding the study of comics in their various manifestations, paving a legitimizing path for future comics scholars around the world. The field of study was further vitalized by publications like Scott McCloud’s treatise on the comics form, Understanding Comics (1993), and Will Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (1985), both of which offered definitions and theoretical positionings that incited beneficial debate within the field and soon began to attract new scholars, ideas, and institutional recognition to the academic study of comics. In the second decade of the twenty-­first century, comics studies has become a dynamic interdisciplinary field that continues to grow, evolve, and make important contributions to a number of disciplines. Alongside fan-­ based conventions like the San Diego Comic-­Con International, which has met annually since its establishment in 1970, scholarly conferences and journals have been organized in recent years locally, nationally, and internationally. Numerous university presses, including Duke University Press, Rutgers University Press, the University Press of Mississippi, and the University of Texas Press, have published works that situate comics and their study firmly within academic contexts. Simultaneously, prominent conferences dedicated solely to comics studies, such as the International Comic Arts Forum, the Michigan State University Comics Forum, and the University of Florida Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels, continue to grow in size and prestige.

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Because scholars working in the field have long discussed the drawbacks implicit in the fact that comics studies as a discipline lacks “institutional footing” (Hatfield, “Indiscipline,” 2), seasoned comics scholars such as Charles Hatfield have worked to create the sort of institutional hub that comics studies has historically lacked. As a result of this effort, the Comics Studies Society was formed in November 2014 at the seventeenth annual International Comic Arts Forum at Ohio State University. At a meeting inside the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library and Museum, the Comics Studies Society’s first Executive Committee was officially voted in, marking a key moment in comics studies as its first declared discipline-­wide institution began to take shape. Ongoing debates within the field mean that much work continues to focus on establishing parameters, such as “the attempt at definition . . . the initial framing of comics as an object of study” (Hatfield, “Indiscipline,” 5). These discussions often involve an emphasis on form or history. A number of scholarly considerations involving the form or history of comics have been published since Eisner’s and McCloud’s early attempts at defining the medium, such as David Carrier’s The Aesthetics of Comics (2000), Robert C. Harvey’s The Art of the Comic Book (1996), Charles Hatfield’s Alternative Comics (2005), Amy Kiste Nyberg’s Seal of Approval (1998), and Bradford Wright’s Comic Book Nation (2001). International publications such as Thierry Groensteen’s The System of Comics (1999, trans. 2007), Jean-­Paul Gabilliet’s Of Comics and Men (2005, trans. 2010) and Santiago García’s La novela gráfica (2010) have further enriched the field, offering not only insightful formal and theoretical discussions, but also a range of perspectives stemming from differing national contexts. These formal and historical considerations are not the only books being published on comics, of course, but they represent attempts within the still-­developing field of comics studies to address the complexities of the comics form. In this way, comics scholarship has sought, and continues to seek, to understand comics in relation to cultural, historical, and industrial concerns over time and to account for the uniqueness of the medium in relation to its artistic and narrative capabilities. In addition to the constant and continuing emphasis on form and history, comics studies has produced scholarship on a wide range of topics and themes. Bart Beaty’s Comics versus Art (2012), for example, explores the sometimes-­ fraught relationship between comics and the art world, and the ways in which low and high culture are constructed. Hillary Chute’s Graphic Women (2010) focuses on how trauma is represented in the graphic memoirs of five important female comics artists, from the underground’s Aline Kominsky-­Crumb to the contemporary graphic novelist Alison Bechdel. José Alaniz’s Death, Disability, and the Superhero: The Silver Age and Beyond (2014) explores mani-

introduction   3

festations of death and disability in the superhero comics of postwar United States. In the realm of collections and anthologies, Charles Hatfield, Jeet Heer, and Kent Worcester’s The Superhero Reader (2013) pre­sents an insightful examination of superheroes and the comics they inhabit; Brannon Costello and Qiana Whitted’s Comics and the U.S. South (2012) offers a compelling look at the ways in which southern US culture has been represented in comics. As illustrated by this small sampling of recent publications, the scholarship currently being produced by comics studies is vast and provocative, and continually expanding in scope and volume. At the same time, however, areas remain in which little scholarship has been produced. Explorations and analyses regarding representations of childhood in comics is one such area. Childhood, as well as its complexity and the ways in which it affects adulthood, has been represented in the pages and panels of comics since their very inception, and yet focused and sustained scholarship in this area is scarce. There have been forays into the exploration of this topic in recent years, but this anthology represents the first book-­length approach to bring together a variety of comics, across vast geographic and temporal spaces, to better understand the intersections between comics and childhood as both an abstract concept and a lived experience. Despite the disparate cultural contexts of the comics featured in this anthology, the chapters show a remarkably sustained emphasis on childhood as a dialectical institution that both shapes and is shaped by cultural and social factors across time and space. The focus of this chapter builds upon earlier convergences of childhood and comics. ImageTexT ran a special issue (“Comics and Childhood,” Summer 2007) devoted to this relationship, and in 2014 the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics dedicated an issue to the connections between constructions of childhood, picture books, and comics. The editors of the latter write that the intersection between these three areas is important because it influences what is available to children and how they are depicted: “[We] believe, then, that focusing on constructions of childhood, rather than education, or reading for pleasure, is an important area of enquiry that opens the fields of childhood studies and visual culture to new debates” (Gibson, Nabizadeh, and Sambell, 241). This type of thinking is reflective of Daniel Thomas Cook’s belief that the “ ‘child’ [can] be approached as an interactional sphere, as something which not only includes children, but also adults and institutions and institutional actors, like industries, which shape and contest and mould” (quoted in Smith and Greene, 62). Despite the important contributions of these journals, and of individual contributions by scholars who have engaged with this theme, the concept of childhood in comics remains critically underexamined, considering the early

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association between comic books and childhood in the United States, the sheer volume of representations of childhood, the importance of childhood as a metaphor regarding futurity, and the reliance of approaches like psychoanalysis on childhood. This underexamination requires rectifying, since “many of the best—the most stimulating, most troubling, most psychologically questing, ideologically fraught, and artistically vital—comics for adults have as their subject matter childhood and its possibilities: its potential for tenderness, awe, terror, and social critique” (Hatfield, “Introduction”). The subject matter of childhood in comics is the focus of this anthology, which explores the ways in which adults understand childhood and its relationship to culture and history. Bradford Wright notes that comic books “have figured into the childhoods of most Americans born since the 1920s” (xiii), and they “have always been the domain of the young.” The reasons for this cultural prevalence are straightforward: “Generally fashioned for an adolescent audience by creators often little older, comic books have spoken to youths’ concerns and sensibilities with a consistency and directness that few, if any, other entertainment media can claim” (xvi). Admittedly, Wright’s assertions are becoming increasingly dated, since children’s comic books have drastically declined in popularity among children. Even the recent resurgence in the reading of comics, spurred in part by the consumption of manga, doesn’t approach the readership numbers of 1945, when about “half of the U.S. population,” including a high of “95 percent of all boys and 91 percent of all girls between the ages of six and eleven” read comic books, as well as “16 percent of men and 12 percent of women over thirty” (Wright, 57). Today there are also far more creators making comics for adult readers and markets than there used to be. Contemporary depictions of children and adolescents are still common, as they have been in newspaper comic strips since their inception, but these depictions are increasingly geared toward adult readers. Childhood has previously been examined in the realm of comics studies, often as a way to illuminate other issues. The role of graphic narratives in communicating cultural history, for example, can be seen in some Native American comics, such as The Adventures of Rabbit and Bear Paws (2006) and A Hero’s Voice (Noori, 1996). The concepts of childhood and childhood innocence are also used as narrative tools that lead readers to grapple with historical and cultural realities, as in Rhode Montijo’s Pablo’s Inferno (2000). Frederick Aldama, in his discussion of this particular text in Your Brain on Latino Comics (2009), observes that the reader is meant to identify with “the innocent child protagonist,” whose perspective on the Spanish conquest of America is an alternative to a history told from the perspective of the conquerors (23). This alignment associates the experience of a subjugated people with the innocence of

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childhood and simultaneously emphasizes the importance of children in preserving culture. In another work, Aldama notes that coming-­of-­age narratives are common in multicultural comics, and that these narratives are often “raw and eye-­opening” to readers because they so often involve issues of racism or sexism during scenes that take place when the characters are young (“Multicultural Comics Today,” 7–8). These instances of discrimination resonate so deeply with us, of course, because Western society draws from Romantic conceptions of childhood in which children are meant to be kept free from and unburdened by adult realities (Kincaid, 14–15). Perhaps this is one of the reasons some constructions of childhood are so poignant for adult readers. When not idealized, they reveal the reality of childhood, which is more complex but also, perhaps, more rewarding than the idealized constructions so firmly ingrained in the cultural imaginary. Gilbert Hernandez’s Marble Season (2013), for example, depicts quite clearly “the decisions and dilemmas faced by the children who populate the neighborhood,” which lends itself to a more adult reading (Royal). Like Charles Schulz’s Peanuts (1950–2000), Marble Season is a comic about children that acknowledges the dialectical relationship between childhood and adulthood. What approaches such as these reveal is that the separation between childhood and adulthood is often blurred, and that sanitized depictions of innocent childhoods reflect the desires of adults rather than the reality of children. This recognition of the complexity of childhood in comics has also taken place in comics from other countries. In Paracuellos (1975–2003), the Spanish cartoonist Carlos Giménez re-­creates the harsh reality faced by children living in the Hogares de Auxilio Social (Social Welfare Homes) during the brutally divided postwar years; his depictions of the violence and persecution that these children faced become a means of showing how the battles of the Spanish Civil War continued to play out well after the war years. Quino’s Mafalda (1964–1973) uses a child protagonist to effectuate a mature criticism of both contemporary Argentine culture and mid- to late-­twentieth-­century global politics and conflicts (see chapter 5). Suhaan Metha notes that in India, the burgeoning comics industry is often sanitized, steering “clear of polemic, ironing out creases in the fabric of national integration and presenting a highly selective view of India to a young audience” (173). But some Indian comics creators, such as Naseer Ahmed and Saurabh Singh, create provocative narratives by depicting childhood and adolescence with all its trials and tribulations. Their graphic novel Kashmir Pending “throws into relief the disillusionment of certain Kashmiri youth, the highly politicized environment of Kashmir, the bitter factionalism among warring groups, and the endless cycle of violence that plagues the valley” (175). Ivorian comics writer Marguerite

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Abouet’s Aya de Yopougon (Aya of Yo City, 2005–2010), illustrated by Clément Oubrerie, explores the life of a young female protagonist and her interactions with other characters living alongside her in the Ivory Coast during the 1970s. Her next work, Akissi, begun in 2013 and illustrated by Mathieu Sapin, similarly tells the tales of a young girl’s adventures on the Ivory Coast, but is written for children rather than adults. These examples are not meant to be exhaustive; they represent only a small percentage of the body of work that engages childhood as a concept. But they illustrate the international scope of the fertile material regarding childhood and comics. This anthology gathers together a variety of approaches to help demonstrate the pervasive yet often underexamined presence of childhood in comics. This confluence of essays comes as childhood studies, as well as comics studies, is growing as a discipline. Mary Jane Kehily, writing in 2004, notes that childhood studies has experienced a significant amount of growth over the course of the past decade, placing the rise of childhood studies around the same time as the publication of McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) and the subsequent expansion of comics studies as a field of inquiry. Kehily ties childhood studies and its expansion to “recent developments in education and the social sciences” (1), in some ways grounding the field in these existing disciplines. Indeed, the indebtedness of childhood studies to education and the social sciences is apparent in the wide range of scholarship that focuses on the lived experiences of children, as opposed to the less prominent analyses of cultural representations of children and childhood in literature, art, and popular culture. Like comics studies, childhood studies is a thoroughly interdisciplinary field, and also concerns itself with childhood as a concept (Kehily, 1), which is how comics studies and childhood studies intersect in Picturing Childhood: Youth in Transnational Comics. Interrogating childhood as a construct can provide immense cultural insight. To echo Henry Jenkins, recognizing these constructions can help us “understand adult politics, adult culture, and adult society, which often circle around the specter of the innocent child” (2). Yet these constructions are not concrete. For example, Debbie Olson and Giselle Rampaul observe, “Childhood is, and always has been, an unstable concept, variously interpreted and represented according to historical, social, cultural, political and economic contexts” (23). Exploring the articulation of childhood in cultural texts, then, is in many ways a move toward understanding society itself. Picturing Childhood investigates the ways in which constructions of childhood in comics function to explore, question, and comment on contemporary culture and society, using the unique combination of text and image to articulate characters and situations that speak to larger concerns and realities. To that end, this collection provides a comprehensive and wide-­ranging ac-

introduction   7

counting of the ways in which children and childhood, as well as larger cultural forces behind these representations, are depicted in comics from the 1930s to the present day. The 1930s marked the point when comic books, which were marketed at youth, emerged (Wright, xiii–­xiv). While newspaper comic strips had been published since the late nineteenth century, the marketing of comic books to children and adolescents was one of the reasons that childhood and comics became so entwined in the popular imagination. Created by, and often for, adults, comics have a rich history of exploring the lives of child characters and the realities that surround them. From the early days of US comics production, child characters such as Richard Outcault’s Yellow Kid, Winsor McCay’s Little Nemo, and the title character of Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, to name only a few examples, began to establish an important precedent in the representation of childhood in comics. In Europe as well, child characters have long played an important role in the bandes dessinées, historietas, fumetti, and comicheft of European comics production, featuring such characters such as Hergé’s Tintin (Belgium), José Escobar’s Zipi and Zape (Spain), and Wilhelm Busch’s Max and Moritz (Germany), all of whom quickly became icons in their countries of origin and beyond. Examples like these paint a picture of international comics production that is in many ways defined by the child characters that have been depicted within its diverse panels and pages. This collection brings together scholarship on representations of childhood in comics through both time and space, providing an international scope and a time frame that covers the better part of a century. In doing so, it takes up a number of theoretical issues. While the chapters in this anthology are organized chronologically based on the comics under examination, the chapters also productively cohere. For example, the chapters by Pamela Robertson Wojcik, Lara Saguisag, and Annick Pellegrin explore the ways in which comics reflect a wide spectrum of cultural values concerning children and childhood, as well as how comics in some instances question or resist dominant cultural constructions of childhood. In “Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker,” Pamela Robertson Wojcik examines the representation of “new girlhood” in Little Orphan Annie. Wojcik argues that the title character’s ventures out of the orphanage and into the space of “new girlhood” allowed for a liberating unmooring from conventional family life, affording her mobility, freedom, and significant agency to transform and improve both her situation and that of others. In “RAW and Little Lit: Resisting and Redefining Children’s Comics,” Lara Saguisag explores tensions between childhood and adulthood from Françoise Mouly and Art Spiegelman’s RAW, an alternative text which rejected the notion that comics were for children, to Little Lit, which was a comic created for children. Because Mouly and Spiegelman

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used RAW to help separate comics from childhood, Saguisag questions what it means for them to create a line of comics for children. She finds that both publications differentiated themselves from a more traditional comics format to create an alternative publication. Examining this contrast between childhood and adulthood from a different angle, Annick Pellegrin explores what makes a comic suitable for children in “Vehlmann, or the End of Innocence: Lessons in Cruelty in Seuls and Jolies ténèbres.” Pellegrin discusses two works written by the same person with similar themes and publication histories. In this case study, she finds that death and cruelty may become suitable topics for children when the text reflects on difficult subject matter and mitigates it with comic relief. Alternatively, she demonstrates that the comic book aimed at adults is unrelenting in its attack on childhood innocence. Complex and sensitive national and sociocultural issues can also be expressed and explored in comics through the use of child characters, as demonstrated by the inclusion of chapters by Ralf Kauranen, Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton, Qiana Whitted, and Brittany Tullis. In “Competent Children and Social Cohesion: Representations of Childhood in Home Front Propaganda Comics during World War II in Finland,” Ralf Kauranen highlights the promotion and valorization of national unity through wartime comics featuring child characters. Kauranen demonstrates that children in Finnish comics, in an attempt to build national unity, were endowed with an exceptional, unquestioned agency and competence that tied them firmly to the adult world. Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton explore the representation of race and gender in “In the Minority: Constructions of American Dream Childhood in 1950s–­Early 1960s Little Audrey Comics.” Highlighting the positive depictions of both African American and female characters during a time of marked homogeneity in the American comics industry, Hayton and Hayton find that Little Audrey was not only more diverse and inclusive in its cast of characters than other comics of its time, but that the plotlines promoted a markedly egalitarian perspective that encouraged social change and equality among its young readers. Discussing comics that deal with a violent and tragic historical event from the same time period, Qiana Whitted’s essay continues this examination of the represented intersections of race and childhood in comics. In “Comics and Emmett Till,” Whitted examines the ways in which racial formation and cultural trauma intersect with the construction of childhood in comics by taking a closer look at representations of the 1955 murder of Emmett Till. Looking at comics published since Till’s death, Whitted argues that depictions of Till are used frequently in comics to illustrate the process of racial segregation for black and white children, often alerting black youth to the chilling consequences of racial division in

introduction   9

1950s America and making them aware of the power and vulnerability of their own racialized bodies for the first time. Internationalizing this exploration of sociocultural issues in comics centered on child characters, in this case moving toward an exploration of representations of gendered experience and subjectivity, Brittany Tullis examines critical reactions to constructions of idealized Argentine femininity in “Out of the Mouths of Babes: Mafalda’s Interrogation of the Argentine Angel in the House.” Through the title character’s repeated lampooning of embodiments of traditional patriarchal gender roles, she points out how women throughout history have been confined to the domestic sphere and denied the opportunity to play meaningful roles in society. Tullis contends that Mafalda gives voice to the growing population of young, educated Argentine women and girls who began to vocalize their rejection of this socially prescribed role during the 1960s and ’70s. Contributions by Ian Blechschmidt, James G. Nobis, and Mark Heimermann analyze the ways in which alternative understandings of childhood, such as grotesque or sexualized children, are expressed in comics, and to what ends. In “Sex, Comix, and Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Zap Comix’s Attack on the American Mainstream,” Ian Blechschmidt analyzes early issues of Zap Comix in order to better understand their symbolic assault on the American preoccupation with childhood innocence. This chapter discusses how Zap’s rhetorical use of graphic imagery featuring children and the entertainment icons associated with them served as a response to the policing of gender via the entrenchment of the nuclear family as the standard for normality and respectability in the Cold War United States. Continuing this provocative exploration of depicted intersections of childhood and sexuality in comics, James G. Nobis analyzes a particular construction of sexualized childhood in his article, “Lolicon: Adolescent Fetishization in Osamu Tezuka’s Ayako.” Nobis explores Tezuka’s role in the emergence of the lolicon phenomenon, which involves the fetishization of adolescent girls, in Japanese manga. He emphasizes the visual semiotics of Tezuka’s Ayako to better understand lolicon and its place within Japanese culture by drawing upon Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design (2nd ed., 2006). Just as Blechschmidt and Nobis identify and analyze discursive spaces created by the conflation of the realms of childhood and adulthood, Mark Heimermann considers childhood as metaphorically grotesque as a way to consider belonging to multiple worlds in his essay “The Grotesque Child: Animal-­Human Hybridity in Sweet Tooth.” He argues that the animal-­human children in Jeff Lemire’s Sweet Tooth provide a metaphor for what commodification does to people: it turns them into hybrids, part human, part com-

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modity. At the same time, by highlighting the hybrid’s humanity, Heimermann argues that the text challenges this commodification. Finally, chapters by Clifford Marks, C. W. Marshall, and Tamryn Bennett demonstrate a shared interest in the complex ways in which adulthood and childhood are always in dialogue with each other, but explore this relationship on a more intimate scale by focusing on adults, both real and fictional, looking back on their own childhoods. Clifford Marks employs the psychoanalytic concept of introjection to help show how Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis resonates with readers, in “Wise beyond Her Years: How Persepolis Introjects the Adult into the Child.” Marks argues that introjection serves multiple purposes. It allows a Western audience to relate to a Middle Eastern character, even as it enables Satrapi’s child protagonist to dissociate herself from the trauma she experiences. C. W. Marshall discusses the role of childhood in Paul Hornschemeier’s purportedly autobiographical The Three Paradoxes in his essay “Zeno, Childhood, and The Three Paradoxes.” Marshall emphasizes the comic book’s use of pre-­Socratic philosophy while arguing that the return to the narrator-­author’s childhood within the narrative highlights his progression through life. This progression positions the titular paradoxes as lying outside the bounds of reality. In “Dancing with Demons: Consciousness and Identity in the Comics of Lynda Barry,” Tamryn Bennett examines Lynda Barry’s emphasis on the praxical as a way to better understand trauma, consciousness, and identity. She argues that Barry’s comics go beyond merely representing childhood to reconstructing it, since Barry’s work reconstitutes the fragmented childhood self as whole. At the same time, Barry doesn’t offer closure in this reconstruction so much as the possibility for alternative ways to construct childhood. These essays show the dialectical nature of childhood and adulthood. Childhood influences adulthood, yet childhood oftentimes cannot be fully understood until time has passed. In light of the vast reach of the preceding topics and themes, this anthology is meant to provide a comprehensive (but not exhaustive) overview of depictions of childhood in comics. The range of literary, historical, and theoretical approaches is intended to make meaningful contributions to ongoing discussions in numerous fields and disciplines, including African American studies, childhood studies, comics studies, communication studies, and women’s and gender studies, among others. This broad array of interdisciplinary connections helps demonstrate the multiplicity of productive approaches to childhood as well as the wide-­ranging importance of the humanities. By moving beyond national boundaries, it also demonstrates affinities and differences between comics and representations of childhood in the United States and other countries. Further research and scholarly attention is clearly merited. In addi-

introduction   11

tion to further exploration of the texts discussed in this volume, there are a number of interesting avenues to explore in continuing to pursue these questions. For example, this anthology doesn’t take up comics such as Tintin, Peanuts, or Aya, all of which offer notable representations of childhood in comics. There is a rich tendency in superhero comics to explore the formative experiences of superheroes and villains, too. These comics often deal with childhood trauma or other childhood experiences, such as Batman’s loss of his parents or the love and support of Superman’s adoptive parents. These constructions are not explored here, but they remain ripe for examination. The concerns of this volume are meant as another step in the exploration between childhood and comics, not as the final destination.

Notes 1. For more on early comics scholarship, see Heer and Worcester, eds., Arguing Comics. 2. In particular, there was concern surrounding the ways in which comics might or might not affect children and young adults. As Jeet Heer explains, “The main consensus among educators and sociologists in the 40s and 50s was that comics weren’t harmful” (Heer). On the other hand, one of the most strident voices in early comics research was Fredric Wertham, a psychiatrist whose 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent, deemed comic books dangerous for young minds. Indeed, his work received so much attention that it led to an official congressional inquiry into the matter. These hearings culminated in the formation, by the comics industry, of the infamous Comics Code in 1954, which lasted, with revisions, until 2011.

Works Cited Aldama, Frederick Luis. “Multicultural Comics Today: A Brief Introduction.” In Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 1–25. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. ———. Your Brain on Latino Comics. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. Gibson, Mel, Golnar Nabizadeh, and Kay Sambell. “Watch This Space: Childhood, Picturebooks and Comics.” Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics 5, no. 3 (2014): 241–244. Hatfield, Charles. “Indiscipline, or, The Condition of Comics Studies.” Transatlantica 1 (2010): 2–16. ———. Introduction to “Comics and Childhood.” Special issue, ImageTexT 3, no. 3 (2007), www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/introduction.shtml. Heer, Jett. “Interview with Jeet Heer on Comics Scholarship.” By Dave Howard. Published online February 10, 2010. Heer, Jett, and Kent Worcester, eds. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2004. Jenkins, Henry. “Introduction: Childhood Innocence and Other Modern Myths.” In The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins, 1–37. New York: New York University Press, 1998.

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Kehily, Mary Jane. “Understanding Childhood: An Introduction to Some Key Themes and Issues.” In An Introduction to Childhood Studies, 1–21. New York: Open University Press, 2004. Kincaid, James Russell. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 1998. Mehta, Suhaan. “Wondrous Capers: The Graphic Novel in India.” In Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 173–188. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Noori, Margaret. “Native American Narratives from Early Art to Graphic Novels: How We See Stories.” In Multicultural Comics: From Zap to Blue Beetle, edited by Frederick Luis Aldama, 55–72. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2010. Olson, Debbie, and Giselle Rampaul. “Representations of Childhood in the Media.” In The Routledge International Handbook of Children, Adolescents, and Media, edited by Dafna Lemish, 23–30. New York: Routledge, 2013. Royal, Derek Parker. “Review of Recent Books from Gilbert Hernandez.” ImageTexT 7, no. 1 (2013), www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v7_1/royal. Smith, Carmel, and Sheila Greene. Key Thinkers in Childhood Studies. Chicago: Policy Press, 2014. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Chapter 1

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker Pamel a Robertson Wojcik

Harold Gray ’s Little Orphan Annie comic strip is often viewed as the urtext for representations of strong role models for girls in comics. For example, Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia (Mitchell and Reid-­Walsh) claims that “ ‘Little Orphan Annie’ is important to girls because she is one of the earliest representations of a strong preteen girl in popular culture” (401). This reading of Little Orphan Annie rightly situates Annie as a strong role model for girls, but mistakenly assumes that her character is without precedent or parallel. Annie was not the first “preteen,” but it was only in the 1930s that the category “girl” was distinguished from the category “teen” (“preteen” did not yet exist). Before then, the term “girl” was much more pliant. Annie needs to be situated within the complex and variable definitions of girlhood available in the 1930s. If we understand Annie according to these definitions of girlhood—­ particularly the categories of the “new girl” and the “girl problem”—we can better understand the ways in which she can be seen as empowering. As Sally Mitchell argues, the word “girl” became “dramatically visible” only in about 1880 (6). Then, it did not indicate chronological age, but a “state of mind” that blurred the categories “girl,” “adolescent,” and “woman” (much as the renewed concept “girls” does today). In Mitchell’s account, in the period 1880–1915 a new category of girlhood arose, the “new girl,” akin to the “new woman”; the new girl existed in a “provisional free space” between being a child at home and assuming wholly adult responsibilities (3). Defined as an interstitial space between the child’s home and the married woman’s home, the space of the new girl was defined by independence and freedom (4). The category “new girl” existed largely in the imaginary: she was a figure produced in books, magazines, and clothing styles aimed at girl consumers, and then promulgated through clubs, sports, schools, and girls’ own writing. Most girls, of whatever class, did not have access to this freedom. Working-­class

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girls might have started working as early as age twelve, whereas a middle-­class girl might have remained under her parents’ supervision until her midtwenties or later (7). But, Mitchell argues, both classes of girls “knew (and perhaps dreamed) about some of its freedoms,” primarily through their reading of popular new girl fiction (4). In distinction to the new woman, the new girl character in fiction was not, by and large, sexualized. Instead, her freedom enabled her to participate in sports, gain professional training, masquerade as a boy, and have adventures. By the 1930s, however, due to changes in laws about schooling and labor, the category “girl” had been divided from that of the adolescent and the woman (Mitchell, 173). As Viviana Zelizer explains, from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s, perceptions of childhood shifted: children went from being viewed as economically worthwhile participants in public and family life to being seen as economically “worthless” but emotionally “priceless.” But this transition was uneven: nineteenth-­century working-­class children were still expected to contribute wages and household assistance even as middle-­ class children began to be viewed differently; and the Depression restored the need for “useful” children across a wide range of families. This tension, between viewing the child as “priceless” and as economically useful, continued throughout the 1930s. In line with views of the child as priceless, or intended to be outside the realm of economic usefulness, child labor laws were under debate from 1904, and Progressive activists, such as the National Child Labor Committee and National Consumers League, worked to pressure Congress to enact laws protecting children. Children’s working conditions in mills and factories were publicized by using the photographs of Lewis Hine and other means to shape public opinion. Not until 1938, however, did President Franklin Delano Roosevelt sign the Fair Labor Standards Act, which placed limits on child labor, excluding agricultural work. Thus, while children were ever more ideologically positioned to exist outside the labor force, they were legally available or, in many cases, subject to it. In the same period that new girl fiction flourished, a different definition of girlhood emerged in the sociological literature. The “girl problem” from the Victorian period to the Progressive era and into the 1930s was defined as a rejection of “Victorian standards of girlhood virtue to lay claim to sexual desire, erotic expression and social autonomy” (Alexander, 12). The girl was viewed, on the one hand, as naturally pure but susceptible to influence, and on the other as too independent and too desirous. Mitchell notes the “creeping sexualization” and “regendering” of young women (182) and the concomitant juvenation of schoolgirls (180). Only as girls became segmented as a population, and as older girls became more sexualized, did romance narratives aimed

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   15

at older girls come to the foreground. Before that, the new girl narratives that Mitchell analyzes were largely escapist fare, aimed at promoting feelings of empowerment in girls. Under the rubric of the “girl problem,” urban girls, especially, were seen as likely to fall and as more available to negative influence than their rural counterparts. The late-­nineteenth-­century philanthropist and social reformer Charles Loring Brace, for instance, viewed the urban girl as a more pathetic victim of the urban environment than the boy: A girl street-­rover is to my mind the most painful figure in all the unfortunate crowd of a large city. With a boy, “Arab of the streets,” one always has the consolation that, despite his ragged clothes and bed in a box or hay-­ barge, he often has a rather good time of it, and enjoys many of the delicious pleasures of a child’s roving life . . . With a girl vagrant, it is different. She feels homelessness and friendlessness more; she has more of the feminine dependence on affection . . . Then the strange and mysterious subject of sexual vice comes in. It has often seemed to me one of the most dark arrangements of this singular world that a female child of the poor should be permitted to start on its immortal career with almost every influence about it degrading . . . . . . There is no reality in the sentimental assertion that the sexual sins of the lad are as degrading as those of the girl. (71)

For Brace, the girl is more susceptible to influence than the boy; she feels her neglect and lack more deeply than the boy; she is subject to the streets, influenced by them, not a figure of agency or fun. Her status in the streets is defined almost entirely through her role as sexual object. She is driven “toward the preservation of purity, and therefore her fall is deeper” (71). At the same time that the girl is a creature of influence, however, she also learns to masquerade as, and then becomes, a creature of desire: “She soon learns to offer for sale that which is in its nature beyond all price, and to feign the most sacred affections. . . . She no longer merely follows blindly and excessively an instinct; she perverts a passion and sells herself ” (72). The girl problem of the Victorian and Progressive eras would likely have applied to the broader conception of girls that Mitchell defines under the rubric “new girl,” a conception that blurs the lines between schoolgirls and teens. Against Mitchell’s sense that sexuality creeps into the girls’ realm only at around the time of World War I, the discourse on the girl problem sexualizes girls of all ages strongly. When, in the 1930s, the term “girl” still applied to a broad span of chronological age, younger girls were, as Mitchell suggests,

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represented as more youthful and less obviously sexual than teens and young women.1 This essay situates Little Orphan Annie in the context of these competing discourses on girlhood. It focuses on Annie’s representation through the 1930s only. In part, the 1930s were paradigmatic years for the strip, partly because the Depression informed the character and ethos of “Little Orphan Annie,” and partly because ideas of girlhood changed significantly across the decades-­long publication history of the strip. Little Orphan Annie needs to be understood as existing at the intersection of discourses of the girl problem and the new girl. The strip transmits fears of the girl problem, if only to deflect the reality of girls’ sexuality, demonstrates innocence by teasing it, and demarcates girls from women by blurring the difference, temporarily and parodically. Little Orphan Annie yokes together seemingly contradictory narratives of the new girl and the fallen women. In the strip, Annie is unmoored from home—orphaned or displaced—and finds herself on the streets, where she often encounters men. These encounters, however, do not lead to Annie’s permanent degradation or victimization. Instead, they emphasize Annie’s mobility and freedom and ascribe to her significant agency to transform and improve not only her situation but also that of adults. In this way, Little Orphan Annie offers a vision of the urban as largely benign, and of girlhood as powerful.

Annie as New Girl Little Orphan Annie debuted on August 5, 1924, in the New York Daily News and moved within three months into syndication with the Chicago Tribune Syndicate (later Tribune Media Services). The comic reached the height of its popularity in the 1930s. In 1930, a fifteen-­minute Little Orphan Annie radio show debuted on WGN in Chicago and went national on NBC in 1931, initially with two casts, one for the East Coast broadcast and one for the West. The show ran six days a week at 5:45 p.m. and was on the air until 1942. Two film adaptations of the comic strip were made in the 1930s, both titled Little Orphan Annie (Robertson, 1932; Holmes, 1938) and Little Orphan Annie merchandise circulated widely. The strip continued with Gray’s guidance until the 1960s, but remains linked to the 1930s in the cultural imaginary, especially since the musical and film Annie (Huston, 1982) are set during the Great Depression.2 Little Orphan Annie is indebted to Victorian melodrama and especially to Dickens. In 1938, Harold Gray made the link to Dickens explicit: “You can take Great Expectations or any Dickens book and put in running water and a

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   17

telephone and you have Annie in a modern setting with a sound story” (Gray, 2:11). As Jeet Heer explains: Dickens’ fiction is rife with orphans, lost children who roam the city streets, sudden reversals of fortune with characters finding and losing money rapidly, coincidental meetings, corruptly administered institutions like orphanages, hypocritical old people who pretend to be charitable but are only interested in their own personal self-­aggrandizement, benevolent rich men who provide last minute rescue to those in jeopardy, and many other motifs that would be recycled in Little Orphan Annie. (Heer, “Dream Big,” 24)

As Heer suggests, Gray did not just borrow a few figures or plotlines from Dickens, but also shared his sentimentality, his populist world view, and what Sergei Eisenstein referred to as Dickens’s propensity to portray the world as irreconcilably divided between rich and poor, good and evil (Eisenstein, 234). Rather than merely harking back to the past, however, Gray updated and Americanized Dickens. In particular when the Great Depression hit, Annie’s poverty and insecurity came to seem “closer to a newspaper headline than an outgrowth of Victorian fiction” (Heer, “Economy,” 12). Similarly, while Gray borrowed Dickens’s view of the child as vulnerable and in need of protection, he revised the trope. Where orphans like Oliver Twist are passive characters, acted on for good or bad by forces they cannot control, Annie is self-­reliant: “[She is] cast from a different mold. Her goodness is not passive but active. She doesn’t let herself be pushed around, but is the mistress of her destiny. Alone in a city, she always finds work for herself ” (Heer, “A Dickens of a World,” 17). In this sense, Annie combines Dickensian melodrama with the generic demands of new girl literature. Annie appeals as a new girl, unmoored from conventional family life and able to have adventures. One version of the story that Gray tells about Annie’s origin emphasizes mobility and freedom as key to her character. Early versions of Annie’s origins ascribe her gender to the newspaper publisher’s input. In this early version, Gray developed a character named “Little Orphan Otto,” but the Tribune’s publisher, Captain Joseph Medill Patterson, rejected him as a “pansy,” suggesting that Gray change the feminine-­looking character to a girl (Heer, “Dream Big,” 24).3 In 1951, however, Gray revised this story and claimed that Annie was based on a real-­life model, a “street urchin he met while roaming the streets of Chicago”: “I talked to this little kid and liked her right away,” Gray said, “She had common sense, knew how to take care of herself. She had to. Her name was Annie. At the time some 40 strips were using boys as the main characters; only three were using girls. I chose Annie for mine, and made

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Figure 1.1. Annie and Sandy return home to the smells, noise, and crowding of their urban home. Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, 7:23 © IDW Publishing, 2009.

her an orphan, so she’d have no family, no tangling alliances, but freedom to go where she pleased” (quoted in Heer, “Dream Big,” 24). This perhaps revisionist history matters less for its veracity—as Heer suggests, both stories are likely apocryphal—than for the analysis it provides of Annie’s appeal: in this story, Gray underscores her common sense, ability to fend for herself, and freedom from “tangling alliances.” His description of Annie is echoed in Mitchell’s description of popular “city arab” tales for girls. In these tales—a late-­nineteenth–­early-­twentieth century cycle of “new girl” fiction about “poor outcast waifs” (Mitchell, 157)—the main character “lives on her own; she is cool, self-­possessed, forward, independent; and she is also the highly visible bruised victim of abuse” (153). Annie, then, both carries with her values of the Victorian era and updates the new girl paradigm—she is the new girl in a more modern setting. Crucially, Annie is an urban girl. Although she frequently travels to rural areas, she views the city as her home. In the 1936 episode “Those Who Are About to Die,” for example, as Annie and her dog, Sandy, make their way back to the city from a rural workhouse, Annie proclaims: “I know some folks don’t like th’ city—plenty claim it’s unhealthy—maybe th’ air is bad— but what makes some folks dopey puts pep in others. . . . Sniff, sniff—Oh, Boy! Smell that Sandy? Smoke—Asphalt—Garlic—Gasoline—Old fruit— and look at th’ people—Thousands of ’em, Sandy—Every breed on Earth— and noise—Boy it makes yer teeth chatter—Yep, it sure is like getting home again—eh, Sandy?” (Gray, 7:22–23). Against those who view the city as intrinsically bad, Annie values the city for its diversity and liveliness, “havin’ to think quicker and move faster than th’ next guy” (Gray, 7:22). She affiliates herself with the city and claims the city at large—rather than any single place—as home.

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   19

Complicating the understanding of Annie as a preteen but fitting her status as a new girl, Annie evinces something of a category crisis with regard to her age. As Stella Ress argues, “Annie intrigues adults with her dual nature, a combination of youthful and mature qualities” (787–788). Annie appears childlike but acts like an adult. She frequently works for wages as, variously, a grocer, a farmer, a circus act, a child star, a flower peddler, and more; she sometimes lives on her own, even renting a room in a boardinghouse; she often mouths the “philosophies of a person of 60 years” (788); and she is more caretaker than dependent. In one 1931 episode, Annie even temporarily “adopts” an abandoned child she finds in the hallway of her boardinghouse. Rejecting the idea of an orphanage, Annie declares, “She’ll be no factory product—this kid’ll be hand raised and by me, or I’ll know the reason why” (Gray, 3:268). Rather than question Annie’s ability to raise a child, the adults in her life praise her. “Good for you,” says her landlady, Maw Green; and her boss, Jake, declares, “Such a girl—Now she takes in a little waif to raise—she is young in years— yes—but she will raise that kid fine” (Gray, 3:268).

Annie as Fallen Woman Annie’s combination of adult manners and childlike appearance works with her status as “street arab,” or what Joanne Hall calls a “female hobo,” to parodically invoke the figure of the fallen woman.4 I mean parody in the sense that Linda Hutcheon posits when she describes parody as a denaturalizing critique that imitates through repetition, but with a difference (6). Parody, in this sense, need not necessarily be comedic. Parody, according to Hutcheon, might imitate the conventions of a text or trope ironically, thereby subverting the intended meaning. Annie subversively echoes and parallels the trope of the fallen woman while nonetheless avowing her innocence. In doing so, she simultaneously denaturalizes the figure of the fallen woman and the innocent child. Annie can be seen as repeatedly enacting a fall in which she is unmoored from home and family. In the case of the comic strip, these falls are partly explained through market demands. In the early days of the strip, according to Heer, Gray and Patterson argued over Annie’s fate. Gray wanted her to stay with Daddy Warbucks, but Patterson felt the strip would have more appeal if Annie stayed poor. So, they “split the difference” (Heer, “Dream Big,” 26). Daddy would vanish repeatedly, reorphaning Annie over and over again, leaving her to wander the streets or find a new home in poverty until Daddy reappeared, often rescuing Annie or being rescued by her, to start the cycle again.

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In part, this cycle of abandonment ties Little Orphan Annie to the deep tradition of orphan narratives that runs through British and American literature and film (Nelson, 4; Griswold, 241–242; Sanders). At the same time, it marks a particular anxiety about the status of the family in the Depression. Divorce declined during the Depression because fewer people could afford it; but as Steven Mintz points out, “desertions soared”: “By 1940 more than 1.5 million married women lived apart from their husbands,” and there was a 50 percent increase in the number of children placed in custodial institutions during the first two years of the Depression (Mintz, 237). Additionally, the number of homeless children rose dramatically (Ashby, 108). Figuratively, Annie’s status as an orphaned and dependent child, unmoored from home, triggers associations with immigration, and issues of assimilation and class rise. Because of her lack of home, she is similar to Georg Simmel’s modern stranger: someone seen “not in the sense often touched upon in the past, as the wanderer who comes today and goes tomorrow, but rather as the person who comes today and stays tomorrow,” someone who is not a “soil owner” in the literal or figurative sense, who does not belong to the dominant group, and who is fundamentally mobile and free (402–403). In line with this view of Annie as a stranger, she acknowledges, on a long walk back to the city from the country, that “at heart,” she and Sandy are “just a couple o’ tramps” (Gray, 7:22). Across the series, Annie freely and confidently roams the streets. She is both literally and figuratively a streetwalker. She plainly walks city streets, and she metaphorically invokes the image of the streetwalker. As numerous critics and theorists have argued, the figure of the woman on the street was a figure of suspicion in early modernity. Masculine figures, such as “the dandy, the flaneur, the hero, the stranger” could roam freely, whereas women “could not stroll alone in the city” (Wolff, 41). As Sharon Marcus puts it, “Men freely stroll the boulevards, mingling with the crowd and collecting impressions, but women enter the streets only at the risk of being taken for streetwalkers” (1). Annie’s mobility here is both surprising for her being a child, but also, presumably, free from associations of prostitution because she is a child. Nonetheless, even if they do not follow through on the sexual denotations and remain at the level of parody, these scenes of risk, encounter, and pairing with a man connote streetwalking. As she roams the streets, Annie is frequently picked up by men. In the 1926 episode “The Blue Bell of Happiness,” for example, Annie is dismissed from a boarding school and attempts to head home. But she gets left behind at a train station when she tries to get a hamburger for herself and Sandy. Left with no luggage, no ticket, and only forty cents—and with Warbucks away for a few

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   21

Figure 1.2. Annie meets Jerry the hobo and immediately joins him on the road. Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, 1:309 © IDW Publishing, 2008.

months—Annie becomes homeless. Wandering the train tracks, she meets Jerry, a hobo. Jerry declares that Annie is “pretty young to be out here all alone” and suggests that she ‘better go along with me a ways” (Gray, 1:309). Without hesitation, Annie says, “Sure, that’d be swell,” and joins him on the road. As they travel together, Jerry helps Annie dress to look like a boy and calls her “Dannie.” This pickup brings Annie and Jerry together as partners until another male hobo kidnaps Annie, determined to use her to milk more sympathy, and money, out of old women. Not only does Annie walk the streets, but many times she is assigned an exchange value that monetizes her appeal. For example, in the 1925 episode “Welcome Stranger,” when Annie is separated from Daddy Warbucks and living with the Silos, Warbucks posts a notice offering a $5,000 reward for her return. Annie is kidnapped by men who have seen the notice and aim to collect even more money: “This bird Warbucks would pay $50,000 for that brat if he’d pay a dime and I’m going to collect it” (Gray, 1:120). In 1935, when Annie is discovered by the Hollywood talent agent Mr. Uptown, he declares, “This kid is the key to unlock millions in profits for Kolossal” (Gray, 6:119). In 1933, Annie works as a street performer singing alongside a blind fiddle player and earns eleven dollars, but soon meets an agent, Mr. Chizzler, who knows that Annie is “worth a fortune” (Gray, 5:43). In “Easy Money” (Gray, 7:155–217), swindlers attempt to murder Annie and collect $200,000 in insurance money. In its parodic reworking of the trope of the fallen woman, Little Orphan Annie provides what Miriam Hansen calls “a sensory-­reflexive horizon for

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the experience of modernization and modernity,” or, in other words, makes visible the “fantasies, uncertainties, and anxieties” associated with modernity (10, 14). In Hansen’s account, women, and especially fallen women, “function as metonymies, if not allegories, of urban modernity” and “metaphors of a civilization in crisis” (15). Annie’s trials may have harked back to Victorian literature, but they resonated strongly with concerns of the Depression, such as “displacement from home, loss of family livelihood, and the death of parents” (Studlar, 61). In combining the figure of the fallen woman, if only metaphorically, with the image of the child, Annie conjures the potential risk for the child in the city, of course; yet her youth also allows for multiple readings and mobilizes a range of anxieties related to urban living and modernity, such as increased urbanization and industrialization; immigration; the growing squalor of industrialized cities, including overpopulation, tenements, and slums; the role of women and the perceived threats of feminism; alienation, fragmentation, and so on. In particular, Annie reorients the potentially jarring contingency and indeterminacy of modernity into a positive realm of possibility and encounter, and she navigates uncertainties about immigration, poverty, and feminism through narratives of adoption and marriage.

Annie Queers the Family In many ways, Annie’s extended story plays maternal failure against paternal redemption. When Annie is first adopted, for example, she is taken in by Mrs. Warbucks (Gray, 1:38) on a trial basis. Mrs. Warbucks’s interest in Annie, however, is only a masquerade of charitable behavior, intended to impress her friends: “Oh, I felt I should do something for charity, no matter what the sacrifice” (Gray, 1:45). The portrayal of Mrs. Warbucks denaturalizes maternal care and, in doing so, makes clear a crisis in mothering. Ellen Key’s Progressive feminist bestseller The Renaissance of Motherhood argues that early feminism produced a disinclination for motherhood—birth rates decreased and women increasingly viewed day care and outside care as better than home care for the child’s upbringing: “Motherhood has . . . ceased to be the sweet secret dream of the maiden, the glad hope of the wife, the deep regret of the ageing women who has not had this yearning satisfied” (110). In Key’s account, as women became liberated from some traditional roles, they lost their ability and interest in mothering: “The social activities of the mothers of the well-­ to-­do classes and the outside work of the wage-­earning mothers make mother-­ care only a figure of speech, and the children are neglected” (127). While underscoring maternal failure, the strip promoted a model of paternal rehabilitation. Much as the figure of the child in temperance narra-

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   23

tives cures the drunkard, Annie disciplines men. As Gaylyn Studlar argues in relation to Shirley Temple, Little Orphan Annie assures viewers that “masculinity could be made devoutly paternal and irrevocably domesticated at a time when the ties between men and their families were particularly fragile” (63). In contrast to Mrs. Warbucks’s uninterest in parenting, as soon as Mr. Warbucks meets Annie, he insists she call him “Daddy.”5 He tells his wife, “Annie doesn’t need charity. Just give her an even break and she’ll do the rest” (Gray, 1:51). Having made his fortune during the war in munitions, Daddy tells Annie, “Maybe I did wrong, Annie, but I did the best I knew.” Confessing that he chased fortune in order to gain his wife’s love, but that his wife does not love him, he states, “I’ve made nothing but mistakes all my life. . . . If there were more girls like you in the world, there’d be a lot less old birds like me” (Gray, 1:53). In a pattern that continues across the life of the strip, “those who help Annie, rich and poor alike, are rewarded by the fact that she helps them become young again and change their bad habits” (Heer, “A Dickens of a World,” 16). Soon, Daddy is playing cowboys with Annie, taking her to a vaudeville show, rescuing her friend Miss Fair from an unscrupulous loan shark, and giving his coat and a job to a homeless man (Gray, 1:53–58). Although Daddy and Annie state their mutual love, and Daddy admits his past mistakes, their union is impermanent. Daddy goes to Siberia on business, and as soon as he is gone, Mrs. Warbucks returns Annie to the orphanage (Gray, 1:60), initiating the cycle of Annie’s repeated abandonment. In short order, Annie runs away and makes her way to the country. There she lives with Mr. and Mrs. Silo, kind country folk. They take her in, but then Daddy returns and brings her home until he and Mrs. Warbucks separate and he goes to Africa on business. Then Annie, thinking he is dead, joins a circus and is nearly crippled doing a trapeze act. Daddy returns and installs Annie at a country estate, but ends up broke and on the road . . . and so on. These cycles of abandonment and rescue in Little Orphan Annie initiate new encounters and adventures. Many of these encounters put Annie at risk. For example, in “The Haunted House,” Annie uncovers a gang of bank robbers, recovers the stolen money, and then is kidnapped by the bandits (Gray, 1:367–374). In the remarkably similar story “Sherlock Jr.,” Annie catches a band of criminals and recovers the stolen money, but then is kidnapped by the criminals shortly afterward (Gray, 2:84–144). In another episode, while Annie is being escorted on her way to a private school by Daddy Warbucks’s friend Wun Wey, “competitors” kill him and take Annie hostage (Gray, 6:111–115). As often, though, Annie encounters strangers who quickly become friends and provide her with a temporary home. Instead of risk, this contact ignites what Sharon Marcus has characterized as “the urban novel’s emphasis on

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chance encounters, the interplay between isolation and community, and the sudden transformation of strangers into kin” (11). This pattern renders a view of the urban as beneficent, open to encounter and contingency. It marks a difference between Little Orphan Annie and traditional orphan girl narratives in which “an orphan girl enters a home far from modern urban life, a home that is reluctant to accept her” (Sanders, 6) and in which the orphan girl has to overcome hostility and win the hearts of those with whom she lives. Here, to meet Annie is to love her and want her. In “The Girl Next Door” (Gray, 2:248–272), for instance, Annie takes a walk, leaving the hotel where she and Daddy have been finally reunited, without paying attention to its name or address, and promptly gets lost. She is found sleeping in a doorway by a cab driver named Monk Dooley, who takes her to his home. At home with his wife the next morning, Monk wonders, “Maybe I should have taken her to the police station—they’d know what to do with her—I guess it was a mistake me bringing her here” (249). His wife, however, responds, “What else could you do? The place for that child is in a good home like ours” (249). Annie accepts them as they accept her: “Course th’ Dooleys haven’t all th’ money in th’ world, or th’ swellest flat in town— but they have big hearts and I guess that’s what really counts more’n anything else” (250). Another episode, “On the Lam,” shows Annie on the run from Chinese hit men (Gray, 4:184–199). Hungry, tired, and with worn-­out shoes, Annie wanders into a shoe repair shop and meets Jack Boot. After Boot feeds Annie and provides her with new shoes, she falls asleep in his shop. He takes her home to his bachelor house. There, Annie cooks, cleans, and keeps a light on for him. Shyly, Annie and Boot each admit a desire to stay together. To keep neighbors from snooping, they decide to be “uncle” and “niece” to each other. For both, the feeling of kinship is real. Annie says, “As far as that goes, you might be my real uncle, for all I know—Anyway, I’m going to really believe you are— Gee—a real uncle—folks o’ my own” (Gray, 6:202; emphasis in the original). In “Justice at Play,” from 1939, Annie travels with Daddy Warbucks to London—this, he assures her, will keep her safe from trouble. But criminals throw Annie off the ship’s deck, her feet and hands bound and her mouth gagged. Annie, however, executes a trick she learned from Daddy Warbucks’s servant Punjab and frees herself before she hits the water. Then, floating down the English Channel, she is rescued by a young couple, John and Jill. Believing Warbucks to be dead, the young couple bring Annie home to their mansion, under the pretense that she is their niece (Gray, 3:217ff). As Annie moves time and again from home to hotel to boardinghouse, from the country to the city and back again, she inhabits numerous spaces

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   25

Figure 1.3. In another “pickup,” Monk Dooley finds Annie. Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, 2:249 © IDW Publishing, 2009.

Figure 1. 4. Annie forms an impromptu family with Jack Boot. Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, 6:202 © IDW Publishing, 2010.

and encounters diverse people. These range in class and ethnicity. For an extended period in 1931, she lives in a boardinghouse run by the Irish-­named Maw Green while working at a store run by Jake, who speaks with a Yiddish inflection and has mainly customers with Jewish names. In 1936, she lives with Ginger, a former showgirl and countess, whose neighbors are Honest Al, a Jewish pawnbroker, and Barney, the landlord, who speaks with a Cockney accent (Gray, 7:27ff). Characters in Little Orphan Annie speak with accents that mark their ethnicity and neighborhood. This “melting pot ethos of Annie’s world” (Heer, “Economy,” 16) signals not only the populism of the strip, and provides a realist glimpse of multiethnic urban life, but also models an acceptance of diversity and tolerance—within whiteness.6 Just as Annie can be absorbed into good, moral, and kind families, she also transforms bad or inauthentic ones. In an extended sequence, the Bleeks pose as her biological parents in a gold-­digging scheme (Gray, 5:91–219). But Mrs. Bleek falls for Annie’s goodness and charm and tells her the truth: “I’m

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not your mother . . . but Annie . . . I wanted you to love me . . . Annie, my darling—I’ll be a mother to you, no matter what, I swear” (191). Annie eventually discovers the scheme and traps Mr. Bleek and his gang of thieves. Mrs. Bleek aids her: “This is my chance to go right, and I’m taking it. You’re not alone against those heartless butchers any longer Annie” (215). Little Orphan Annie underscores the contingency of not only urban living but also family. As a mobile and free child without “tangling alliances,” Annie can forge temporary alliances with multiple adults, including bachelors and couples without children of their own, like the Silos and Dooleys. As Joanne Hall observes, “Annie often adopts and is adopted by couples who lack children just as she lacks parents; essentially, she is the last piece of the jigsaw to be willingly assimilated into the parent-­child family structure” (38). Annie has no stable home life, but instead drifts in and out of multiple homes, often with loving adults who take care of her. These adults come from different backgrounds and ethnicities, and different classes. These alternate families render family as potentially queer—contingent and spontaneous, not organic or destined. The adults with whom Annie affiliates are akin to the aunts and uncles who populate queer childhoods. As Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick avows, uncles and aunts are stereotypically associated with queer childhoods: “Because aunts and uncles (in either narrow or extended meanings) are adults whose intimate access to children needn’t depend on their own pairing or procreation, it’s very common, of course, for some of them to have the office of representing nonconforming or nonreproductive sexualities to children. We are many, the queer women and men whose first sense of the alternative life trajectories came to us from our uncles and aunts” (63). Like the aunts and uncles whom Sedgwick describes, the adults who become temporary family to Annie represent alternate lifestyles: people who have not married or had children, people willing to forge nonbiological and generally non-­legally-­binding relationships to create a de facto family with Annie. The comic strip takes the instability of families in the Depression and renders it not merely as a problem but also as a virtue. If families are not stable and permanent, they can at least be malleable and accommodating. While highlighting the risks of urban living in Annie’s frequent run-­ins with criminals, kidnappers, and thugs, Little Orphan Annie simultaneously figures the urban as a site of possibility. In showing the perils of neglect and the possible susceptibility of girls to external influences and forces, Little Orphan Annie ultimately emphasizes the urban girl’s freedom and capabilities. Little Orphan Annie produces a potent and prevailing fantasy of the urban girl as mobile, free, and powerful, an adventurer rather than a victim. Annie

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   27

challenges conventional views of the limitations placed upon girl protagonists. For example, Ina Rae Hark claims that being “on the road” is an adventure generally reserved for boys: “In American home-­leaving narratives, both literary and cinematic, woman as protagonist is rare; woman as protagonist who escapes either redomestication or ruin is rarer still” (29). In contradistinction, Annie is a home-­leaving figure who is neither ruined nor, in any simple way, domesticated. Her long-­running narrative parodically invokes the figure of the streetwalker by showing a girl who roams city streets and has frequent “pick up” encounters with men. Little Orphan Annie stitches together the contradictory narratives of the fallen women and the new girl. As a “new fallen woman,” Annie has significant agency to transform and improve not only her situation, but also that of the men who take her in, and to create new alternate families. Little Orphan Annie thus provides a utopian solution to the traumatic effects of modernity in the figure of the new girl, a girl whose movements mimic those of the fallen woman, but whose own unmooring from traditional familial structures shows alternatives and possibilities in the upheaval and instability of modern life.

Acknowledgments This chapter excerpts portions of my chapter “Shirley Temple as Streetwalker: Girls, Streets, and Encounters with Men,” in Fantasies of Neglect: Imaging the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction (New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2016).

Notes 1. Gaylyn Studlar argues that the juvenation of girls in film was a long-­term process that occurred from the silent era to the 1960s. 2. The recent film Annie (Gluck, 2014), starring Quvenzhané Wallis, situates the action in the present, making parallels between our contemporary recessionary period of austerity and the Depression. 3. Many people assume that Gray took the name from the 1885 poem “Little Orphan Annie” (called “Little Orphant Annie” until a typo switched the word to “Orphan”) by James Whitcomb Riley. Riley’s poem was based on an orphan taken in by his family in Indianapolis: “Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay, / An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away, / An’ shoo the chickens off the porch, an’ dust the hearth, an’ sweep, / An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-­an’-­keep; / An’ all us other children, when the supper-­things is done, / We set around the kitchen fire an’ has the mostest fun / A-­list’nin’ to the witch-­tales / ’at Annie tells about.” 4. Joanne Hall reads Annie as a female hobo (42–44) and cites a 1926 sequence in the strip in which Annie literally becomes a hobo, cross-­dressing as “Dannie” (see Gray, 1:309–

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319). While the term “female hobo” captures Annie’s mobility, it does not fully account for her movement in and out of homes or her constantly changing familial and economic status. 5. The word or name “Daddy” is always in quotation marks in the comic strip. For Joanne Hall, this signifies “the lack of blood ties between Annie and her adopted father” (42). 6. The arrival of Annie’s Indian protector Punjab in 1935 adds diversity, but removes the strip somewhat from its realist form: rather than represent aspects of the melting pot, it moves the strip into a world of fantasy (see Heer, “Punjab,” 5).

Works Cited Alexander, Ruth M. The “Girl Problem”: Female Sexual Delinquency in New York, 1900–1930. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1995. Ashby, LeRoy. Endangered Children: Dependency, Neglect, and Abuse in American History. New York: Twayne, 1997. Brace, Charles Loring. The Dangerous Classes of New York. Fairford, UK, 1872. Eisenstein, Sergei. “Dickens, Griffith and the Film Form Today.” In Sergei Eisenstein—Film Form: Essays in Film Theory, 195–255. Edited and translated by Jay Leyda. New York: Harcourt, 1949. Gray, Harold. Little Orphan Annie. Vol. 1, Will Tomorrow Ever Come? Daily Comic Strips, 1924–1927. Library of American Comics. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2008. ———. Little Orphan Annie. Vol. 2, The Darkest Hour Is Just before the Dawn: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1927–1929. Library of American Comics. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2009. ———. Little Orphan Annie. Vol. 3, And a Blind Man Shall Lead Them: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1929–1931. Library of American Comics. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2009. ———. Little Orphan Annie. Vol. 5, The One-­Way Road to Justice: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1933–1935. Library of American Comics. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2010. ———. Little Orphan Annie. Vol. 6, Punjab the Wizard: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1935–1936. Library of American Comics. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2010. ———. Little Orphan Annie. Vol. 7, The Omnipotent Mr. Am: Daily and Sunday Comics, 1936– 1938. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2011. Griswold, Jerry. The Classic American Children’s Story: Novels of the Golden Age. New York: Penguin, 1996. Hall, Joanne. “The Wanderer Contained: Issues of ‘Inside’ and ‘Outside’ in Relation to Harold Gray’s ‘Little Orphan Annie’ and Marilynne Robinson’s Housekeeping.” Critical Survey 18, no. 3 (2006): 37–50. Hansen, Miriam. “Fallen Women, Rising Stars, New Horizons: Shanghai Silent Film as Vernacular Modernism.” Film Quarterly 54, no. 1 (2000): 10–22. Hark, Ina Rae. “Moviegoing, ‘Home-­leaving,’ and the Problematic Girl Protagonist of The Wizard of Oz.” In Sugar, Spice and Everything Nice: Cinemas of Girlhood, edited by Frances Gateward and Murray Pomerance, 25–38. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2002. Heer, Jeet. “A Dickens of a World: Annie’s Literary Ancestors.” In Harold Gray, Little

Little Orphan Annie as Streetwalker   29 Orphan Annie, vol. 2, The Darkest Hour Is Just before the Dawn, 11–21. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2009. ———. “Dream Big and Work Hard.” In Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, vol. 1, Will Tomorrow Ever Come?, 11–27. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2008. ———. “The Economy of Little Orphan Annie.” In Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, vol. 3, And a Blind Man Shall Lead Them, 9–18. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2009. ———. “Punjab and Politics.” In Harold Gray, Little Orphan Annie, vol. 6, Punjab the Wizard, 5–12. Edited by Dean Mullaney. San Diego: IDW, 2013. Hutcheon, Linda. A Theory of Parody: The Teaching of Twentieth-­Century Art Forms. New York: Methuen, 1985. Key, Ellen. The Renaissance of Motherhood. Translated by Anna E. B. Fried. New York: Knickerbocker, 1914. Marcus, Sharon. Apartment Stories: City and Home in Nineteenth-­Century Paris and London. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999. Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2004. Mitchell, Claudia A., and Jacqueline Reid-­Walsh, eds. Girl Culture: An Encyclopedia. Vol. 2. Westport, CT: Greenwood, 2008. Mitchell, Sally. The New Girl: Girls’ Culture in England, 1880–1915. New York: Columbia University Press, 1995. Nelson, Claudia. Little Strangers: Portrayals of Adoption and Foster Care in America, 1850–1929. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2003. Ress, Stella. “Bridging the Generation Gap: Little Orphan Annie in the Great Depression.” Journal of Popular Culture 43, no. 4 (2010): 782–800. Sanders, Joe Sutliff. Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2011. Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. “Tales of the Avunculate: The Importance of Being Earnest.” In Tendencies, 52–72. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1993. Simmel, Georg. “The Stranger.” In The Sociology of Georg Simmel, 402–403. Translated and edited by Kurt H. Wolff. New York: Free Press, 1950. Studlar, Gaylyn. Precocious Charms: Stars Performing Girlhood in Classical Hollywood Cinema. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2013. Wolff, Janet. “The Invisible Flaneuse: Women and the Literature of Modernity.” In Feminine Sentences, 34–50. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1990. Zelizer, Viviana A. Pricing the Priceless Child: The Changing Social Value of Children. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1985.

Chapter 2

Competent Children and Social Cohesion: Representations of Childhood in Home Front Propaganda Comic s during World War II in Finl and Ralf Kauranen In Finland during World War II, the Ministry of Supply produced educational and propagandistic comics to convey messages to the reading public on such issues as rationing, black market trade, self-­sufficiency, and thrift. The comics also aimed to boost morale on the home front. The comics contained numerous child characters and drew on and reproduced various representations of childhood. A central character was the competent and active child, a worthy member of a society and nation in crisis. The competent child—along with representations of children drawing on, for example, childhood innocence—was one of the figures used in the comics to create an image of social cohesion in the national context. Finland was intensely involved in World War II. This engagement was divided into three separate wars.1 The Winter War, which started when the Soviet Union attacked Finland, was fought from the end of November 1939 to mid-­March 1940. After a short period of peace, the so-­called Interim Peace, the Continuation War lasted from the end of June 1941 until mid-­September 1944. During this time, Finland was aligned with Germany, first through Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion of the Soviet Union, and toward the end of the war in the attempt to keep the Soviet army from occupying Finland. After the cease-­fire with the Soviet Union, Finland was engaged in the Lapland War from September 1944 to May 1945, with the aim of forcing its former German allies to leave the country. The comics discussed in this article were published during the Continuation War from 1941 to 1943. The fewer than one million children in wartime Finland experienced the war in ways that varied, depending on, for example, place of residence. Lack of provisions was a bigger problem in towns than in rural areas, where agricultural production provided supplies to supplement the official rations and people were not dependent on products available in stores (Jaatinen, 121).

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Bombings were concentrated in the largest towns (Laaksonen, 104), and children’s experiences of the violence of war were unevenly distributed. The loss of territory to the Soviet Union forced some 400,000 people, or 12 percent of the Finnish population, to evacuate (Fingerroos, 484). More than 70,000 children were evacuated from Finland, in most cases temporarily, to Sweden and Denmark (Korppi-­Tommola, 446). Some 50,000 children, furthermore, lost their fathers in the war (Näre, 139). Since a significant part of the male population was absent from civilian life, the role of women and children in working life and production changed during the war (Saraste, 286–289). Children had worked before the war, especially in the countryside, where most Finns lived, but the war brought with it new forms of child labor. New legislation affecting adult women’s obligation to work was introduced in 1939; in 1942, everyone age fifteen and older was compelled to work (Kirves and Näre, 269). In 1941, an umbrella organization called the Bee of the Young (Nuorten Talkoot) was founded to unify under its auspices different youth organizations and to organize the work done by young people. Work was a duty for anyone older than fifteen, but younger children were also involved (272). Children and youth were not only required to work, but also encouraged through rewards and badges, and through propagandistic mottos such as “Work and pray” (274). Just before Finland was drawn into the war in 1939, a special Ministry of Supply was created to regulate the country’s economic life: production, consumption, and foreign trade (Salovaara, 16–17). Its main task was to ensure that the needs of different institutions and parts of the population were satisfied and to oversee the distribution of goods. During the war years, the number of rationed goods increased gradually. The measures taken were not popular with the general public, and regulations on rationing were frequently broken (Jaatinen, 120; Toivonen). Public relations and the new bureaucracy’s ability to communicate with other areas of society were thus of central concern. The ministry’s information and propaganda organization was built up gradually. To begin with, the ministry established a press secretary, and in late 1942 a special information office was founded (Utrio, “Kansanhuoltoaiheinen,” 189–190). Its tasks can be described as both informational and propagandistic. It was responsible for spreading information about laws and decrees to other governmental authorities, local subbranches, the representatives of production, and the general public, but this information was to be complemented by attempts to enlighten the general public about the meaning of the regulations and about means of self-­help and self-­sufficiency. When describing the information and propaganda work done by the Ministry of Supply, the

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head of the ministry’s information office stated that the measures taken to prepare the Finnish people to conform to the new realities had four general purposes: To make the public understand the necessity of rationing and to make it sympathetic and even helpful to the execution of rationing; to make all parts of the population aware of the regulations of the national services; to make the people follow the decrees and to encourage both producers and consumers to attain self-­sufficiency in production, as broadly and versatilely as possible. (Utrio, “Kansanhuoltoaiheinen,” 189; trans. by author)

Information and propaganda were spread through all available media: print, radio, film, and meetings, including face-­ to-­ face communication. Newspapers were supplied with articles, notifications, and photographs as well as comics and cartoons. The ministry produced films, radio programs, a magazine, and manuals and posters. In overall propaganda production, comics constituted only one small part. The propaganda of the Ministry of Supply, in turn, constituted one field in the broader landscape of informational and propagandistic strategies, which were controlled by a number of other authorities and had other targets and purposes (see Kirves; Lehtinen; Salminen and Suvanne; Valkonen). The first experiments by the Ministry of Supply with comics as a communicative means took place in the spring of 1941 with a small-­scale comics campaign promoting the collection of rags. Two comic strips by the artist Paul Söderström were sent to fifty newspapers, of which thirty-­three chose to publish the strips (Utrio, “Selostus huhti-­toukokuun,” 3; see also Utrio, Kotirintama 80). The campaign was deemed successful, since it resulted in an increase in the quantity of rags collected, and by the end of 1941, comics were being used more broadly. Comics were first used against black market trade, but soon they dealt with all aspects of the ministry’s sphere of operations. The comics were continually produced from late 1941 to mid-­1943, and the plans and execution were extensive and ambitious. There were to be six sets of materials—not only comics, but also columns and articles—sent weekly to newspapers, which were grouped by political orientation. Accordingly, the comics were to be drawn by six artists. The newspapers were categorized in the following political camps: the National Coalition Party, the Agrarian Party, the Social Democratic Party, the Swedish People’s Party, the National Progressive Party, and, as a separate group, the politically nonaligned papers. The comics were to be distributed

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to 143 newspapers (“Salakauppa-­propaganda”). According to the information office’s reports, 314 comic strips were distributed to the newspapers in 1942, and 180 strips in 1943 (Utrio, “Selostus kansanhuoltotoimiston,” 1–4; Utrio, “Selostus Tiedotustoimiston,” 4). In the books of clippings in the ministry’s archives there are 500 comic strips, but the collection is not complete, and more comics were produced. Most of the comic strips were drawn by six artists—Holger Erkelenz, Joel Räsänen, Hugo Otava, Erkki Salonen, Erkki Tanttu, and Arnold Tilgmann—but more artists were involved in their production (see Kaukoranta and Kemppinen, 206, 209; Hänninen and Kokkila, 26). The artists hired by the ministry had varying degrees of experience in the art of comics. Erkki Tanttu was the best known of the artists. His comical hero Rymy-­Eetu had been familiar from the pages of magazines since 1930, and in 1938 the first collection of these popular strips was published in book form. In most cases, the strips are composed of three or four panels that form a sequence presenting a linear narrative. At times there are only two panels, and sometimes the comics create a contradiction or dichotomy rather than a linear story. The comics draw on a tradition of humorous gag strips, although the informational purpose often overshadows the comic effect. In only a very few cases is the educational aspect lacking. The lessons the comics intended to impart fall into several categories. According to ministry reports, their themes included “general propaganda,” “household propaganda,” the treatment of agricultural affairs, the collecting of different types of materials, woodcutting, footwear, and foraging for natural products such as berries and mushrooms (Utrio, “Selostus kansanhuoltotoimiston”; Utrio, “Selostus Tiedotustoimiston”). The comics convey concrete information, such as how to preserve berries or use a stove. At the same time, however, they pre­sent more abstract lessons, for instance, models of proper conduct and correct attitudes. The ministry’s officials provided the artists with topics for the comics. Since the artists’ execution of ideas in many cases is very similar, it is probable that the instructions were quite specific and concerned artistic choices as well as themes. Of the 500 comic strips in the ministry’s archives, 163 include children. These characters share the strips with a number of other characters, most of whom represent the adult world. The latter category includes women and men, often parents, as well as professionals and laborers such as farmers, shopkeepers, soldiers, policemen, and bus drivers. The representatives of the adult world often appear as figures related to economic transactions: they are producers and consumers, and among these, the black market scalper pre­sents a particular case. The agents in the comics also include animals, plants, and ob-

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jects, all occasionally appearing in anthropomorphized forms. Furthermore, agency in these comics is sometimes given to other figures, such as the personification of the Russian bear as a symbol of the Soviet Union. Constructionist approaches to children and childhood question a view of childhood as a natural and singular phenomenon connected to a certain age group or developmental phase, and highlight instead the making of childhood as varied and plural. From this perspective, the categories “child” and “childhood” are formed in manifold social, practical, and material processes, and children form their lives interactively with other people, materials, and discourses (Prout and James, 7; James, Jenks, and Prout, 212–214). Representations of childhood and children, such as the ones produced in comics, give meaning to and reproduce conventional ideas about the category “child.” They also provide parameters for how children living surrounded by such representations can enact their lives. In the words of the sociologist Beverley Skeggs, representations in the form of evaluative categorizations are inscribed in individuals and groups, fixing them to (or liberating them from) certain positions and dispositions (1–3, 12–13). The representations of childhood in comics give meaning to the category, infusing it with values, and at the same time prescribe forms of conduct. In these comics’ instructional and propagandistic aims, they very explicitly provide models of how children should act, but at the same time, the effects of comics are not easily controlled and may have unforeseen outcomes. In their ambition to mobilize children, comics create a vision of children’s competence and blur the traditional distinction between the competence associated with adult subjects and the incompetence associated with children (see Hutchby and Moran-­Ellis, 4). Such a representational construct potentially changes the understandings of childhood more broadly, outside the specific area addressed by the comics. Assessments of the effects of these representations of childhood are not easily made, not only because information on reception is scarce, but also because children are depicted in the comics in a number of different ways, in different capacities and roles. It is unclear exactly how the comics were received or even how widely they were printed, but in September 1942, after nine months of comics production, the head of the ministry’s information office stated, “The drawings have gained great popularity and their edifying effect is significant” (Utrio, “P.M.,” 2). When the production of these comics was terminated in 1943, it was (according to the diaries of the same person) because ministry officials and artists had run out of “funny topics” (Utrio, Kotirintama 335), not because the strips were unpopular.

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The child characters of the comics appear in various roles, and the comics draw on different discourses of childhood, allowing for a range of representations. In a significant number of the comics, children function as markers of family; that is, they constitute part of the background in which adults, marked as parents, act. A typical example of this function of the child character is provided by a comic strip in which a family sits at the dinner table and the adults discuss a current matter, for example, hoarding and the role of scalping, while the child quietly listens to the discussion (Tanttu, “Kumman”; Tilgmann, “Två”). In other strips, children watch their parents as they carry out household chores and other tasks (for example, Räsänen, “Hra”). In this passive role, the children may seem insignificant to the narratives of the strips, but their presence as indicators of family (in the precise meaning of the nuclear family) and family life may be seen as a sign of community. The family, based on the presence of the child, constitutes an image of the society of which they are a part, which the war threatens on both the home front and the front lines. In this kind of imagery, the child character’s presence in juxtaposition with adults taps into discourses of childhood innocence and potential victimhood. Children in this passive role not only signify the presence of a society constituted of various kinds of members, but also represent those in need of most protection. The child as innocent victim is also used more straightforwardly in the comic strips. In the first panel of one comic, a little girl is positioned next to a big-­bellied man, and the text asks who needs more butter, the child or the scalper. The following two panels provide the answer—“the child, of course”—and explain that rationing provides the child with a bigger portion, whereas the scalper sells his butter to someone who pays the most but has the least need (Erkelenz, “Kumpi”). The strips sometimes draw on the character of the innocent child while illustrating the comics’ ability to mix representations of children and draw on the ambiguity of the concept of childhood. In the comic strip shown on the next page, called “Relatives,” an American gangster kidnapping children is compared to a Finnish scalper stealing bread. The third panel explains the similarity between the two figures: “Both eagerly undermine society.” The comic strip draws heavily on a discourse of childhood innocence (Davis, 379–380), represented both in the kidnapped baby and in the children playing. The children are threatened by representatives of the adult world acting in undesirable ways. Innocence is, therefore, composed of victimhood, but also of a natural, implicit lack of knowledge of the evils of the world, highlighted by the infant in the first panel. The innocent children in the comics are constructed in opposition to adult figures, and their fates

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Figure 2.1. “Relatives” (Salonen, “Sukulaiset”). The captions translate as follows: 1. In America, an awful gangster kidnaps children. 2. In Finland, the scalper steals bread through the backdoor. 3. Both eagerly undermine society. © 1942 The estate of Erkki Salonen.

very concretely illustrate the opening words of Jean-­Jacques Rousseau’s Émile: “Coming from the hand of the Author of all things, everything is good; in the hands of man, everything degenerates” (11). While the representation of children as innocent in the comic strip gives meaning to black market trade and singles out the scalper as a corrupting force, the comic also represents children as a metaphor for society and its future. The children at play in the last panel are not only potential individual victims, but their depiction in combination with the houses illustrates a society threatened by the digging scalper and kidnapper. The caption underlines the metaphoric use of children even as it highlights the scalper’s evil, directed at society as a whole. This comic strip also makes clear the nationalist framework of the comics’ propaganda. Through the comparison of two nations, it explicitly posits the problem of the scalper in Finnish society. The nationalist framework is central to the understanding of the comics, although it is seldom so clear as in “Relatives.” In this sense, the comics studied here differ from many other cases of wartime propaganda, where blatant patriotism is crucial (see, for example, Murray, 261). Still, when social cohesion and unity were formulated in the comics of the Ministry of Supply, it was precisely in a context of the Finnish nation. Besides being depicted as a component of victimhood, children’s innocence is portrayed as ignorance; that is, the child characters are shown to be unaware—just like the playing children in “Relatives”—of the hardships of war and the destitution confronting society. Ignorance forms an ingredient

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of innocence in discourses on child protection, as, for example, Stevi Jackson and Sue Scott show in reference to discussions of sex education and anxieties concerning teenage pregnancy (99). Knowledgeable children are seen as particularly at risk in this context. While the comics do not show children in need of protection against knowledge, their ignorance is articulated in other ways. In one comic strip, the two children of a family complain about having to eat rutabagas (or yellow turnips) yet again, allowing the mother to explain that they are to eat the turnips as long as they are fresh and not spoiled (Räsänen, “Makosen perhe syö”). The comic strip is part of a group of strips informing the public that it is easier to preserve potatoes than turnips and carrots, thus encouraging people to save their potatoes for the winter to come. Children are not the only characters who show their ignorance. In comic strips published in July 1942, the aim was to emphasize the need to save sugar for the preservation of berries. In four of the comic strips, a husband voices his wish to put sugar in his coffee (Otava, “Toisessa”; Räsänen, “Makosen perhe”; Tanttu, “Kahvisokeri”; Tilgmann, “Spar”), and the wife in all six strips is given the role of explaining why sugar needs to be used with care (Erkelenz, “Rouva”; Salonen, “No”). Fathers and children display the same carefree attitude, which is corrected by the mother or wife in the family. This indicates that while the gendered division of labor was at times questioned in the comics, they also maintain gendered roles. Certain household tasks and the kitchen domain were reserved for the women in the family, who thus also were to behave more responsibly than other family members. In October 1942, the comic strips during one week dealt with the mood of the population on the home front, and reminded readers of the importance of maintaining good spirits. One of the strips, called “Be as the Children,” perhaps draws on the idea of children as representatives of ignorant bliss (Tilgmann, “Var”). In a discussion between two gentlemen, one of them complains about the never-­ending war and the lack of supplies. As two smiling boys, unaware of the hardships of war, pass the men, the other man points at the boys and says that “only when they [the children] stop being happy is there misery in Finland.” The complaining man learns from this and adds that adults should be ashamed of themselves for being discontented. The children provide an effective example in this case, since they represent society’s future and also signify the weakest members of society. The survival of a society is secure as long as it provides for the needs of those in this category. The two boys in the strip are, however, ambiguous: while they may be seen as representatives of ignorance, they may also be interpreted as exemplary citizens from whom adults too can learn. While children are sometimes shown as passive bystanders and innocent

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youngsters signifying victimhood or ignorance of the troubles facing the nation at war, another striking representation is offered by child characters that are in many ways active, productive, knowledgeable, and competent. These indicate the comics’ ideological interpellation of a national subjectivity that collects all members of Finnish society despite differences in characteristics such as age. In relation to the construction of social cohesion, the active, competent child, who constitutes a worthy member of the social body (Brembeck, Johansson, and Kampmann, 18), offers a different perspective from that of the discourse of childhood innocence. The active, competent child characters partake in social life in different ways. First, children work and perform chores. Second, they inform representatives of the adult world of the right way to do things, for instance, in relation to attitudes toward scalping, and reprimand them when they go astray. Third, children show their competence by accepting the current social conditions and by adapting to the demands that follow from them. On the one hand, children’s work is distinguished from the work performed by adults. On the other hand, many tasks performed by children are done together with adults. In the age-­based social division of labor, one form of work is portrayed as specifically suitable to children. They are to collect material resources to be recycled and reused in the production of goods. Many of the comics educate the reading public about ongoing collections of, for example, scrap metal, rubber, and rags, and children in these comics are the active protagonists engaging in work. In addition, they brush and collect hair from cows, pick up ears from harvested grain fields, extract resin from trees, and cut wood. Woodcutting, along with fishing, berry picking, and mushroom hunting, and the growing of vegetables are chores that children engage in with their adult family members (Räsänen, “Matti”; Salonen, “Nytpä”; Tilgmann, “Våra”). The work performed by children in the comics represents the collaborative effort required on the home front from every citizen. The children’s contribution also signals that no one is too small or weak to join in. Most of the child characters in the comics engage in their jobs voluntarily, happily, and proudly. They find scrap materials not only in their surroundings, but also among their toys. In one strip, related to the campaign “Home Front Spring Clean” (Kotirintaman suursiivous) in 1942, a boy gives away his broken rubber and tin toys and a girl lets go of a doll’s dress that she thinks is “old-­fashioned” (Tanttu, “Maasta”). The toys being broken and old-­fashioned indicates that there were limits to the sacrifice expected of children. They were not supposed to give away their most beloved possessions, but to realize that even seemingly worthless things had value in the war economy. The second form of competence that children show is in their knowledge

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Figure 2.2. “The example rubs off” (Tanttu, “Esimerkki”). The dialogue translates as follows: 2. We always change clothes before we go sliding. / What raggedy children. 3. We should be happy that we still have at least one set of undamaged clothes. 4. It’s nice going to school in whole clothes. / But in the evening we’ll go sliding, and we will change for poorer clothes. War commands children too to thrift. © 1943 The estate of Erkki Tanttu.

and moral standing. This is evident in the willingness with which most of them perform their tasks, but also in their engagement with other people. In a few strips, children engaged in work inform or mock other children who do not show the same commitment (Tanttu, “Ei”; Tilgmann, “Alla med!” 1). Children remind each other of the value of thrift, as in a strip where two boys who have played in the snow and ripped their trousers are reprimanded by another group of children. One child says to the two boys, “We always change clothes before we go sliding,” and another child adds, “What raggedy children.” Afterward, the two boys are thankful that they still have some clothes in good condition to wear to school. The strip ends with one of the boys stating, “War commands children too to thrift” (Tanttu, “Esimerkki”). The pedagogic voice granted to children in their relations with one another also appears in their interactions with adults. In one strip, a little girl participates in the public shaming of a scalper by pointing her finger at him (Erkelenz, “Voi”). In another, children learn in school that the home front has to fight the black market trade, and they later reprimand their mother: “Mother has been running the enemy’s errand by selling butter on the black market.” In the final panel, their mother, having learned her lesson, refuses to sell butter to a visiting scalper (Erkelenz, “Tulen”). In yet another strip, a little boy standing by the counter of a shop exposes the sales clerk, who just has lied to a customer about having no blood pudding. The happy customer rewards the boy with a piece of the pudding and tells him to always be vigilant (Räsänen, “Tilanne”). Mockery and shaming, as well as reporting or snitching, are signs of competence and of moral standing in the comics. In this sense, the educative message is clear; even so, the comics cannot be read straightforwardly as endorsements of this kind of behavior. Instead, the comics may remind adults of the possi-

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Figure 2.3. “The situation changed” (Räsänen, “Tilanne”). The dialogue translates as follows: 1. Do you have blood pudding? 2. No—and I don’t know when we will have it. / But you do have it under the counter. 3. Here is a piece of pudding for you too— always be as vigilant. © 1942 The estate of Joel Räsänen.

bility of being caught and shamed, thus encouraging readers to refrain from unwanted actions. Either way, the comics reassert a social norm by pointing out the mechanism through which social control is exerted. The third way in which children’s competence was addressed in the comics is evident in depictions of children’s acceptance of the hardships brought on by war and their willingness to make sacrifices. The previous forms of children’s competence discussed—their work activities and their knowledge and moral standing—showed their willingness to make sacrifices, spend time performing necessary duties, and take care of their belongings. The most poignant example of the acceptance of the situation, which in fact depicted a joyful understanding of the demands placed on everyone in a society at war, was presented in the comic strips published in the week before Christmas 1942. These comics address the issue of children’s Christmas presents, suggesting that parents give their children government bonds, since more traditional and perhaps preferable gifts were scarce. Four of the six strips of the week portray children eavesdropping on their parents’ discussions about presents (Erkelenz, “Nyt”; Räsänen, “Joululahjakeskustelua”; Salonen, “Tules”; Tilgmann, “Fars”). The excited kids are, with one exception, all happy to hear that they will receive bonds—with a “high” or “5½ percent” interest rate— which in six years’ time will provide them with money to buy whatever they want. Here, as elsewhere, children show a high level of knowledge, as opposed to the representations of childhood ignorance. One of the strips (Salonen, “Tules”) strikes a balance between knowledgeable and ignorant children and creates a distinction within the category of children. After having heard about the bonds, the family’s daughter asks, “Pooh, what are we supposed to do with bonds?” to which the brother retorts that girls don’t understand anything and explains that the bonds will support the “economic front”—and “that’s something, that!” Again, the boy shows the pride that goes with competence and having a meaningful role in society.

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The representations of children’s competence provide an understanding of children as worthy members of society with an important contribution to make. This is in line with the general ethos of the Ministry of Supply’s propaganda comics. The representations of competent children illustrate the more general tendency of the comics to include all parts of society in the common struggle demanded by the war. There is a blurring of boundaries between age groups—adults and children—social classes, genders, and urban and rural populations. For example, a comic strip fittingly named “All aboard!” portrays a couple—a man dressed in a top hat and morning coat, and a woman in a fine hat and fox stole—planting potatoes. The caption reads, “Nobody is too genteel” (Tilgmann, “Alla med!” 2). Another comic portrays a couple planting potatoes in an urban park (Räsänen, “Sota-­ajan”), and urban professionals are shown performing traditional agrarian tasks like harvesting. One comic called “Metamorphosis” pre­sents a young woman typing by an office desk. In the following three panels, this urban female professional is cutting down trees in a wood chopping bee. The health benefits of this form of exercise are made visible in the office worker’s stooped back becoming straight thanks to the physical labor (Tanttu, “Muodonvaihdos”). On a more humorous note, and building on the tradition of comics and cartoons giving life to inanimate objects, even potatoes and pots join in the common struggle. In one strip, potatoes dug from the soil take pride in ending up in a pot (Räsänen, “Maanalaista”). In another, two pots discuss and recapitulate the arguments of the previously mentioned campaign on preserving potatoes and eating turnips and carrots first (Erkelenz, “Oletteko”). The use of so-­called funny animals, often aimed at children and youth, is seen in the propaganda strips; in one, fish caught in a fish trap are happy to “serve the good cause” (Erkelenz, “Ahdin”). In one from November 1942, sheep are aware of the conveyance of wool and are eager to “participate in the defense of the fatherland” (Tilgmann, “Värme”). The number of strips portraying happy, smiling animals making sacrifices attests to the propaganda comics’ central characteristic of creating a sense of common struggle to unite different parts of society. The number of animals partaking in the human endeavor of the war effort, however, may be interpreted in other, complementary ways. The humor rising from these animals (and potatoes) is based on the incongruence between a nonhuman subject behaving in human fashion: talking, smiling, sacrificing for a human cause. In connection with this source of humor, children showing competence may be read as humorous in the same vein. If competence is deemed an adult trait, a similarly competent, adultlike child may be seen as amusing (or problematic, as in reactions to sexualized children; see Egan and

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Figure 2. 4. “Mobilization” (Salonen, “Liikekannallepano”). The dialogue translates as follows: 2. Attention! Extend! 3. Route step . . . March! 4. Today the mobilization of rags takes place in this house! © 1942 The estate of Erkki Salonen.

Hawkes) rather than as a proper model for behavior. The different interpretations point to the possibility of different reader positions and highlight the questions of who was the comics’ target audience and who read them. Still, the distinct interpretations of the child characters as models of competence or sources of humor do not exclude each other. The humorous effect based on incongruence does not imply a denigration of the child protagonists, but instead plays on conventional understandings of children without excluding the possibility of a change in these understandings. The topic of the common struggle is accentuated in the comics, with frequent comparisons between the battlefront and the home front. The comic strip “Mobilization” (Salonen, “Liikekannallepano”) conveys the rhetorical use of this trope while also illustrating the comics’ representations of children’s labor. A sleeping boy dreams about the forthcoming collection of rags, which come to life and appear as soldiers that he drills while wearing a paper hat and holding a sword. The military metaphor points to the importance of the tasks awaiting the boy—the metaphor is gendered—and the dream and the happy awakening indicate the joy of being useful. Moreover, the strip connects two other “fronts,” those of reality and dream. The dream places the boy in a world of childhood fantasy and play, and softens the hard world of real life and its drudgery. Whereas this strip is one in which the comparison between military life and life on the home front is pointed out most visibly in the drawings and the narrative, there are a number of comics in which phrasing indicates the same understanding. For example, a group of three small children who pick up ears from a grain field is called an “ear picking shock troop” (Räsänen, “Maasta”). As represented in the comics, children’s competence gains its meaning in the context of the more general representation of social inclusion and unity. This is achieved through the leveling of differences between groups in society and the promotion of the idea that everybody can participate and be of value. This value is, furthermore, indicated through the references to the war being

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fought on two fronts. While differences between age groups, genders, social classes, and urban and agrarian populations are downplayed, the division of social actions and functions, as well as the division of labor, is maintained. According to the comics, children are more suited to certain tasks, such as collecting things, rather than to factory work, for example, which the children of the comics do not engage in. The presence of enemy images also contributes to the comics’ portrayal of a social body united in a common struggle that ties together various groups, including children. It is significant that the Soviet Union, as an external enemy, is mostly invisible in the comics. Only a few strips refer to this outside power. Instead, the enemy portrayed in the comics is found within Finnish society. This role is played by the scalper. Black market trade was a pressing problem for the Ministry of Supply, and a significant proportion of the country’s population was in one way or another involved in black market commerce (Junila, 207). Therefore, the focus on the scalper and black market trade is understandable. The figure of the scalper, however, also highlights how the social body and social cohesion were created in the comics. It is in this context that the representations of children need to be interpreted. The threat that black market trade posed to society could not be produced by the scalper alone. Potentially all members of society constituted a problem, since they could assume the role of either a producer or a consumer in the trade. Numerous comics show sellers and buyers in trouble with the authorities because of involvement in business that is deemed both immoral and criminal. There are also many examples of individuals being corrected by their family members and acquaintances, as in the cases described previously, when children reprimanded a mother or exposed a sales clerk. Unlike other members of society, who, through their relations with one another, form a community, the scalper is singled out as an antisocial wrongdoer, lacking others’ social relations. In the depiction of communality and social cohesion, the representations of children play different roles, giving meaning to the united social body in different ways. The representations of children and childhood, both ascribing meaning to this category and entitling it to certain capacities and roles, are based on a vision of social cohesion. The representations of children as competent and active, taking part in the work performed in society, show them fulfilling a function similar to that of other groups in society: contributing to the social whole, which, despite its internal differences, is to be united in a common struggle. The fact that even the smallest—in this sense, the most insignificant—members of society can make a contribution carries an educative message of encouragement to all groups in society. This includes the possibility that the comics depicting children at work could function as models for newspaper-­reading children as well

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as adults. While making a contribution to society, children’s activities stand in contrast with the asociality of the scalper. Representations that do not present children as active or competent, but as innocent victims or passive props, fulfill other functions in the creation of sociality. Childhood innocence stands as the antithesis of the egotistic and criminal character of the scalper or of complaining adults. The passive children may lack agency beyond that of the onlooker, but at the same time they give meaning to their surroundings, for example, as markers of family life and simultaneously as signs of communality. Despite their varying functions, the active, innocent, and passive children both assume and bestow meaning in relation to other characters and the activities depicted in the comics. With the war as a backdrop, the home front propaganda comics enable, and even call for, the use of various childhood conceptions within an overarching discourse of social unity framed in nationalistic terms.

Acknowledgments The author wishes to thank Ville Hänninen and Jenni Kronqvist for their helpful comments on earlier versions of the article.

Note 1. On the general developments in Finland in World War II, see Kivimäki (1–3) and Vehviläinen.

Works Cited Brembeck, Helene, Barbro Johansson, and Jan Kampmann. Introduction to Beyond the Competent Child: Exploring Contemporary Childhoods in the Nordic Welfare Societies, edited by Helene Brembeck, Barbro Johansson, and Jan Kampmann, 7–29. Frederiksberg, Denmark: Roskilde University Press, 2004. Davis, Robert A. “Brilliance of a Fire: Innocence, Experience and the Theory of Childhood.” Journal of Philosophy of Education 45, no. 2 (2011): 379–397. Egan, Danielle, and Gail L. Hawkes. “Endangered Girls and Incendiary Objects: Unpacking the Discourse on Sexualization.” Sexuality and Culture 12, no. 4 (2008): 291–311. Erkelenz, Holger. “Ahdin valtakunnassa.” April 22, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Kumpi heistä tarvitsee enemmän voita?” April 1, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Nyt on säästettävä . . .” December 9, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland.

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———. “Oletteko kuullut . . .” November 4, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Rouva Topakan tempaus.” July 8, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Tulen toistekin ostamaan . . .” n.d. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Voi voi sentään.” March 18, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Fingerroos, Outi. “‘Karelia Issue’: The Politics and Memory of Karelia in Finland.” In Kinnunen and Kivimäki, Finland in World War II, 483–517. Hänninen, Ville, and Timo Kokkila. Poika Vesanto: Käyttökuvan mestari. Tampere, Finland: Tampereen museot, 2009. Hutchby, Ian, and Jo Moran-­Ellis. Introduction to Children and Social Competence: Arenas of Action. London: Falmer, 1998. Jaatinen, Satu. “Ruoka ja kulutustarpeet sotivassa Suomessa.” In Sodassa koettua. Arkea sodan varjossa, edited by Martti Turtola, 115–146. Helsinki: Weilin + Göös, 2008. Jackson, Stevi, and Sue Scott. “Risk Anxiety and the Social Construction of Childhood.” In Risk and Sociocultural Theory: New Directions and Perspectives, edited by Deborah Lupton, 86–107. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. James, Allison, Chris Jenks, and Alan Prout. Theorizing Childhood. Cambridge: Polity, 1998. Junila, Marianne. “Wars on the Home Front: Mobilization, Economy, and Everyday Experiences.” In Kinnunen and Kivimäki, Finland in World War II, 191–232. Kaukoranta, Heikki, and Jukka Kemppinen. Sarjakuvat. 2nd ed. Helsinki: Otava, 1982. Kinnunen, Tiina, and Ville Kivimäki, eds. Finland in World War II: History, Memory, Interpretations. Leiden: Brill, 2012. Kirves, Jenni. “ ‘Päivittäinen myrkkyannoksemme’—Sensuuria ja propagandaa jatkosodassa.” In Ruma sota: Talvi-­ja jatkosodan vaiettu historia, 13–61. Helsinki: Johnny Kniga, 2008. Kirves, Jenni, and Sari Näre. “Nuorten Talkoot: Isänmaallinen työvelvollisuus.” In Sodan kasvattamat, edited by Sari Näre, Jenni Kirves, and Juha Siltala, 267–287. Helsinki: Werner Söderström, 2010. Kivimäki, Ville. “Introduction: Three Wars and Their Epitaphs; The Finnish History and Scholarship of World War II.” In Kinnunen and Kivimäki, Finland in World War II, 1–46. Korppi-­Tommola, Aura. “War and Children in Finland during the Second World War.” Paedagogica Historica 44, no. 4 (2008): 445–455. Laaksonen, Lasse. “Kaupunkien pommitukset jatkosodassa.” In Itsenäisyyden puolustajat: Kotirintamalla, edited by Lauri Haataja, 104–107. Helsinki: Weilin + Göös, 2002. Lehtinen, Lasse. Itsenäisyyden puolustajat: Kynällä, kameralla, kiväärillä. Helsinki: Weilin + Göös, 2004. Murray, Christopher. Champions of the Oppressed: Superhero Comics, Popular Culture, and Propaganda in America during World War II. Cresskill, NJ: Hampton Press, 2011. Näre, Sari. “Sotaorpojen mykkä ikävä.” Sodassa koettua: Haavoitettu lapsuus, edited by Sari Näre, 139–168. Helsinki: Weilin + Göös, 2007. Otava, Hugo. “Toisessa muodossa.” July 1, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Prout, Alan, and Allison James. “A New Paradigm for the Sociology of Childhood? Provenance, Promise and Problems.” In Constructing and Reconstructing Childhood: Contempo-

46  Ralf Kauranen rary Issues in the Sociological Study of Childhood, edited by Allison James and Alan Prout, 7–32. London: Falmer, 1997. Räsänen, Joel. “Hra Kinnari kellarissa.” June 24, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Joululahjakeskustelua.” December 9, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. 27 June 2011. ———. “Maanalaista keskustelua.” September 9, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Maasta se pienikin . . .” August 26, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Makosen perhe.” July 1, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Makosen perhe syö päivällistä.” November 4, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Matti ja isä.” April 22, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Sota-­ajan puisto.” May 6, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Tilanne muuttui.” April 1, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Rousseau, Jean-­Jacques. Émile, or, Concerning Education; Extracts. Translated by by Eleanor Worthington. Boston: Heath, 1889. Available at http://brittlebooks.library.illinois.edu /brittlebooks_open/Books2009-­08/rousje0001emile/rousje0001emile.pdf. “Salakauppa-­propaganda.” [1941]. Folder Ha:3 Keräykset, kilpailut. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Salminen, Esko, and Kauko Suvanne. Kuvien sota 1939–1945: Propagandalehtiset talvi-­ja jatkosodassa. Helsinki: Otava, 1989. Salonen, Erkki. “Liikekannallepano.” April 15, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “No nyt koetetaan . . .” July 1, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Nytpä vedetään kirppoja . . .” May 6, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Sukulaiset.” May 27, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Tules kuunteleen . . .” December 9, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Salovaara, Karli. Säännöstellen selvittiin: Kansanhuoltoa 1939–1949. Helsinki: Kauppiaitten Kustannus, 1977. Saraste, Erja. “Talonpitoa rintaman varjossa. Työvoima ja työmarkkinat vuosina 1941–44.” In Kansakunta sodassa: 2. Vyö kireällä, edited by Silvo Hietanen, 285–300. Helsinki: Opetusministeriö, 1990. Skeggs, Beverley. Class, Self, Culture. London: Routledge, 2004. Tanttu, Erkki. “Ei merta edemmäs kalaan.” April 15, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland.

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———. “Esimerkki tarttui.” n.d. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Kahvisokeri hilloihin.” July 1, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Kumman osa oli parempi.” June 10, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Maasta se pienikin ponnistaa.” August 19, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Muodonvaihdos.” n.d. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Tilgmann, Arnold. “Alla med!” 1. April 8, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Alla med!” 2. May 13, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Fars och mors discussion.” December 9, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Spar på sockret.” July 1, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Två hem.” January 21, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Var som barnen.” October 14, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Våra vitaminer.” April 22, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Värme åt armén.” November 11, 1942. Folder Ub Sarjakuvat. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Toivonen, Onni. Kymmenen vuotta kansanhuoltajana: Muistelmia. Turku, Finland, 1950. Utrio, Untamo. “Kansanhuoltoaiheinen tiedoitustoiminta.” Viisi vuotta kansanhuoltoa, edited by Untamo Utrio, 188–196. Helsinki: Kansanhuoltoministeriö, 1945. ———. Kotirintama kestää. Somerniemi, Finland: Amanita, 2010. ———. “P.M. kansanhuoltoaiheiseen valistustyöhön tämän vuoden loppupuolella tarvittavista määrärahoista.” September 9, 1942. Folder Ha:3 Keräykset, kilpailut. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Selostus huhti-­toukokuun aikana suoritetusta valitustutyöstä [sic] villojen ja lumppujen talteenoton tehostamiseksi.” June 17, 1941. Folder Ha:3 Keräykset, kilpailut. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Selostus kansanhuoltotoimiston toiminnasta ajalla 1/1–31/12 1942.” January 11, 1943. Folder Ha:3 Keräykset, kilpailut. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. ———. “Selostus Tiedotustoimiston toiminnasta ajalla 1/1-­31/12-­43.” January 10, 1944. Folder Da:3 Tiedotusraportteja, tiedotustoimintaan liittyviä toisteita. Archive of the Ministry of Supply, Information Office, National Archives, Helsinki, Finland. Valkonen, Markku. Ateljeena sotatanner: TK-­piirtäjien sotaa. Helsinki: Otava, 1989. Vehviläinen, Olli. Finland in the Second World War: Between Germany and Russia. Houndmills, UK: Palgrave, 2002.

Chapter 3

In the Minority: Constructions of American Dream Childhood in 1950s–Early 1960s Little Audrey Comic s Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

Comic books have been posited as educational artifacts, as purveyors of cultural attitudes and norms, at least since the 1940s (Gruenburg, 209–210). During the 1950s and ’60s, Harvey Comics, a major US comic book publisher, produced several Little Audrey series aimed primarily at young female readers. The portrayal of childhood as a social construct in Little Audrey narratives assists understanding of the nuclear suburban family in the prevailing Eurocentric, capitalist society of the time. Children were depicted as respectful toward adults, accepting of responsibilities such as chores, capable of managing some independence, goal oriented, and satisfied with simple pleasures and accomplishments. Yet these comics also promoted innovative, revolutionary changes by undermining the status quo of racial segregation and inequality. Harvey Comics showcased other young female protagonists, but Little Audrey was unique with its inclusion of the young African American male character Tiny, one of Audrey’s friends (Beck, 10). In mid-­twentieth-­ century comic book narratives, respectful inclusion of racial diversity was an unusual feature, and Harvey’s bold move to include a minority character was part of the expansion of its kids’ line of comics in the early 1950s (Jacobson interview, May 26, 2014). Considering the sociopolitical landscape of the time, the alliance often depicted in these comics, between Tiny and Audrey, a black male and a white female, was highly unexpected. These comic books promoted equal treatment of females and members of nonwhite racial and ethnic groups in ways that aided the shifting of cultural attitudes. As Audrey and her friends encountered and solved routine problems, such as where to play and with whom, a milieu was provided through which Harvey writers implanted perceptions in their young readers’ minds about society and what it could be, potentially conditioning them (Jackson and Arnold). Tiny was introduced in 1953, a year before the Brown v. Board of Education ruling that launched the overall desegregation of public schools (Godfrey,

In the Minority   49

205). A primary concern of those opposing desegregation was that it would ultimately lead to interracial marriage and the repeal of antimiscegenation laws (Lawing, 2). Segregation ostensibly protected white girls from the sexual advances of “big overgrown negroes” and assuaged white males’ fears that white females would invite black males into their bedrooms (Godfrey, 207). The alliance between Tiny and Little Audrey therefore countered prevailing norms in a deeply segregated 1950s America, presenting a view of race and gender uncharacteristic of comic books and society at the time. There is little record of the intent surrounding the introduction of Tiny, but Jerry Beck writes: “Audrey’s friend Tiny . . . was one of the first positive comic book role models for a minority group. The cute and clever Tiny was so popular that he became a regular backup feature in the Little Audrey books, with stories of his own. . . . Tiny’s interactions with Audrey and the other neighborhood kids exemplified true integration, years before Civil Rights became law. ‘Tiny was done consciously by us,’ says editor Sid Jacobson. ‘Our group . . . [was] socially conscious’” (10–11). Examination of digital images of the original artwork for the first story featuring Tiny, “Clubhouse Capers” (Jacobson and Muffatti, “Clubhouse Capers,” 2), reveals that the character was referred to as “Runt” by the letterer (Samuels). But before publication, the name was changed to “Tiny.” Tiny’s creator, Sid Jacobson, recalls, “It may have been something that came out of the art department at the time, but that was never a suggested name by myself, Warren or Steve” (interview, May 25, 2014). On the second page of “Clubhouse Capers,” a small piece of paper bearing the word “tiny ” had been glued over the word “runt” in panel seven for final production, but later fell off. A correction, the word “Tiny,” is penciled in the margin to the left of the panel. A similar change is visible in the artwork for the other story featuring Tiny in that issue (Jacobson and Muffatti, “Wood Scents,” 3). Tiny, like Audrey, appears to live in a middle-­class suburban American Dream home. Tiny’s family, in retrospect, could be considered representative of what the American politician and sociologist Daniel P. Moynihan identified in 1967 as a “consolidating and growing” African American middle class (Hochschild, 39–43). Sid Jacobson, states, “I wanted Tiny to be one of the accepted kid friends, and his family a middle-­class family, as were most of the others in Audrey’s world” (interview, May 25, 2014). Tiny’s parents occasionally feature in stories, engaging in standard heteronormative activities. For example, Howard Post depicts Tiny’s mother as wearing an apron and working in the kitchen (“That’s Life—On Mars,” 2), and Jacobson and Kremer show his father taking responsibility for arranging for the repair of a leaking pipe in the basement, and the expense that entails (“Plumb Busy,” 1). This reinforce-

50  Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

Figure 3.1. Tiny’s mother exhibits characteristics typical of middle-­class American Dream suburban inhabitants. Page 2, panels 1–2, That’s Life— On Mars, reprinted in Little Audrey TV Funtime #9 (September 1964). Art and story by Howard Post. © 1957 Harvey Entertainment, Inc.

ment of standard gender roles paradoxically supports the radical promotion of diversity in these comics because it normalizes these depictions of African Americans and reflects, rather than ignores, a growing reality. Several Tiny stories contain emphatic depictions of a middle-­class family of color in an integrated society, something highly out of place for the times. Cultural assimilation is sometimes seen in a negative light because of the negation of individual identity and the distinct history of the minority group, but in this case showing a black family being like the majority was cutting-­edge. “Neatness Doesn’t Count” begins with Tiny being told by his mother to keep his nice clothes clean for a visitor (Post, “Neatness”). Importantly, the backgrounds of the indoor scenes, and Tiny’s mother’s attire, locate the family in a middle-­class demographic. In “Plumb Busy,” Tiny is shown running an errand for his father but getting sidetracked, helping others in the community, eventually returning empty-­handed to find that his father’s problem had solved itself (Jacobson and Kremer, “Plumb Busy”). At the end of the story, we get an external view of Tiny’s home—a neat, detached, two-­floor dwelling with a nice garden—which cements the perception that Tiny does not come from a poor family, again disconfirming a common stereotype. Another lesson from this story is how people in the community respond to Tiny. They place trust in him, and he helps them all out. Depicting an African American family as an integral part of a mainstream American community, and as a positive force within it, was a message rarely seen in the 1950s, and went against much of the conditioning a Eurocentric society espouses. Tiny features in some Audrey stories, but also appears on his own, including solo stories focused on his career aspirations. In “The Firefighter,” for example, Tiny dresses up, acting the part of an adult worker in the community (Post, “The Firefighter”). Readers learn that Tiny has an uncle, Frankie,

In the Minority   51

who is a cop (Post, “Caught Flat-­Footed”), and Tiny imagines himself as a policeman. Some of the occupations Tiny playacts include detective, inventor, artist, and spaceman. Through the periodic incorporation of these textual performances, readers were exposed to the idea that African American kids could grow up to participate in society on an equal footing with their white peers and could have access to leadership roles. In spite of these imaginings, Tiny often finds himself bullied, excluded, or exploited by the white male character Melvin and his assistants. Yet the reader sees Tiny regularly portrayed as more intelligent, resourceful, and compassionate than the self-­absorbed Melvin, and as respected by Audrey as her intellectual equal. Tiny is frequently the problem solver. He also abides by a strong set of values—honesty, altruism, reliability, to name a few—and is generally rewarded for his virtues. In contrast, Melvin’s meanness and selfishness almost always result in his own suffering or failure. In this Code-­friendly “good always triumphs over evil” children’s comic, the law of karma is plain for all to see—everyone gets what they deserve. Little Audrey stands out from other mid-­1950s comic books, however, by casting an African American as the good guy, a rarity. Little Audrey’s character was based on Marge’s Little Lulu. Little Lulu originally appeared in the Saturday Evening Post, soon becoming a popular newspaper strip and Paramount cartoon, and later a Dell comic book. The target audience of Little Audrey was children, but the Little Lulu newspaper strip was written for an adult audience (Jackson and Arnold). Audrey first appeared in Paramount Pictures cartoons in 1947, then in a 1948 quarterly comic book series published by St. John (Jackson and Arnold). According to Mark Arnold, Audrey “was developed by Paramount’s Famous Studios in order to stop having to pay licensing fees for the animation” (interview). The title was licensed by Harvey Comics in 1952 (Arnold, 24), the numbering of the now bimonthly issues continuing from the St. John run, and was purchased in 1957 (Arnold, interview). Harvey then discontinued the original series, beginning a new bimonthly title, Playful Little Audrey, in June of that year. This was eventually followed by a series of related but differently named titles that included the same characters.1 A typical early Harvey Little Audrey comic included three five-­page Audrey stories, reprints of newspaper strips created by Steve Muffatti, and one five-­ page Tiny story, with ad pages making up the rest of the book. As the series progressed, a one-­page Audrey story written for the book replaced the contents page, and text stories were sometimes switched for the newspaper reprints. Tiny’s presence in Little Audrey comic books didn’t last throughout their entire run. No new Tiny stories were appearing in Playful Little Audrey

52  Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

by the beginning of the 1960s, but because the twenty-­five-­cent giants essentially reprinted two of the old Little Audrey or Playful Little Audrey comics in each issue, Tiny’s presence as a character in the Harvey universe was maintained through the end of 1966. Tiny (via his face) subsequently became a token minority presence on the covers only. In addition to having a carefully circumscribed presence, Tiny was featured in the cover artwork of only five comics: Little Audrey #35–­#38 in 1954, and Little Audrey TV Funtime #3 in 1963 (Grand Comics Database Team). By the late 1960s, however, other minority characters had been introduced into the Little Audrey stories. Early Harvey Audrey stories were written by Sid Jacobson and then by Ralph Newman, and early Audrey artists were Steve Muffatti and Warren Kremer; Howard Post began drawing and writing both Audrey and Tiny stories in the late 1950s (Jacobson interview, May 26, 2014; Arnold interview). The identification of artists working on specific stories remains tentative, however, because of similarities between Kremer’s artwork and that of Muffatti, whose style he mimicked, and the influence of “in-­house model charts,” visual definitions that Harvey artists were expected to reproduce (Jacobson interview, May 26, 2014). Exactly who wrote which stories also remains conjectural, Harvey re­cords of these comics being absent or inaccessible. What is clear is that the Harvey writers gave their characters expanded appeal. While Little Lulu is presented as a mischievous girl, Audrey’s identity is transgressive. She retains stereotypically female interests, like playing with dolls, but unlike adult females in the stories, she is not confined by heteronormative expectations, as seen when she fishes or plays baseball. Audrey collapses boundaries between the supposedly separate worlds of boys and girls, participating equally in both. Audrey is clever and quick thinking, has a fertile imagination, and is a natural leader. In her world, adult supervision is fairly remote, the neighborhood is relatively safe, and children spend much of their day playing outside with friends. Audrey’s parents, individually or together, feature in some Audrey stories, playing expected male and female roles in their typical middle-­class 1950s suburban American Dream family. Reasonably prosperous, they live in a detached house in a spacious neighborhood characterized by front lawns and garages. They are involved in their community and enjoy leisure pursuits affordable to those with good jobs. They go on picnics in beautiful natural settings (Jacobson and Kremer, “Little Sir Grecho”). They have a modern kitchen and nice furnishings; their material needs are met. In contrast to Audrey and her other friends, Audrey’s next-­door neighbor Melvin is an unlikable, egotistical boy with a sense of entitlement. The small crown he wears signals his assumed authority and superiority. Originally

In the Minority   53

called “Lester” in the newspaper strips (Muffatti, 1), Melvin can be mean and selfish, as Jacobson and Muffatti illustrate in “Ice Scream,” in which Audrey tries to teach Tiny how to ice skate. After belittling both Tiny and Audrey, Melvin kicks Tiny, which makes him slip and hurt himself (Jacobson and Muffatti, “Ice Scream,” 1). This example illustrates how Melvin interacts with Tiny as Melvin inflates his own self-­worth by disparaging “the other.” Allegorically, Melvin can be posited as representative of the dominant white male in the patriarchal society of the time. Some stories pre­sent Audrey and Melvin as girlfriend and boyfriend (Jackson and Arnold), and in these we see Melvin assume the patriarchal right of superiority, despite lacking the qualities and attributes he believes make him better than others and deserving of everything (Jacobson and Muffatti, “Three’s a Riot”). To put the innovation represented by Tiny in context, it is important to consider the social psychology underpinning the status quo in mid-­1950s America. Societies possess sets of values and norms by which behaviors of the people within them are judged, both individually and collectively. A subset of societal norms comprises those expected characteristics of particular groups within society that emerge as popular stereotypes. Stereotyping, “a valid mechanism whereby people make sense of their interactions with other groups . . . , is a natural human process” that may also yield undesirable consequences when false, negative, or pejorative expectations for a particular group are generated (Hean et al., 163). When analyzing media consumption, scholars have argued that a lack of positive representation of minorities has direct negative consequences for young viewers’ self-­esteem (Martins and Harrison, 338). Negative stereotypes of minorities used in the media might constitute a so-­called stereotype threat, which can adversely affect performance by minority consumers as they anticipate their own actions being negatively stereotyped by others (Steel, 614). Conversely, stereotype lift is the promotion of self-­efficacy in a nonstereotyped person in response to being aware of the stereotyping of the “other” (Walton and Cohen, 456). This echoes the principle in social psychology known as downward comparison, defined by Wills (245) as people being able to “increase their subjective well-­ being through a comparison with a less fortunate other.” The presentation of disconfirming information can theoretically prevent the threat from occurring (Rosenthal and Crisp, 501). Research indicates that a public image emerges as the mean of portrayals over time, and that an audiovisual media campaign, for example, must be influential on a mass scale to elicit effective modification of a stereotype (Pingree, 441). It has also been shown that when attempting to diffuse stereotype-­disconfirming information, widely dispersed and less intense (versus more localized but more intense) exposure yields better out-

54  Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

comes (Johnston and MacRae, 582). The repeated subversion of stereotypes in Little Audrey comics, over a span of several decades and across an immense geographic area, provided the level of dispersal that research has discovered to be most effective in modifying perceptions. Racist imagery and content has been present in US comic strips from their roots in the nineteenth-­century newspaper comic panel Hogan’s Alley, featuring the Yellow Kid (1895–1898). The artist, R. F. Outcault, used racist stereotyping of minorities in his imagery, reflecting the popular majority standard of the time. Outcault apparently used African American characters to provide working-­class white readers with an object for downward comparison: “Outcault featured black children in his comics, but drew them as if they were wearing blackface makeup, with very dark skin and large lips (that are sometimes white, sometimes red). Such portrayals bound the white community together; at the least, they may have thought, they were superior to blacks” (Wood). Mary Wood here identifies an example of how Outcault’s comics made African American characters the butt of racially framed jokes, paralleling the broader exploitation of the minstrel and other such images for the entertainment of whites while people of color remained excluded from the benefits of wider community membership. Racism has been described as manifesting in comics primarily on three levels: offensively stereotyped visual characteristics; textual captions and dialogue that negatively portray racial minorities; and content that promotes the representation of racial and ethnic minorities as subservient, evil, foolish, or nonexistent (Strömberg, 24). Fredrick Strömberg identifies seven basic stereotypical, racist representations of blacks in early comics: the native; the tom; the coon; the pickaninny; the tragic mulatto; the mammy; and the buck (29–30), and argues that World War II led to their near eradication, except in jungle titles (226–227). According to Strömberg, fear of offending one reader group or another pushed publishers to avoid the inclusion of minorities in their comics. William W. Savage Jr., writing about the comics of the period 1945–1954, agrees with Strömberg that African native peoples constitute most of the black characters to be found in comics during that time. He also, however, lists numerous examples of other character types that could be found in the late 1940s and into the 1950s. While most were intended by their creators to be humorous, they were, in reality, highly insulting (75, 134–135), playing off the racial stereotypes that permeated contemporary society. The Comics Code came into existence in the mid-­1950s as an industry-­ imposed self-­regulatory mechanism prompted by public outcry and the threat of governmental censorship (Nyberg, 79). Comic books were being seen as a negative influence on children because of their violent, sexual, and

In the Minority   55

disturbing content (32). One of the people spearheading the crusade against comic books at the time was the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham, whose complaints were many and varied. He lambasted comics that contained “images associating sex with violence and sadism” (“Curse,” 399). In his book Seduction of the Innocent, he describes ways in which he believed comics’ content negatively affected children’s development: “Ethical development of children, so intimately bound up with their mental development, has to do not only with an individual but also with integration in groups. . . . In this sphere, comic books are most pernicious. They expose children’s minds to an endless stream of prejudice-­producing images” (100). His campaign contributed significantly to the setting up of the Comics Code by the Comics Magazine Association of America (Nyberg, 98). Introduction of the code coincided with an industry-­wide market crash that left many companies unable or unwilling to adapt to the new regulations or to the negative publicity directed at the medium. Other consequences of the code related to race. With the implementation of the Comics Code, the industry enforced the rule that “ridicule or attack on any religious or racial group is never permissible” (US Senate). As a result, ethnic minorities virtually disappeared from comics for a period of ten to fifteen years. By simply not including minorities, publishers reduced the risk of having their material censored for containing inappropriate depictions of minorities. At the time of Wertham’s campaign, Entertaining Comics (EC) was an industry leader. EC garnered the most criticism from the Senate Committee because of the arguably inappropriately gruesome content in some of its titles, particularly the horror and crime books. Perhaps EC’s fate caused other publishers to be wary. Their powerful antiracist stories had attracted unfair criticism from Wertham (Nyberg, 64–65), and they finally met their demise at the hands of the Comics Code Authority. The last panel of the famous antiracist story Judgment Day was inaccurately accused by the authority of being a disrespectful representation of an African man because of the beads of sweat shown on the spaceman’s face (Diehl, 95; Hayton and Albright; Wright, 177). The early post-­ Code period was, perhaps for multiple reasons, guilty of racism by omission; for example, the populations of entire American towns or cities were shown as white (Savage, 75–6). Harvey did not escape criticism in Seduction of the Innocent. For example, Wertham highlights a panel from Harvey’s First Love Illustrated #35 that depicts an act of domestic violence, in which the perpetrator, wearing a wife-­ beater tank top, hits a woman in the face while saying, “I’ll teach you! I’ll teach you to do as you’re told!” Wertham wryly comments, “The title of this comic book is First Love” (Seduction, 204). While Wertham has been accused

56  Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

of going too far in some of his criticisms, this certainly is not one of those occasions. Harvey, however, had begun to develop comic books specifically for younger children, and this enabled the company to survive the downturn that coincided with the imposition of the Code (Benton, 127). Of that crash, and of Harvey’s timely acquisition of the Paramount characters, the former editorial assistant and subsequent editor Sid Jacobson recalls: Only I was kept on as editor. The horror and war books, which I edited, were gone, and I was given all the kids’ books except for Sad Sack, which was self-­edited by the artist. And just about that time, Harvey was basically gifted by Paramount and given their line of books: Audrey, Casper, Herman and Katnip, Buzzy, Baby Huey. The money they had to pay for this was given to them for allowing Paramount’s Famous Studios the job of animating the TV show featuring those characters. In those days it was ABC-­Paramount . . . and the show was going to be on ABC, which meant that they could no longer own the characters. That’s how Harvey got them. During that time, Harvey became the most successful of all comics houses. (interview, May 26, 2014)

Success in comics during the period in question would have meant issues with print runs of at least 100,000 copies. Publishers annually reported figures for the total paid circulation of their titles, and this figure for Little Dot, a Harvey comic similar to Little Audrey, was 171,642 per issue in 1964, 179,592 in 1967, and 213,070 in 1969; and for Little Lotta, it was was 171,055 in 1967 and 211,039 in 1969 (Miller). Through sharing and resale, these comics had the numerical potential to reach considerably more readers. Tiny appeared in Little Audrey comics from 1953–1966, and in light of the discussion earlier regarding the ability of media to influence attitudes by sustained exposure over a long period of time, it would seem that Harvey comics were capable of doing just that. Tiny was the only positively depicted African American character regularly circulating in mainstream comic books in the mid-­1950s (Beck, 11), but others had preceded him, and others were introduced while Tiny was an active member of the Harvey universe. Harvey Comics was a family business, with Leon Harvey as editor in chief, but Sid Jacobson created Tiny: “I had been the editor of the entire kid line of Harvey books, except for Sad Sack and Bunny, for all the years that Harvey published them. I had been totally embarrassed at the comics world’s utter neglect of blacks and wanted to do something about it that was—and it was—acceptable to our publisher” (interview, May 25, 2014). Jacobson was reacting to the fact that other African American or

In the Minority   57

African characters in children’s comics at the time presented visually offensive stereotypes, on some level, or were absent altogether. For example, a well-­ known character from the period is Ebony White from Will Eisner’s The Spirit newspaper strip, which debuted in 1940 and was then published by Quality Comics (1944–1950), Fiction House (1952–1954), and Harvey (1966–1967) (Overstreet, 688). Of Ebony, the Spirit’s highly stereotyped African American sidekick, with his large lips and strong dialect, Eisner is reported as saying: “I realize that Ebony was a stereotype because I drew him in caricature— how else could I have treated a black boy in that era, at that time?” (quoted in Strömberg, 87). Robert Staples and Terry Jones note the importance of understanding depictions in relation to the context of the time and place in which they were produced. Regarding creators such as Will Eisner and Walt Kelly, who drew African American characters in Our Gang Comics for Dell in the 1940s, they write, “[They] were products of a racist society and, as such, found themselves trapped by the cultural, political, and social ideology of that same society” (11). Eisner explained “that it ‘never occurred’ to him that he might be treading on the feelings of Black Americans, and that he was simply participating in the visual discourse of the time” (Lundy, 194). Apart from sporadic, individual comics addressing racism directly, such as DC’s World’s Finest Comics #17 from 1945, and EC’s Two-­Fisted Tales #30 of 1952, Weird Fantasy #18 in 1953, and Frontline Combat #15 and Shock Suspense Stories #13 from 1954 (Hayton and Albright; Nyberg, 63–73), some of the few ongoing comic book titles that confronted race in the early 1950s were sports comics published by Fawcett, notably Jackie Robinson (six issues, 1950–1952) and Joe Louis (two issues, 1950) (Grand Comics Database Team). These short-­lived titles acknowledged the struggles that African American athletes endured in environments dominated and controlled by whites, very much presenting them as ambassadors of their race. In contrast to Ebony White and other characters like him, Tiny represents a purposeful, effective attempt to integrate a minority character into mainstream comics by using inoffensive imagery. Harvey’s deliberate introduction of Tiny into its universe was recognized by the National Urban League, which gave the company an award for its efforts (Beck, 11; Jacobson interview, May 26, 2014). Little Audrey comics represent propaganda intended to disseminate the goal and philosophy of achieving a harmonious egalitarian society, through the use of stereotype disconfirmation to dismantle racist attitudes. Erasing the minority experience, as in the way that Tiny’s family is integrated into a middle-­class community with no mention of race, would nowadays garner criticism based on “a forgetfulness of the past that is one of the greatest privileges of whiteness” (Nyong’o, 381). This criticism could be

58  Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

leveled at all passive comic book attempts to include racial equality and diversity without reference to the history of oppression. Tiny’s belonging to an “other” race is never directly addressed in Little Audrey comics. The apparently postracial community in Audrey’s world, however, is an overt visual comment on race, condemning racist practices prevalent throughout America at that time. Occasional positive representations, of course, carry little weight compared with decades of underrepresentation and “symbolic annihilation” of minority groups in the media (Klein and Shiffman, 55). But the sustained ripple of altered consciousness started by Harvey’s Little Audrey comics in the mid-­1950s was the front edge of a wave of change in the comic book industry that by the late 1960s and into the 1970s had gained considerable momentum. Harvey was the only publisher in comics promoting racial integration through a regular character from 1953 until Dell rebooted The Little Rascals in 1957. DC weighed in with Jackie Johnson in Our Army at War in 1961, and Marvel in 1963 with Gabriel Jones in Sgt. Fury, adding to the slim roster of regular, mainstream, African American comic book characters in this formative period. What, then, might Little Audrey stories have said to readers about society and its potential? Melvin’s selfish sense of entitlement and assumption of authority fuel two intersecting forms of oppression. One the one hand, he effectively exerts white-­supremacist privilege when African American Tiny is his intended quarry. When he claims superiority over Audrey, his patriarchal male privilege is invoked. When the two combine, he attempts to reap the benefits of the dominant hegemony, which is both racist and sexist (Hooks, 16; Collins, 221–222). Audrey and Tiny are both “other” because they are outside the boundaries of the privileged construction of the mythical norm. In Tiny’s debut story (June 1953), Tiny and Audrey are shown being excluded by Melvin and his friends from the boys’ clubhouse (Jacobson and Muffatti, “Clubhouse Capers,” 1). One sequence, consisting of panels 2 through 5 of the first page of “Clubhouse Capers,” shows Tiny being ejected for being “too little” (panel 3) after having his “goodies” taken away, and Audrey being barred because of her gender (panel 5). Panel 2 shows the first time that Audrey and Tiny meet in the comics, although clearly they are scripted as already knowing each other. Audrey weighs up her options in panel 4, where we see the representatives of the two repressed demographics begin their collaboration. In panel 5, the tree house positions the white boys above Audrey and Tiny, from where they look down on them both literally and metaphorically. Not only do the white boys not want them there, but they can be seen pulling up the rope, thus highlighting how racist patriarchal systems can deprive certain peoples of the ability to negotiate or access every aspect of the system.

In the Minority   59

Figure 3.2. Audrey and Tiny become allies in the face of white patriarchal hegemony. Page 1, panels 2–5, Clubhouse Capers, from Little Audrey #30 (June 1953). Art by Steve Muffatti, story by Sid Jacobson. © 1953 Harvey Entertainment, Inc.

Audrey spearheads all attempts to gain access to the clubhouse, leaving Tiny as a passive supporter of her actions. Their partnership across race and gender can be interpreted as an expression of feminist thought that recognizes commonalities among oppressed groups in opposition to white male oppressors (Collins, 221–238). The agency afforded to Audrey as she attempts to achieve equality goes against the girls-­as-­passive trope (Weitzman et al., 1125). Audrey and Tiny eventually inhabit the clubhouse, which Audrey renames “Audrey’s Club” instead of “Boy’s Club.” The core narrative of “Raft of Pirates” (Jacobson and Kremer) is similar to that of “Clubhouse Capers.” Audrey and Tiny are excluded from a raft because no girls or “little” people are allowed. This scenario is even less fair, however, since the two helped Melvin and his cronies build the raft. In this story, both Tiny and Audrey generate ideas to try and get back on the raft. Using teamwork, they eventually displace Melvin and his friends and get to partake in a bounty of candy. Both Audrey and Tiny show determination, supporting each other through ordeals and making equal intellectual contributions in the eventual outwitting of Melvin. Following two attempts to access the raft by using a barrel—a combined idea—Audrey thinks of using inner tubes to

60  Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

achieve the goal. When that fails, she floats two skunks out to the raft on a log. These clear the boys from the raft, leaving behind the candy. Tiny then suggests using stilts to make the final capture of the floating fortress. The raft can be interpreted as allegorical of US society, to which everybody contributed under differing degrees of coercion. Yet in the 1950s, females and minorities were, in various ways, denied full citizenship in what was an oppressive society because of sexism and racism (Friedan, 57–78; Meyerowitz, 3; Committee on the Status of Black Americans, 3). Little Audrey stories featuring Tiny repeatedly focus on ways that Melvin, from his unannounced vantage point as representative of the dominant white male demographic, verbally belittles both Tiny and Audrey. In “Snow Fall” (Jacobson and Kremer), Tiny, Audrey, Melvin, and friends participate in a snow-­figure-­building competition. As is often the case, the story begins with Melvin asserting an inflated view of his own worth while minimizing the abilities of Tiny and Audrey. In the opening panel he states, “Are you kidding? Do you think any of you stand a chance against me in the contest?” (Jacobson and Kremer, “Snow Fall,” 1). But in the next panel, Melvin thinks, “Hmm! They’re not bad. They might win unless . . .” and so proceeds to enact a series of plots to destroy Audrey’s and, especially, Tiny’s creations, as well as those of all the other kids. Rather than retaliating, Audrey and Tiny team up to build and protect new snow sculptures, but Melvin destroys them all. The final one, a swan floating in the air with balloons attached, falls and covers Melvin with snow after he bursts the balloons with his catapult. The judge of the competition is unimpressed by Melvin’s snowman but likes the snow-­covered Melvin, and thinking it to be Tiny’s sculpture, awards Tiny the prize. “Snow Fall” has Tiny lead the crusade to overcome Melvin’s entitled behavior, and as Audrey points out, “That Tiny just never gives up” (3). Obliged to work around the unfair situation imposed upon them, Audrey and Tiny teaming up against Melvin illustrates an idealized version of the minority struggle in which race and gender as sources of oppression lead to united action (Hooks, 31; Rollock, 71–72). The author acknowledges this commonality in juxtaposition to his deployment of the wannabe-­alpha-­male stereotype played by Melvin. At the end of the story, the judge recognizes the hard work Tiny must have exerted to make his snow figure, reminding the reader how deserving he was, despite his final snow sculpture being a fluke. Instead of being skeptical of Tiny as a minority with talent, the judge is very forthcoming with praise. Another important achievement of the Tiny stories in Little Audrey is that they show an idealized society in which a black body is not immediately profiled by the police as a criminal or a troublemaker. The heckling and the gen-

In the Minority   61

eral verbal and physical abuse that Melvin subjects Tiny to are featured in the story “Get Lost,” in which Tiny plays hide-­and-­seek with Echo and Melvin. The other boys are initially unfair to Tiny, circumventing the rules of the game and making it impossible for Tiny to win. But as is typical of Tiny stories, Tiny prevails and becomes the hero. In this case, while hiding, Echo and Melvin get abducted by counterfeiters. Tiny stumbles upon them tied up in a car while the crooks are collecting their fake cash from a nearby building. Tiny hides in the car. When the bad guys drive off, they get pulled over for speeding. When the cops see Melvin and Echo crying in the back seat, the crooks attempt their escape. The cops chase them but would have lost them if Tiny hadn’t thrown the counterfeit money out the window, leaving a trail (Post, “Get Lost”). For using his wits to save the day, Tiny is thanked by the white police officers, thus again undermining a pervasive negative stereotype that continues to threaten African American males today. Little Audrey comics persistently and consistently pre­sent the African American Tiny in a positive way. A prime example is when Tiny’s virtue is contrasted with Melvin’s corrupt mentality in the five-­page Jacobson and Muffatti story, “Baseball Bantam.” In this short tale, the neighborhood boys are playing baseball, and Tiny, although allegedly included, is relegated to an outfield position where his only responsibility is to stop the ball from going through a hole in the fence. Audrey comes by and elicits this information from Tiny, who, she discovers, has been there for two hours without getting a turn at bat because he is “too little.” Audrey would like to play herself, and she approaches Melvin to ask whether she and Tiny can participate. Melvin agrees when he realizes that he can use Audrey as an umpire. As the game progresses, Melvin hits the ball out of the park and smashes a window. Furious, the owner of the dwelling approaches the children while Melvin sneakily hands Tiny the bat, saying it is his turn. Of course, Tiny gets the blame from the homeowner, but after they resume play, Melvin again takes the bat off Tiny, and Audrey is quick to observe how unfairly he is being treated. Tiny is ready to give up on the game, but as he walks away, Melvin slugs another ball through a window, and runs to give Tiny the bat in anticipation of the fallout. Sure enough, Tiny gets yelled at again, but this time Audrey quickly restarts the game while Tiny still has the bat in his hand. Tiny thumps the first ball through yet another window, but whereas Melvin was very adept at getting someone else in trouble for what he had done, the physically diminutive Tiny is ready to take responsibility for his own actions, as shown on the last page of the story. The first three panels depict Tiny admitting to himself, to Audrey, and then to Officer Clancy that he was the one who hit the ball and caused the breakage.

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His honesty is immediately rewarded by praise from the policeman. Tiny is confused about why the officer is so happy with him, as is shown by a question mark drawn above his head, but his lack of understanding becomes irrelevant to Tiny when another reward is produced in the form of a big bag of cash. The final panel highlights the polar opposite personalities given to Tiny and Melvin in Little Audrey. Whereas Melvin, as regular readers would be aware, is totally self-­serving, Tiny is always ready to share any good fortune with his friends, and on this occasion he buys them baseball uniforms (Jacobson and Muffatti, “Baseball Bantam,” 5). If the baseball field here is taken as an allegory of society, the minority character is initially shown as marginalized and then blamed when things go wrong in the mainstream. Audrey’s feminist pluck and Tiny’s sincerity and altruism ultimately expose the ugliness of the travesty perpetrated by the miscreant Melvin. “Back to Nature” (Jacobson and Kremer) shows Tiny as a racial “other” allying with a racial majority who is an “other” because of her sex. The story involves Tiny, Audrey, Melvin, and a newly introduced character, Phoebe. Phoebe displays intellectual prowess and is presented as a well-­meaning “know it all” who is not as adventurous as the other children. Melvin speaks derisively about Phoebe’s intelligence. His resentment toward her culminates in him tricking her into getting stuck in his “Indian trap” (panels 3–5 on page 4 of the story). Here Melvin exploits Phoebe’s innocence and her enthusiasm for knowledge acquisition to lure her into danger; his willingness to cause others to suffer and his lack of empathy are notable characteristics to consider in relation to the demographic he represents. He later receives karmic retribution by getting sprayed by a skunk; the resilient Phoebe, maintaining her poise and academic savoir-­faire, identifies the animal by its “Indian” name. This consequence of Melvin’s atrocious actions occurs as the outcome of the story, but in the last two panels of this sequence, we see Melvin unsuccessfully attempt to excuse his behavior as “only fooling.” Audrey, unimpressed by Melvin’s hastily improvised and unconvincing defense, passes judgment—Melvin deserves to be punished, and by the end of the story he will be. In “Back to Nature,” Audrey listens to Phoebe, rescues Tiny and Melvin in one instance, and works with Tiny to rescue Phoebe in another. Tiny begins as an associate of Melvin, but after the latter acts reprehensibly, Tiny takes the side of Audrey and Phoebe. This story devalues hegemonic masculinity, presenting Melvin as a thoughtless person who, because of his chauvinism, resents Phoebe’s intelligence. It offers the reader the conclusion that Melvin’s unpalatable disregard for others, as when he tricks Phoebe into his trap, where she has a very unpleasant experience, is the product of his entitled sense of superiority. Additionally, we see Audrey learning from another girl. This is also

Figure 3.3. Tiny is unexpectedly but justly rewarded for his honesty by the law and order of the cosmos. Page 5, panels 3–7, Baseball Bantam, reprinted in Harvey Hits #11 (July 1957). Art by Steve Muffatti, story by Sid Jacobson. © 1953 Harvey Entertainment, Inc.

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Figure 3. 4. Audrey and Tiny challenge the status quo of hegemonic chauvinistic white masculinity represented by Melvin. Page 4, panels 3–8, Back to Nature, from Little Audrey #42 (June 1955). Art by Warren Kremer, story by Sid Jacobson. © 1955 Harvey Entertainment, Inc.

progressive, since popular culture often depicts girls as rivals vying for male attention. Tiny sides with Audrey in solidarity against Melvin’s sexist treatment of Phoebe. This is powerful, because it challenges both the patriarchal structures that value maleness and whiteness. Intersectional feminist values present in Little Audrey comics are depicted through this alliance of Audrey and Tiny against Melvin and his buddies, the latter displaying well-­established patterns of hegemonic heterosexist privileged white male behavior found in multiple areas within patriarchal society

In the Minority   65

(McIntosh, 293–294). Little Audrey is thus a potential influencer and promoter of change in cultural attitudes and opinions for mid-­twentieth-­century child audiences. According to bell hooks, “Politically, the white supremacist, patriarchal state relies on the family to indoctrinate its members with values supportive of hierarchical control and coercive authority” (39). That the comic books countered prevailing norms relating to gendered and racist hierarchies suggests a subversive role for these comics during that period. Tiny was a popular character in each issue of Little Audrey comics published from 1953 through 1960, and then in reprints through 1966. As mentioned, the pool of mainstream black comic book characters during this period was very limited. The material examined in this chapter has rarely been looked into critically, so this research solidifies a foundation for future work in this area. The major difference between the worlds of Audrey and her predecessor Lulu was the racial element that Tiny provided. Little Audrey and Tiny working together as friends, often against the bully Melvin, was a positive depiction of interracial friendships that was rarely seen in comics from the 1950s and early 1960s. The Little Audrey series presented a nonconformist view of race and gender uncharacteristic of the times. In several of the stories, Melvin excludes Tiny based on the premise of him being too little. Yet one of Melvin’s main cohorts is Echo, who is of the same stature as Tiny. This alludes to the exclusion of Tiny being racially motivated and sets up Audrey and Tiny as minority characters who seek equal treatment. This mission of fairness appearing in a mainstream comic book at the start of the civil rights era, predating second wave feminism, was thus insurrectionary, given the prevailing societal structure of those times. Tiny and Audrey both use their intellect, which was a powerful example for young readers who were girls or people of color, since they were typically told to rely on their practical skills or physicality. Finally, Tiny was promoted as middle class and as integrated within the overwhelmingly white community. While early post-­Code mainstream comics that included diversity tended to portray postracial societies that did not address prejudice, Tiny’s being helpful and well positioned in the community remains a political statement when Little Audrey is viewed as a comic published during the civil rights era (Hayton and Albright). Tiny represents a conscious strategy to integrate respectfully portrayed minority characters into mainstream comics. Comic books are heavily coded, since they use so few images to tell a story (Royal, 7). When a visually negative stereotype is used, all connotations that come with it are evoked. Simply by showing a symbol of otherness, like pronounced and prominently colored lips for example, promotes the racist ideas that black people are animalistic, less-­than-­human “others.” In contrast, the only thing that lets a reader know

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Tiny is black is the coloring of the comic panels. Tiny and his parents have no exaggerated features that denote being an “other.” The message is clear: Tiny belongs and is as important as his friends. In the Little Audrey art, there is no coded imagery that can be interpreted as racist kitsch. Within the context of mid-­1950s–early 1960s American society, many of the Audrey-­Tiny plots worked to provide agency and empowerment to both women and people of color. Stories involving Audrey and Tiny are powerful in this regard, showing the children overcoming inequalities traditionally imposed on underrepresented groups usually pictured as inferior to white males (Klein and Shiffman, 58). In reality, the history of interaction between the feminist movement and the African American civil rights movement was often full of dissonance, but was perhaps most effectively interwoven in the form of black feminism (Collins, 221). Racial prejudice continues to exist, but media has the power to influence changes in attitudes (Holt, 118–119). Since Little Audrey shows positive depictions of both females and African Americans, it constitutes propaganda promoting an idyllic society from an integrationist and egalitarian point of view. The power of a single positive example should not be underestimated, since these stereotype-­disconfirming representations have the capacity to decrease racist or sexist views that young readers may have otherwise developed (Heintz and Wartella, 26).

Acknowledgments The authors wish to thank the following people for their valuable assistance with this study: the Harvey Comics experts Mark Arnold and Ben Samuels, for help with identifying the Little Audrey artists and for background information on the Little Audrey series and the Harvey company; and especially the former Harvey Comics editor Sid Jacobson, for sharing his firsthand knowledge of the Little Audrey and Tiny material and the company’s history. Some identifications of the artists of Little Audrey and Tiny stories discussed in this chapter were gleaned from the Heritage Auctions website, comics.ha.com.

Note 1. In the early 1960s, Harvey capitalized on its 1950s portfolio and a new generation of young readers by reprinting old stories in sixty-­eight-­page square-­bound giant comics priced at twenty-­five cents. For Little Audrey, the first of these was the one-­shot Little Audrey Clubhouse in September 1961. The following year saw the quarterly Little Audrey TV Funtime introduced, which ran for 33 issues before cancellation in 1971. A fifth title, Little Audrey and Melvin (regular size), featured new material and ran from May 1962 through December 1973.

In the Minority   67 Playful Little Audrey ceased publication in April 1976 after 121 issues (Overstreet, 543–44, 622).

Works Cited Arnold, Mark. “Harvey History.” In The Best of the Harveyville Fun Times!, edited by Mark Arnold, 15–37. Saratoga, Calif.: Fun Ideas Productions, 2006. ———. Interview with the authors. May 26, 2014. Beck, Jerry. Introduction to The Harvey Girls: Little Audrey, Little Dot, and Little Lotta, edited by Leslie Cabarga, 7–15. Milwaukie, Oregon: Dark Horse, 2009. Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas: Taylor, 1989. Collins, Patricia H. Black Feminist Thought: Knowledge, Consciousness, and the Politics of Empowerment. Boston: Unwin Hyman, 1990. Committee on the Status of Black Americans, Commission on Behavioral and Social Sciences and Education, and National Research Council. “Summary and Conclusions.” In A Common Destiny: Blacks and American Society, edited by Gerald D. Jaynes and Robin M. Williams Jr. Washington, DC: National Academy Press, 1989. Diehl, Digby. Tales From the Crypt: The Official Archives. New York: St. Martin’s, 1996. Friedan, Betty. The Feminine Mystique. New York: Norton, 2001; orig. pub. 1963. Godfrey, Phoebe. “Sweet Little (White) Girls”? Sex and Fantasy across the Color Line and the Contestation of Patriarchal White Supremacy.” Equity and Excellence in Education 37, no. 3 (2004): 204–218. Grand Comics Database Team. Grand Comics Database, www.comics.org. Gruenberg, Sidonie M. “The Comics as a Social Force.” Journal of Educational Sociology 18, no. 4 (1944): 204–213. Available at www.jstor.org/stable/2262693 (subscription required). Hayton, Christopher J., & David L. Albright. “The Military Vanguard for Desegregation: Civil Rights Era War Comics and Racial Integration.” ImageTexT: Interdisciplinary Comic Studies 6, no. 2 (2012), www.english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v6_2/hayton_albright. Hean, Sarah, Jill M. Clark, Kim Adams, and Debra Humphris. “Will Opposites Attract? Similarities and Differences in Students’ Perceptions of the Stereotype Profiles of Other Health and Social Care Professional Groups.” Journal of Interprofessional Care 20, no. 2 (2006): 162–181. Heintz, Katharine E., and Ellen A. Wartella. “Young Children’s Learning from Screen Media.” Communication Research Trends 31, no. 3 (2012): 22–29. Hochschild, Jennifer L. Facing Up to the American Dream: Race, Class, and the Soul of the Nation. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press. 1995. Holt, Lanier F. “Writing the Wrong: Can Counter-­Stereotypes Offset Negative Media Messages About African Americans?” Journalism and Mass Communication Quarterly 90, no. 1 (2013): 108–125. Hooks, Bell. Feminist Theory: From Margin to Center. London: Pluto, 2000. Jackson, Kathy M., and Mark D. Arnold. “Baby-­Boom Children and Harvey Comics after the Code: A Neighborhood of Little Girls and Boys.” ImageTexT 3, no. 3 (2007), www .english.ufl.edu/imagetext/archives/v3_3/jackson. Jacobson, Sid. Interview with the authors. May 25, 2014.

68  Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton

———. Interview with the authors. May 26, 2014. Jacobson, Sid, and Warren Kremer. “Back to Nature.” Little Audrey #42, June 1955, 1–5. ———. “Little Sir Grecho.” Little Audrey #39, December 1954, 1–5. ———. “Plumb Busy.” Little Audrey TV Funtime #4, June 1963, 1–5. ———. “Raft of Pirates.” Little Audrey #36, June 1954, 1–5. ———. “Snow Fall.” Little Audrey #35, April 1954, 1–5. Jacobson, Sid, and Steve Muffatti. “Baseball Bantam.” Harvey Hits #11, July 1957, 1–5. ———. “Clubhouse Capers.” Little Audrey #30, June 1953, 1–5. ———. “Ice Scream.” Little Audrey TV Funtime #3, March 1963, 1–5. ———. “Three’s a Riot.” Little Audrey #34, February 1954, 1–5. ———. “Wood Scents.” Little Audrey #30, June 1953, 1–5. Johnston, Lucy C., and C. Neil MacRae. “Changing Social Stereotypes: The Case of the Information Seeker.” European Journal of Social Psychology 24 (1994): 581–592. Klein, Hugh, and Kenneth S. Shiffman. “Underrepresentation and Symbolic Annihilation of Socially Disenfranchised Groups (“Out Groups”) in Animated Cartoons.” Howard Journal of Communications 20 (2009): 55–72. Lawing, Charles B. “Loving v. Virginia and the Hegemony of ‘Race.’ ” Lawing’s Drawings: An Online Portfolio. 2000. www.charlielawing.com/modhist_lovingv.virginia.pdf. Lundy, Tiel. “Will Eisner: Portrait of a Sequential Artist.” Shofar 29, no. 2 (2011): 193–195. Martins, Nicole, and Kristen Harrison. “Racial and Gender Differences in the Relationship between Children’s Television Use and Self-­Esteem: A Longitudinal Panel Study.” Communication Research 39, no. 3 (2012): 338–357. McIntosh, Peggy. “White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies.” In Critical White Studies: Looking behind the Mirror, edited by Richard Delgado and Jean Stefancic, 291–299. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997. Meyerowitz, Joanne. “Introduction: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960.” In Not June Cleaver: Women and Gender in Postwar America, 1945–1960, edited by Joanne Meyerowitz, 1–16. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1994. Miller, John J. Comichron: The Comics Chronicles; A Source for Comics Research. www .comichron.com. Muffatti, Steve. “Smell My Flower Audrey . . .” Little Audrey #35, April 1954, 1. Nyberg, Amy K. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. Nyong’o, Tavia. “Racial Kitsch and Black Performance.” Yale Journal of Criticism 15, no. 2 (2002): 371–391. Overstreet, Robert M. The Overstreet Comic Book Price Guide. 30th ed. New York: Harper Collins, 2000. Pingree, Raymond J. “How Messages Affect Their Senders: A More General Model of Message Effects and Implications for Deliberation.” Communication Theory 17, no. 4 (2007): 439–461. Post, Howard. “Caught Flat-­Footed.” Little Audrey TV Funtime #7, March 1964, 1–5. ———. “The Firefighter.” Little Audrey TV Funtime #6, December 1963, 1–5. ———. “Get Lost.” Little Audrey TV Funtime #17, November 1966, 1–5. ———. “Neatness Doesn’t Count.” Playful Little Audrey #2, August 1957, 1–5. ———. “That’s Life—On Mars.” Little Audrey TV Funtime #9, September 1964, 1–5.

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Rollock, Nicola. “The Invisibility of Race: Intersectional Reflections on the Liminal Space of Alterity.” Race, Ethnicity, and Education 15, no. 1 (2012): 65–84. Rosenthal, Harriet E. S., and Richard J. Crisp. “Reducing Stereotype Threat by Blurring Intergroup Boundaries.” Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 32, no. 4 (2006): 501–511. Royal, Derek P. “Introduction: Coloring America; Multi-­Ethnic Engagements with Graphic Narrative.” Melus 32, no. 3 (2007): 7–22. Samuels, Ben. Interview with the authors. May 22, 2014. Savage, William W., Jr. Commies, Cowboys, and Jungle Queens: Comic Books and America, 1945– 1954. Hanover, NH: Wesleyan University Press/University Press of New England, 1990. Staples, Robert, and Terry Jones. “Culture, Ideology, and Black Television Images.” Politics and Culture 16, no. 3 (1985): 10–20. Steel, Claude M. “A Threat in the Air: How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance.” American Psychologist 52, no. 6 (1997): 613–629. Strömberg, Fredrick. Black Images in the Comics: A Visual History. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2003. US Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency, Interim Report, 1955: “Code of the Comic Magazine Association of America, Inc.” Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955. Available at Wikisource, http://en.wikisource.org/wiki/Comic_book_code_of_1954. Walton, Gregory M., and Geoffrey L. Cohen. “Stereotype Lift.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 39, no. 5 (2003): 456–467. Weitzman, Lenore J., Deborah Eifler, Elizabeth Hokada, and Catherine Ross. “Sex-­Role Socialization in Picture Books for Preschool Children.” American Journal of Sociology 77, no. 6 (1972): 1125–1150. Wertham, Fredric. “The Curse of the Comic Books: The Value Patterns and Effects of Comic Books.” Religious Education 49 (1954): 394–406. ———. Seduction of the Innocent. New York: Rinehart, 1954. Wills, Thomas A. “Downward Comparison Principles in Social Psychology.” Psychological Bulletin 90, no. 2 (1981): 245–271. Wood, Mary. The Yellow Kid on the Paper Stage: Acting Out Class Tensions and Racial Divisions in the New Urban Environment. American Studies, University of Virginia, February 2, 2004. http://xroads.virginia.edu/~MA04/wood/ykid/yellowkid.htm. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Chapter 4

Comic s and Emmett Till Qiana Whitted

On the first Saturday in September 1958, just as the school year was getting underway, the editors of the New York Age announced the debut of a comic strip for younger readers called Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History. Most headlines in the Age, a black weekly newspaper, chronicled the continuing battle for justice and equal rights for African Americans across the country, along with local political news, reports on social events, crime, and editorial opinion. Current events, however, were not the main focus of the comic strip created by the Age staff artist Tom Feelings. His series sent a self-­determined black youth from the late 1950s back in time with the help of an elder’s magic library where he could interact with ancient philosophers of African descent, black Revolutionary-­era heroes, fugitive slaves, and prize-­ winning athletes. Readers were even invited to see Tommy as their emissary to Egyptian pharaohs and high-­seas adventurers. Appearing weekly on the opinion page and occasionally in the “Teen-­Time U.S.A.” section for nearly a year, the Age strip reenacted black people’s past victories in an effort to bolster a sense of cultural pride in their descendants: “Watch for ‘tommy traveler,’ newest little hero, as he starts discovering for himself and America’s 16,000,000 Negroes the significant and vital role the Negro has played throughout the history of the world” (New York Age, 12). Given the triumphant aims of the series and its interest in “all the great events where the Negro has played a prominent role,” the November 22, 1958, comic about Emmett Till stands apart. Tommy’s visit to Money, Mississippi, in the ten-­panel strip sharply contrasted with his previous jaunt, to Colonial America, where, over the course of eight Saturday installments, he helped a free black woman named Phoebe Fraunces save General Washington from being poisoned.1 Instead, only three years separated Tommy from the late-­ August evening in 1955 at Bryant’s Grocery and Meat Market, where he joins a group of black boys gathered outside. Among them is Till, the fourteen-­

Comic s and Emmett Till   71

year-­old whose brutal murder at the hands of adult white men would come to embody the shocking consequences of American racism and the urgent needs of the civil rights movement. What could Emmett teach Tommy in his final hours about race, sexuality, and adolescence that would add to his understanding of Negro history? What did Feelings hope young readers of the Age would gain from this all-­too-­short glance back in time? As one of the earliest comics considered in this essay, Tommy Traveler exemplifies the challenge of imagining Emmett Till through a visual storytelling medium. My reading of these representations scrutinizes the wide range of narrative and aesthetic strategies developed not only by Feelings in the Age comic strip, but also in single-­panel comics by Jackie Ormes and Ollie Harrington, and several comic books and graphic novels published over the last two decades, including: March: Book One (2013), Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White (2012), Bayou (2005), Stuck Rubber Baby (1995), and King: A Comics Biography (1993). Empathic identification guides the majority of these depictions: Till’s suffering is transferred to other youths in ways that exalt his childhood innocence while signaling the end of their own. In other instances, the comics attempt to reclaim his immaturity as a teenager, a right granted ostensibly to young white boys, whose mistakes were more likely to be “laughed aside as teen-­age boisterousness” in the 1950s.2 I argue that the startling invocations of Till’s image in comic strips, comic books, and graphic novels illustrate the racial and gender socialization of children during the civil rights era in ways that pointedly draw attention to how black male youth are denied the social protections of childhood. In the process, these comics further substantiate the claims about Till’s rhetorical function as a body unwilling to “stay in its place,” through sequential narratives encoded with what the scholars Christine Harold and Kevin Michael DeLuca describe as the “visual vocabulary” of the incident: the store signs from Bryant’s Grocery; the seventy-­pound cotton-­gin fan that held Emmett’s body at the bottom of the Tallahatchie River; the photographs of his unrecognizable corpse tucked into a suit in his coffin. Harold and DeLuca’s careful scrutiny of the discourse surrounding the particular circulation of Till’s image in African American communities combines Julia Kristeva’s theories about abjection with the history of lynching photographs: “In a sense, the mythical ‘selfness’ of African American people changed as they embraced and centralized Emmett. They refused to see his body as one more threatening message from racist white America. Many embraced, rather than feared (or, perhaps, more precisely through the fear), Emmett in all his abjection and made his body mean differently. Emmett Till illustrated that their very bodies were at stake” (280).

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Comics explore the conditions of this transformative embrace and its visual registers, often by complicating the ethics of identification for young people who see themselves—many for the first time—as subject to the bodily harm that racism can do. Children such as young John Lewis, Toland Polk, and Lee Wagstaff struggled to process the traumatizing horrors of Till’s death and yet they, too, refused to accept the “docile role as abject outsider,” by transforming the message his killers attempted to send (Harold and DeLuca, 280). To further theorize this notion of what it means for comics to humanize Till by “embracing” his abjection, I draw on the critic Darieck Scott’s consideration of literary tropes that reframe “blackness-­as-­abjection” as an unlikely tool for accessing “heroism in disguise” (5) and as a resource that “broadens and even enriches the expanse of what is human being rather than setting its limit or marking its terror-­bound underside” (6). Of course, comics are not the only art form that has been used to tell Till’s story. Christopher Metress describes the process through which numerous writers, artists, and musicians have engaged the Till case as a “reordering” of cultural trauma. When repairing the wound is impossible, Metress explains, literary interventions in memoir, fiction, and poetry seek to “reorder the chaos produced by the senselessness of Till’s lynching” (19).3 Comics take a similar approach, but they also refer to Till in ways that pay special attention to the discursive interplay of word and picture that frames the incident. Some of the titles I examine take creative risks in illustrating the physical horrors done to Till’s body and at least one goes so far as to dramatize him in the afterlife. Just as significant, however, are the way these comics “reorder the chaos” by grappling explicitly with the power relations of spectacle and the visual rhetoric of race, childhood, and sexuality. Whether he is pictured as a defiant adolescent, a victimized corpse, or simply as a name whispered in warning, comics continue to answer the call from Till’s mother at his open-­casket funeral: “Let the people see what they have done to my boy!” (Coleman, 1). It is a living version of Emmett that met the hero of Tommy Traveler and readers of the New York Age in 1958. Feelings depicts Till as a brash and naïve teenager, an outsider so accustomed to the advantages of his life in Chicago that he, too, seems like a time traveler among the unfamiliar social codes of the Deep South. His first words to Tommy are particularly foreboding: “I just came down here for the summer. But I don’t think I’m going to like it here!” (Feelings, 28). Till doesn’t hesitate to boast about attending a racially integrated school up north, eating and playing sports with white kids, or confirming that he “went out with a white gal.” Challenged to “prove” that he is

Figure 4.1. Tom Feelings, “Emmett Till.” © 1958 Niani Feelings.

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not afraid of white people, Till sticks his determined face in the doorway of the country store where the owner’s wife, Carolyn Bryant, is working alone inside. It is Tommy who speaks up then, saying to another boy, “Hey! You better call your cousin back. Before he gets in real trouble.” A distant view of Till approaching the white woman in the final panel is surrounded by a silhouette of Tommy and his friends around the door. Beneath the image, an abrupt narrative conclusion follows: “The rest of this story doesn’t have to be told and it will not be forgotten for it struck a hard blow against the democratic ideals this country stands for, in the eyes of the whole world!” (28). The story that “doesn’t have to be told” in the comic strip dominated the headlines of newspapers across the country and abroad for months. Subscribers to the Age would have been aware that Till was kidnapped that night in August 1955, then shot and dumped into the Tallahatchie River over disputed accusations that he flirted with Carolyn Bryant, possibly whistled at her or called out “bye, baby” after buying bubble gum from the store. Feelings does not reproduce the publicized image of his mutilated corpse, perhaps assuming that even younger readers would recall Mamie Till Bradley’s anguish over her son’s murder or the chilling account of Till’s last moments given by his killers, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam, the husband and brother-­in-­law of Carolyn Bryant, who detailed the murder in a Look magazine interview shortly after being acquitted of the crime. The readers may have taken part in one of the nationwide rallies held to protest the verdict.4 What the comic strip focuses on instead is the adolescent impulsiveness of Till and his friends. Their boasts are at the heart of Tommy’s visit to the South, and the racial dimensions of Till’s self-­aggrandizement are made all the more ominous by white fears about miscegenation. Though time-­traveling magic allows readers to interact with this living version of Till, the comic strip’s conceit cannot stop the Chicago teenager’s bragging or “call him back.” Nothing that Tommy does can keep Till from entering Bryant’s Grocery. What, then, are we to make of Tommy’s unequivocal warning about “real trouble” or the fact that this warning is ignored? Why is there no mention of the men who are responsible for the killing? Is Feelings suggesting that Till could have acted differently? Further complicating the comic’s message is the depiction of Carolyn Bryant. During Tommy’s visit, she gazes into the distance from the store’s doorway, and over the course of three panels, her figure becomes a kind of fetish object, as still as the scenery around her. Separated by only an arm’s length from the boys taunting Till in the strip, Bryant’s face remains silently contemplative and unresponsive. At one point, a close-­up of her face takes up nearly half the panel; she wipes sweat from her brow in a melodramatic

Comic s and Emmett Till   75

gesture while behind her, Till’s friend says, “I bet you’re scared to say anything to white folks anyplace!” Till’s intense gaze regards her like prey in the final panels, where the full image of her face and body are turned toward the viewing reader. Given how frequently Bryant’s attractiveness was praised in the mainstream southern press (see Houck and Grindy, 60), Feelings’s decision to display the white woman in this way may help demystify her physical appearance in the “safe space” of the black newspaper’s comics page. Or perhaps it is an indictment in line with the front-­page photograph of Bryant in the Chicago Defender captioned: “The Cause of It All” (September 17, 1955). Bryant’s inclusion in the comic is a reminder of the way that she, too, acts as a rhetorical text through which white-­supremacist ideology is embodied, not only in the ambivalent depiction of her involvement, but also in the illustration of her physical form. Ultimately, the time-­traveling adventure’s clearest and most urgent lesson is for Feelings’s titular hero and, by extension, young readers of the Age. Tommy’s status as a “spectator” may aptly characterize his interaction with Frederick Douglass and Crispus Attucks in other stories, but by no means is he a bystander in 1950s Mississippi. Appearing nearly indistinguishable from the youth gathered outside Bryant’s Grocery, particularly in the comic’s original black-­and-­white publication, Tommy is just as much at risk as any other black boy in America, subject to the same stereotypes of criminality and lasciviousness that are routinely associated with black men. Arguably, Till calls the entire premise of the comic strip into question, revealing the dangers of the youthful curiosity denied Tommy when he too travels away from home. As the reporter Robert Elliott said of the thousands of mourners at Till’s funeral in his September 10, 1995, article in the Age: “Most of them were thinking it is no crime for a boy to whistle at a pretty woman. They were thinking, ‘My son might do it—or yours’” (2). Indeed, social psychologists and criminal justice scholars in recent years have cited the Till case to demonstrate how the implicit dehumanization of blackness has historically affected the degree to which black children are denied “the privilege of innocence” when compared with white children (Goff et al., 539). According to the study led by Phillip Atiba Goff and Matthew Christian Jackson on the “consequences of dehumanizing black children,” the perception of black male youth is particularly damaging: “Black boys are seen as more culpable for their actions (i.e., less innocent) within a criminal justice context than are their peers of other races. In addition, Black boys are actually misperceived as older relative to peers of other races” (540). The photographs of Emmett as an infant and a child, shared by Mamie Till Bradley alongside her son’s death portrait, helped counter these misperceptions among the public,

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just as the newspaper account of the funeral mourners in the Age strives to reassert Till’s humanity through sympathetic descriptions of what it considered to be a youthful indiscretion. Tommy Traveler takes a different approach in its aim to protect black sons by turning Till’s actions into a cautionary tale that uses his boastful words and Bryant’s passive face to signify the South’s social dangers. While the final panel’s message stresses the political implications of Till’s murder in a context that stretches beyond the moral boundaries of the nation to “the eyes of the whole world,” the comic’s field of vision is reserved for the interaction between black male youth. The comic does not hold Till responsible for his own death; instead, it underscores the value of the youth’s intuitive knowledge (“I don’t think I’m going to like it here”) and behavioral strategies (“You better call your cousin back”) in actively negotiating the social realities of racism. Such a strategy was in keeping with other stories that Feelings went on to write and illustrate after 1959, including his contributions to the Golden Legacy series of African American history comics as well as award-­winning picture books that emphasized the importance of giving black children a cultural education and instilling in them a strong, communal sense of identity. Feelings uses Till’s murder as an opportunity to teach, but other African American cartoonists took a more satirical approach to the disputed elements of the case and its aftermath. In the October 8, 1955, installment of Patty-­Jo ’n’ Ginger by Jackie Ormes in the Pittsburgh Courier, the little black girl named Patty-­Jo gestures to what is presumably the kitchen of their upscale apartment and says to her older sister, Ginger: “I don’t want to seem touchy on the subject . . . but, that new little white tea-­kettle just whistled at me!” (9). As Ginger listens with a shocked expression, she hides behind her back a newspaper, the word “Till” the only legible part of the headline. Ormes uses Patty-­Jo’s misunderstanding of the incident to mock the claim that Till’s “wolf whistle” warranted his death, perhaps comparing Bryant’s spurious accusation to the shrill sound of the “white tea-­kettle.” Further, by making the accuser in this scenario a young black female and the whistle originate from a white source, Patty-­Jo ’n’ Ginger brings to mind the extensive and more socially “acceptable” sexual assault of black women by white men, which can be traced back to slavery. Published two weeks later in the same paper, Ollie Harrington’s Dark Laughter series further demonstrated the reach of the Mississippi incident in motivating Till’s mourners across the country to become more socially and politically active. The editorial cartoon depicts a well-­dressed minister holding a storefront church service before the scowls of an angry congregation. One particularly exasperated woman stands up in the front row and demands: “Well, we appreciates all that fire an’ brimstone that them archangels is

Comic s and Emmett Till   77

goin’ to unload on ’em but look here Reverend what are we goin’ to do about Mississippi?” (9). Harrington turns a critical eye to figures of authority in the comic to stress the need for African American leadership against southern racism to be stronger than otherworldly platitudes. That the call comes from a woman of faith is not insignificant, given Mamie Till Bradley’s candid public appeals on behalf of her son and his memory. The 1950s comics of Harrington, Ormes, and Feelings provide valuable insight into details about the Till case that were being negotiated within black communities: how to evaluate the complexities of the teenager’s behavior and the sexual politics of the accusation against him, and the most effective means of attaining justice for Till and other black boys across the nation. To the question raised by the parishioner in Harrington’s Dark Laughter—“what are we goin’ to do?”—the first volume of John Lewis’s 2013 graphic memoir offers his lifetime of service during the civil rights movement as a response. In March: Book One, Lewis details his experience growing up in Alabama during Jim Crow before going on to participate in demonstrations across the South as a Freedom Rider and as chairman of the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee. A U.S. congressman from Georgia since 1987, Lewis uses the comics form to describe the influence of the 1955 lynching on his own development as an adolescent only a year older than Emmett. Lewis recalls the moment earlier that summer when Brown v. Board of Education outlawed segregation in public schools and when the radio in his home broadcast the social gospel of Martin Luther King Jr. for the first time. Amid these hopeful developments, the news of Till’s death was harrowing. Shaken by the chilling proximity of another young black boy’s suffering in a southern town that could have been his own, John Lewis is a Tommy Traveler full grown. The first of four panels in the one-­page scene opens with small handwritten white words layered over a deep swath of black ink: “That August, an incident occurred which no one could ignore.” Beneath the narration is a long shot of the river and a mangled image of Till’s drowned body tied to the large gin fan that held him under the water. The wide panel that follows shows Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam congratulating each other in court, alongside Lewis’s words: “A black farmer named Moses Wright witnessed the two white men dragging Emmett Till from his relatives’ home, and had the courage to testify against them in open court. The all-­white jury found those two white defendants not guilty” (57). The panels are a succinct summation of the details that affected young John Lewis most profoundly, affirmed in no small part by its juxtaposition to the previous page’s picture of him lying awake at night with his brothers in their shared bed. Adjacent to the boys, Till’s grisly corpse is just

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off center, alone in the middle of the next page with his arms angled stiffly in an empty embrace that is further mocked by the image of two killers hugging each other below. Lewis uses stark terms to sum up the incident as an example of how racial injustice endangers the most vulnerable segment of the American population: “Emmett said ‘Bye, Baby’ to the woman behind the counter. The next day he was dead” (57). The artist Nate Powell, along with Lewis and his cowriter, Andrew Aydin, takes a different approach from that of Tom Feelings by making Till’s dead body the focus of the page and by using the corpse as a visual metonym for the motives driving the civil rights movement. Indeed, the comic draws collective meaning from Lewis’s personal mourning by placing the murder in a chain of events during what he calls a “watershed year” that included the US Supreme Court’s decision in Brown and the start of the Montgomery bus boycott. Asked why she refused to give up her seat on a segregated bus, Rosa Parks told a Time magazine reporter, in part: “I thought about Emmett Till, and I couldn’t go back” (quoted in Young, 27). An analogous reading of Till as cultural trauma in March: Book One further shifts the sexual politics of the case to the larger consequences of what outraged Till’s killer: the inability of African Americans to “stay in their place.” The Look magazine interview claims that Till was defiant until his last breath in refusing to deny that he had “had” white women, leading Milam to declare: “As long as I live and can do anything about it, niggers are gonna stay in their place. Niggers ain’t gonna vote where I live. If they did, they’d control the government. They ain’t gonna go to school with my kids. And when a nigger gets close to mentioning sex with a white woman, he’s tired o’ livin’. I’m likely to kill him” (quoted in Huie, 50). In juxtaposing Till’s alleged transgression to voting rights and desegregation, Milam confirms the historian Dora Apel’s claim that “sex between black men and white women was so loathsome to white southerners and politicians because it was conflated with their fear of black enfranchisement and the social equality that would destroy the racial hierarchy that kept white men in political, social, and economic power” (26). March: Book One reinforces this idea, condensing the series of events into a verbal cause (“Bye, Baby”) and a visual effect (the body), while the remainder of the volume shows Lewis working to convert the fears from his childhood years into a willingness to endanger his own body on behalf of equal rights for African Americans. As Lewis’s graphic memoir indicates, representations of Till in comics demonstrate how the lynching functioned as a crucial part of the socialization process for black children during the 1950s and 1960s. As they learned the strict but unspoken codes of behavior between black and white people in the South, the invocation of Till’s name quickly signaled the dangers of

Figure 4.2. John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, March: Book One, 57. © 2013 Top Shelf.

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racialized sexual desire, particularly for black boys. This is certainly the case in Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White by the writer and artist Lila Quintero Weaver. The comic addresses Weaver’s experiences as an immigrant from Argentina who relocated with her family to Marion, Alabama, amid the civil rights protests during the 1960s. Weaver takes on the observational mode of an international “outsider” to detail her first encounters with the social norms in Marion, including a scene that illustrates the interactions between men and women of different races. In the first of two adjacent panels, an older white man referred to as “Mister Green” grins at two black women walking nearby. A young black man over Mister Green’s shoulder stands in silent shock, hat in his hand, as the white man asks, “Say is that your cousin Louise? Ooh wee! She sure has grown up!” The second panel attempts to reverse the scenario, with two black males discussing a white woman in the distance. The older man scolds, “You out of your mind? Don’t you even look at white girls! You want to end up like Emmett Till, for crying out loud?” To which the younger replies, “No, sir” (69). While the scenario’s dynamics of power extend to the white man’s freedom to openly leer at the young black women, silence is the key to the survival of a black boy denied the privilege of innocence. And in the final panel, the older man hopes that the boy’s averted gaze will keeps him from suffering Till’s fate. The hard lesson echoes the talk that Mamie Till Bradley testified to having with her son before he left Chicago for Mississippi: to say “yes, sir” and “no, ma’am”; “to humble himself ”; and, as Ruth Feldstein explains, “‘to know his place’—or, to know his race—and that being polite and respectful was itself constructed by race” (100). Likewise, it is telling that the white woman in Weaver’s comic is at such a distance that she has none of the distinguishing features of the black women in the preceding panel. Instead, the artist’s pencil abstracts her whiteness and objectifies her femininity in a plain outline of her body in profile, a stand-­in for all Carolyn Bryants. Such generalizations allow Weaver to draw larger conclusions about race relations in the region and to call into question the notion that any town in the Deep South, as the oft-­quoted sign outside Sumner, Mississippi, claimed, was “A Good Place to Raise a Boy” for African Americans during Jim Crow (Houck and Grindy, 72).5 In making the case for how childhood socialization in the South was influenced by the threat of miscegenation during the 1950s, the historian Renee Christine Romano singles out Brown v. Board of Education, the US Supreme Court decision that cited the social and psychological development of black children as a significant factor in declaring public school segregation unconstitutional. She explains: “Although the claim that ‘miscegenation’ would

Comic s and Emmett Till   81

be the inevitable result of racial integration had been part of white southern politics since Emancipation, this reaction was exacerbated in the 1950s by white southerners’ fears that they were losing the ability to socialize their own children, because of both potential federal meddling in southern schools and the cultural ‘miscegenation’ of emerging youth culture” (146). Comics like Weaver’s Darkroom and Lewis’s March: Book One situate the hostility that motivated Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam within this larger resistance to civil rights. In their childhood narratives, Till functions discursively as one of the most urgent points of reference for how race, gender, and sexuality are learned. Weaver’s father is a photographer, ironically enough, but while snapshots of her family punctuate the comic, photographs of Till do not appear. Taken before and after his death, the wide circulation of photos were crucial to Mamie Till Bradley’s visual counternarrative of Till’s innocence outside the courtroom, refuting Bryant and Milam’s depiction of the teenager as “the classic black stereotype of a brute and sexual predator, lusting after white flesh” (Ifa Bayeza, quoted in Kolin, 117). Most chilling were the images of Till’s corpse from his funeral, authorized for distribution by Bradley and initially reprinted in Jet magazine and in black newspapers such as the Chicago Defender. Bradley’s refusal to allow Mississippi to bury her son’s body, along with the international media attention given to her public mourning, helped ensure that Till’s story would not remain hidden. According to the Pittsburgh Courier, “she wanted the people to see the corpse and to ‘realize the threat to Negroes in the Deep South and to what extent the fiendish mobs would go to display their unbridled hate’” (Coleman, 4). The semiautobiographical graphic novel Stuck Rubber Baby by the writer and artist Howard Cruse is one of the few comics that speaks directly to the symbolic resonance of Till’s photograph and its empathetic reach. Observations about dead bodies open Toland Polk’s coming-­of-­age story in Alabama, and the decorum of his loved ones’ funerals is dislodged by the image of Till in Jet. When Toland, a white southerner, is invited to look at what his friend refers to as the “nigger magazine” he found in the trash, it is presented as “somethin’ gross” for them to gawk at in secret. Instead, Toland lingers long over the photo and internalizes Till’s injury: “Something in my brain permanently blew a fuse when I saw that picture. I had nightmares. I was worried about my skull” (Cruse, 2). The comic shifts from Toland’s stunned face to the surreal image of his head exploding first in jagged electric currents and then as flat pieces of skull and brain matter. Once his father opines that black skulls are tougher than those of white people, Toland worries even more. As Gary Richards argues, Toland’s story is both a “white southern racial

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Figure 4.3. Howard Cruse, Stuck Rubber Baby, 2. © 1995 Howard Cruse.

conversion narrative” and a “coming-­out novel”—the events of the civil rights movement serve as a backdrop for him to accept his homosexuality (164). Though Toland explains offhandedly that he “just had a fixation about skulls” (Cruse, 4), his identification with Till generates self-­reflective anxieties about his body that racialize his supposedly illicit sexual desires. Fragmented pieces of skull return at a pivotal moment near the end of the comic after a white gay friend is lynched and accused of being a “nigger-­loving queer” (181). Toland struggles to eulogize his friend and ends up publicly acknowledging his sexual orientation at the funeral. Before the multiracial group of mourners, some of whom had been recently injured in a bomb blast, Toland begins to think critically about the intersections of privilege and oppression that circulate through his racial and sexual identity. To convey his grief and emotional dis-

Comic s and Emmett Till   83

tress, Cruse depicts “a violently exploding skull that replicates the image the teenage Toland pro­jects for himself after seeing graphic photos of Emmett Till” (Richards, 167). After Toland encounters the Jet magazine during his formative years, the photos come to signify for him the depth of his own vulnerabilities to social forces that seem beyond his control. Cruse’s protagonist is not alone in these fears, as Harvey Young explains in his discussion of how the photos of Till affected an entire generation: “The juxtaposed images offered unrelenting testimony to the perils that lurked outside the home and led to the self-­awareness, or the colloquial ‘loss of innocence,’ of many black youth, who may not have been targeted as the primary readership but nevertheless saw Till’s reprinted photographs. The picture rendered them subject to the violence directed at the Chicago teenager” (24–25). Toland is not the magazine’s intended reader, of course. And his efforts as a white male to identify with African Americans throughout the story are not without their shortcomings, as Richards points out. Yet his interaction with the visual image of Till marks a growing self-­ awareness that helps facilitate his “conversion” as a white southerner, allowing him to identify with the abjection of the racialized other in a way that productively influences his behavior. Toland and Lila Quintero Weaver, as outsiders observing black southern communities, speak to the “multiplicity of meaning” that Till’s body was made to convey in the aftermath of his death (Harold and DeLuca, 276). Comics like March: Book One and Stuck Rubber Baby depict Emmett Till’s death as a way of enabling children to bear witness to the country’s horrors. The writer and artist Jeremy Love takes a different approach in Bayou, creatively imagining elements of the 1955 incident from the victim’s perspective. The comic seeks not only to reinstate Till’s voice, but also to restore an appreciation for the boisterousness, curiosity, and adolescent insecurity that the youth was never given the opportunity to explore. The narrative’s sustained adaptation of the lynching further accentuates Till’s acts of resistance, turning what his killers criticized as stubborn and reckless behavior into attributes that aid other characters in the larger narrative. The name “Emmet” is written next to one of Love’s early sketches of this youth, but in issues of the fantasy series, which first appeared in 2005, the character’s name is Billy Glass.6 Billy is a southerner, not a visitor from Chicago, and physically he looks much younger than Till. The story takes place during the 1930s in the fictional town of Charon, Mississippi. But when Love’s protagonist, a young black girl named Lee Wagstaff, is ordered to swim into the bayou to retrieve Billy’s dead body, the reason she is given sounds disturbingly familiar: “I heard Aunt

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Lucy say he whistled at a white woman” (Love, Bayou, 1:7). The whistle takes on added significance when Lee’s white friend, Lily, comments: “My mama said Billy Glass deserved what he got. She said a n***** boy got no business whistlin’ at no white woman” (1:10). Lee’s face is stricken by the remark and in the uncomfortable silence that follows, Lily lets out a whistle of her own. Love calls our attention to the sound with an image of two small eighth notes leaving Lily’s mouth. The illustration is a visual manifestation, as I have previously written, of the “white privilege that attends Lily’s ability to whistle freely, carelessly one could argue, in spite of her naïveté as a child repeating her mother’s words” (Whitted, “Sound and Silence”). Lily’s disconnection from the reality that Billy represents is further underscored by her question to Lee about whether his corpse looked “like that Frankenstein picture we saw that one time” (1:10). But Lee knows that there is more to her friend Billy than his mutilated body or the Frankenstein-­like composite of racial stereotypes that his killers have made of him. What she doesn’t tell Lily is that in the swamp, she also encountered his butterfly-­winged spirit watching her. In dreams, he even speaks to her. And later, when her father has been accused of kidnapping Lily and Lee is determined not to let the white racists of Charon “do [him] like Billy Glass,” the murdered boy becomes her guide on the quest through another world (1:54). Indeed, Billy initiates Lee into an alternate reality where Br’er Rabbit and the other animal characters of African American folktales battle the living manifestations of racial caricatures. In the comic, Jeremy Love and the colorist Patrick Morgan adopt the kind of vivid color palette associated with the style of the animated portions of Disney’s Song of the South, in an effort to undermine the film’s whimsical approach to black subjugation. Central to Love’s revision is the creation of a realm where the victims of racial trauma interact with Lee and other “fleshly brothers and sisters” who need help (2:79). The young girl quickly befriends a gentle swamp monster named Bayou on the other side, but even he cannot protect her from the threat of the ghostly “Bossman,” who has abducted Lily. Billy surfaces when Lee is most at risk, such as when she suffers an injury early in the narrative that Bayou cannot fully heal. Billy’s face is grim as he reveals that her days are numbered, but when Lee expresses concern for Lily’s safety, he interrupts: “Ha ha ha you got a few days to live and all you can think about is some damn white girl. Whatta bunch of horse s%$*!” “Hush, Billy glass! If you woulda learnt to watch your mouth I wouldn’t ta had to fish you out that water!”

Comic s and Emmett Till   85

Figure 4. 4. Jeremy Love, Bayou, 1:107. © 2005 Jeremy Love.

“That ain’t right to say, Lee. Ain’t right at all. . . . What them peckerwoods did to me was horrible. Just horrible. . . . And they finna do the same to your Daddy if ’n you don’t get your black a#@ movin’!” (1:107)

With the wide amber-­colored wings of a monarch butterfly stretched out behind his overalls in one panel, Billy throws back his head in irreverent laughter, while in the next panel, his glowing eyes widen with hurt at Lee’s remark about the cost of not watching his mouth. Love has stated that Billy’s wings, like the mosquitoes and ladybugs in the story, were chosen for their regional significance and not as an allusion to angels or fairies (Love, “Artist Presentation”). Yet the trope of the angelic white child, most notably associated with Harriet Beecher Stowe’s heroine Eva, in Uncle Tom’s Cabin (1852), may shape readers’ assumptions of the redemptive force of Billy’s character. Eva’s sanctifying purity and innocence is made all the more powerful by the juxtaposition of her whiteness with the black child in Stowe’s novel, the dehumanized pickaninny caricature, Topsy. In her study of images of race and

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American childhood, the critic Robin Bernstein notes that “in many cases, angelic white children were contrasted with pickaninnies so grotesque as to suggest that only white children were children” (16). Given these cultural associations, the metonymic tether that Love maintains between Billy’s spirit presence and his humanity as a child is crucial, bringing otherworldly power to a more earthly, profane reality that is conveyed through the butterfly wings and an autumnal palette of colors, through Billy’s attire and his refusal to “watch [his] mouth.” He doesn’t hesitate to call the perpetrators “peckerwoods” (2:65) or to encourage Lee to keep fighting, though his own face still bears the marks of the deep trauma that ended his life. Indeed, the suffering at the heart of Love’s depiction of Billy remains the primary frame of reference for the comic’s larger consideration of racial abjection as a source of power and subjectivity. Darieck Scott characterizes the nature of this resourcefulness, generated in response to the senseless, unpredictable absurdity of racism, as a model of resistance that may seem “counterintuitive” (11). Yet he suggests that “within the black abject—within human abjection as represented and lived in the experience of being-­black, of blackness—we may find that the zone of self or personhood extends into realms where we would not ordinarily perceive its presence; and that suffering seems, at some level or at some far-­flung contact point, to merge into something like ability, like power (and certainly, like pleasure) without losing or denying what it is to suffer” (15). While writers such as James Weldon Johnson, Amiri Baraka, and Toni Morrison are the primary focus of Scott’s analysis, the fantasy landscapes of Bayou also provide unconventional realms of personhood for African American children, ones that operate in ways similar to what Scott describes, merging the experience of unjust racial suffering with newly discovered creative abilities and wonderland pleasures. Furthermore, it is through the tensions between Billy’s agency and his victimization, somewhat reminiscent of Feelings’s efforts in Tommy Traveler, that the construction of childhood in Love’s comic enters into a critical dialogue with the Till case. In the 1956 Look magazine feature, Roy Bryant and J. W. Milam devote a great deal of attention to the idea that Till never showed fear during their confrontation and would not stop talking back. According to the journalist William Bradford Huie, “Bobo wasn’t afraid of them! He was tough as they were. He didn’t think they had the guts to kill him” (50). This sentiment carries over into what Milam describes as his final exchange with the fourteen-­year-­old: Milam: “You still as good as I am?” Bobo: “Yeah.”

Comic s and Emmett Till   87

Milam: “You still ‘had’ white women?” Bobo: “Yeah.” That big .45 jumped in Big Milam’s hand. The youth turned to catch that big, expanding bullet at his right ear. He dropped. (Huie, 50)

In a flashback from the second volume of Bayou, the reader learns that Billy Glass was hanged rather than shot before being dumped in the river—a detail in line with the comic’s 1930s setting and the illustration of the lynching postcard that follows. But Love’s adaptation retains Till’s alleged defiance. Billy mocks his assailants despite his beaten and bloody face, saying, “Thu-­That the best you peckerwoods can do? Why don’t you loose me, n’en we see” (2:66). After a white fist is shown punching Billy’s jaw repeatedly, he spits back a mouthful of blood. Even his final curse to the white man that pulls the rope around his neck reinforces his unapologetic refusal to know his place and “keep his body in line” (Harold and DeLuca, 271). This violent exchange opens up a discursive space where assertions of black manhood and virility become a weapon of resistance. Rendered physically powerless, Billy pushes back against the accusation about his sexually suggestive whistle in order to verbally emasculate his kidnappers and bring the white woman’s promiscuity into question: “Ya’ll ain’t nuthin but a bunch o’ pink fat hogs! No wonder Miss Maylene was givin’ me the eye!” (2:67). Comics that foreground Till’s innocence and the transformative effect of his image on children, such as March: Book One or Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White, rarely venture into this contentious territory. By contrast, in King: A Comics Biography, the writer and artist Ho Che Anderson stages a private conversation between Martin Luther King Jr. and his fellow civil rights activist Ralph Abernathy, who denounces the white racists that killed Till as “them cricket-­ dicked good ol’ boys . . . fine specimens of what the South has become” (35). Grainy inset photographs of Till and his corpse rupture the surface of the page and contrast with the abstract outlines of the two speaking figures. As the reader is confronted with these documented images of Till’s physical trauma, King expresses his irritation with black people, like the preacher at Till’s funeral (if “church gabble” is to believed), who suggest the Chicago youth brought about his own death, “cause he didn’t know how to act ’round White folks down here.” Their reactions bring to mind the frustrations voiced in the Ollie Harrington comic strip over the initial failure of church clergy to lead. Abernathy goes a step further in emasculating the preachers who failed to defend Till’s fearlessness, saying, “They s’posed to have some stones in they pants” (35). Billy doesn’t back down either, but Bayou makes clear that his confronta-

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tional stance before the lynch mob is unsustainable. After his death, the scene takes a poignant turn as he sits with his knees clutched to his chest and refuses to leave his material form “to rot in the bayou” (2:73). A black female ancestral figure named Mother Sista appears to Billy on a spectral plane to reclaim him, saying, “Honey, that body is just a vessel. If you cling to it, bad things will happen” (2:74). The flashback returns to the start of the comic with Lee swimming down to find his corpse. Billy’s golden-­eyed spirit watches in relief; he has not been abandoned. And like his onetime counterpart from Chicago, he will be cared for as part of a sacred, loving community in the afterlife while continuing to influence the well-­being of those left behind. This is how Love makes Emmett’s abject body mean differently. Through the lens of the fantastic, Bayou takes Till’s memorialized image and reimagines the dimensions of his humanity through the character Billy Glass, an adolescent who is mischievous in his interactions with friends, bold in the face of his mortality, and yet all too vulnerable and afraid of the unknown. Comics began telling the difficult story of Emmett Till within weeks of his funeral. Many of these texts explore the impact of the hate crime on the racial and gender development of other children during the 1950s, lessons made all the more insistent by the heavily circulated visual corroboration of the damage done to his body. Worth emphasizing, however, is the point made by scholars, including Harold, DeLuca, and Young, that what provokes the “reflexive shudder” in us as viewers is not just the single photograph of his corpse, but the “juxtaposition” and “dialogue” between all the images of Till disseminated in the media, from the baby portraits and smiling snapshots beside his mother to the final picture from his coffin (Harold and DeLuca, 274; Young, 24). Together these images construct a staggering graphic narrative that during the civil rights era “produced real sensations and real social relations” (Harold and DeLuca, 277). It should come as no surprise, then, that young Emmett would find another home in the creative interpretations of comics, a medium where juxtaposed visual and verbal sequences can offer their own narrative testimony to Till’s suffering.

Notes 1. Also marking the comic strip’s difference is the fact that the subtitle, “in the World of Black History,” was deleted from the 1991 color reprint of the Emmett Till story, further suggesting that the incident was not far enough removed or celebratory enough to be labeled as “history” in the manner of Tommy’s other adventures. (“Black” replaced the term “Negro” in the 1991 reprint as well.) 2. From a reader’s letter to Look magazine following the interview with Roy Bryant and

Comic s and Emmett Till   89

J. W. Milan: “Can you in any number of ‘unbiased’ versions change the single deadly . . . fact that had Emmett Till been a white boy, his approaches to Carolyn Bryant . . . would very probably have been laughed aside as teen-­age boisterousness?” (Chisholm). 3. These works include the essays and autobiographical writings of Martin Luther King Jr., Muhammad Ali, Eldridge Cleaver, Anne Moody, Molefi Asante, Julian Bond, and Jesse Jackson; the creative writings of Gwendolyn Brooks, James Baldwin, Audre Lorde, Toni Morrison, Bebe Moore Campbell; and the songs written and composed by Langston Hughes and Jobe Huntley, Aaron Kramer and Clyde R. Appleton, Scatman Crothers and the Ramparts, and Bob Dylan. 4. The reprint of Tommy Traveler, published over three decades later, doesn’t assume the reader’s knowledge of the case and replaces the entire last panel with the following text: “For the ‘crime’ of whistling at a white woman 14-­year-­old Emmett Till was kidnapped and lynched in Sumner, Mississippi, by two white men who were charged and acquitted of his murder, the all-­white jury citing the authorities supposed inability to identify Till’s decomposed corpse, found at the bottom of a river” (Feelings, reprint, 9). 5. The comic Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans, by Roland Laird, Taneshia Nash Laird, and Elihu “Adofo” Bey attempts to convey a similar message by depicting Till on the street outside the store in formal dress, politely greeting Bryant, whose face remains hidden, with “How you doin’, Miss?” A white male observer responds, “That nigger sassed the wrong woman” (181). The emphasis on Till’s respectability may be intended to heighten the tragedy and the devastating race hatred that motivated his killers, yet the imagined exchange and the generic illustrations of the comic ultimately flatten out the complexities of the 1955 incident. 6. Love also intended Glass to allude to the 1944 case of George Stinney Jr., a fourteen-­ year-­old South Carolina youth who was wrongly convicted and executed for the murder and rape of two white girls (Love, “Artist Presentation”). Billy Glass therefore becomes a composite of young black boys who were subject to racial victimization, the Till case being the best-­known example. For additional analysis of Bayou, see Whitted, “Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things.”

Works Cited Anderson, Ho Che. King: A Comics Biography of Martin Luther King, Jr. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005. Apel, Dora. Imagery of Lynching: Black Men, White Women, and the Mob. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2004. Bernstein, Robin. Racial Innocence: Performing American Childhood from Slavery to Civil Rights. New York: New York University Press, 2011. Chisholm, Ann J. Letter. Reprinted in “Killers’ Confession,” American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_letters.html. Coleman, Theodore. “Latest Atrocity in Mississippi Arouses Nation.” Pittsburgh Courier, September 10, 1955. Cruse, Howard. Stuck Rubber Baby. New York: DC Comics/Vertigo, 1995. Elliott, Robert. “Thousands at Rites for Till.” New York Age, September 10, 1955, 1–2. Feelings, Tom. “Emmett Till.” Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History, New York Age,

90  Qiana Whitted November 22, 1958, 28. Reprinted in Tommy Traveler in the World of Black History. New York: Black Butterfly Children’s Books, 1991. Feldstein, Ruth. Motherhood in Black and White: Race and Sex in American Liberalism, 1930– 1965. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2000. Goff, Phillip Atiba, Matthew Christian Jackson, Brooke Allison Lewis Di Leone, Carmen Marie Culotta, and Natalie Ann DiTomasso. “The Essence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 106, no. 4 (2012): 526–545. Harold, Christine, and Kevin Michael DeLuca. “Behold the Corpse: Violent Images in the Case of Emmett Till.” Rhetoric and Public Affairs 8, no. 2 (2005): 263–286. Harrington, Ollie. Dark Laughter, Pittsburgh Courier, October 22, 1955, 9. Houck, Davis W., and Matthew A. Grindy. Emmett Till and the Mississippi Press. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Hudson-­Weems, Clenora. “Resurrecting Emmett Till: The Catalyst of the Modern Civil Rights Movement.” Journal of Black Studies 29, no. 2 (1998): 179–188. Huie, William Bradford. “The Shocking Story of Approved Killing in Mississippi.” Look, January 24, 1956, 46–50. Available at “Killers’ Confession,” American Experience: The Murder of Emmett Till, www.pbs.org/wgbh/amex/till/sfeature/sf_look_confession.html. Jackson, Jesse L., Sr. Foreword to Death of Innocence: The Story of the Hate Crime That Changed America, by Mamie Till-­Mobley and Christopher Benson, iv–­xii. New York: One World, 2003. Kolin, Philip C. “Haunting America: Emmett Till in Music and Song.” Southern Cultures 15, no. 3 (2009): 115–138. Laird, Roland [writer], Taneshia Nash Laird [writer], and Elihu “Adofo” Bey [artist]. Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans. New York: Sterling, 1997, 2009. Lewis, John [writer], Andrew Aydin [writer], and Nate Powell [artist]. March: Book One. Marietta, GA: Top Shelf, 2013. Love, Jeremy. “Artist Presentation.” USC Symposium on Comics Studies in the South, University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC, October 25, 2013. ———. Bayou. Vol. 1. New York: DC Comics, 2009. ———. Bayou. Vol. 2. New York: DC Comics, 2010. Metress, Christopher. “On That Third Day He Rose: Sacramental Memory and the Lynching of Emmett Till.” In Emmett Till in Literary Memory and Imagination, edited by Harriet Pollack and Christopher Metress, 16–30. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2008. New York Age. “Tommy Traveler Cartoon Starts Next Week in age.” September 6, 1958, 12. Ormes, Jackie. Patty-­Jo ’n’ Ginger, Pittsburgh Courier, October 8, 1955, 9. Richards, Gary. “Everybody’s Graphic Protest Novel: Stuck Rubber Baby and the Anxieties of Racial Difference.” In Comics and the U.S. South, edited by Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted, 161–183. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Romano, Renee Christine. Race Mixing: Black-­White Marriage in Postwar America. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Scott, Darieck. Extravagant Abjection: Blackness, Power, and Sexuality in the African American Literary Imagination. New York: New York University Press, 2010. Weaver, Lila Quintero. Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2012.

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Whitted, Qiana J. “Of Slaves and Other Swamp Things: Black Southern History as Comic Book Horror.” In Comics and the U.S. South, edited by Brannon Costello and Qiana J. Whitted, 187–213. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. ———. “Sound and Silence in the Jim Crow South.” Hooded Utilitarian, April 19, 2013, www.hoodedutilitarian.com/2013/04/sound-­and-­silence-­in-­the-­jim-­crow-­south. Young, Harvey. “‘A New Fear Known to Me’: Emmett Till’s Influence and the Black Panther Party.” Southern Quarterly 45, no. 4 (2008): 22–47.

Chapter 5

Out of the Mouths of Babes: Mafalda ’ s Interrogation of the Argentine Angel in the House Brittany Tullis

An internationally acclaimed comic strip that has been translated into more than thirty languages and distributed around the world, Quino’s Mafalda derives its power from the wide-­reaching scope of the topics and themes covered in its daily four to five panels. The narrative space of the strip itself, however, is closely circumscribed, composed of a small cast of characters, and focused on the young title character, her friends, and her parents. Originally published in 1964–1973 in Buenos Aires, Mafalda can be read as a cultural artifact that attests to the tumultuous nature of a decade full of tensions, conflicts, and battles, a number of which played out on a global scale. The initial goals of the strip, however, were not so lofty: it was commissioned by an Argentine marketing agency as part of an advertising campaign to sell a new line of household appliances. Created years before it debuted, Quino’s world-­renowned strip nearly never saw the light of day, since the company was unable to get the new line off the ground. Later pressed by a friend and colleague for work that might be published in his magazine, Quino (the pen name of Joaquín Salvador Lavado) provided the samples he had prepared for the marketing campaign, which featured his depiction of a typical middle-­ class Argentine family. The first strip was published on September 29, 1964, in the pages of the Buenos Aires weekly Primera Plana. In addition to touching on topics as complex and tension laden as the Cold War, the arms race, Vietnam, the “China threat,” and the aftermath of the Cuban Revolution, Mafalda deals with popular-­culture manifestations such as television, soccer, movies, and the Beatles. Indeed, the scope of Mafalda is broad and international, even as it represents a very specific local context. The guiding premise of the strip is Mafalda’s astute questioning of issues and practices that she recognizes as unjust or unbalanced, and one of the primary battles that plays out in the strip is domestic in nature, fought between Mafalda and her mother, Raquel.

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At the heart of the conflict between Mafalda and her mother is a long-­ prescribed model of domestic femininity, the “angel in the house.” An emblematic figure that has long operated within patriarchal societies to maintain the sexual division of labor and its accompanying power dynamics, the angel in the house is a figure that, in writings dating back to the sixteenth century, is charged with the care of her home and her family as well as the preservation of her own carefully guarded virtue and complete and total submission to the will of her husband and family.1 In Quino’s exploration of 1960s and ’70s Argentine femininity, this figure, along with the limitations that it implies for the female subject, is articulated as a critical foil for the cheeky young protagonist, a model to be questioned and critiqued rather than celebrated or emulated. Through the three primary female characters of the strip, two of whom are young girls only recently starting grade school, Quino conducts a provocative critique of the Argentine “angel in the house,” the prescribed model of idealized feminine behavior in contemporary Argentina.2 In addition to demonstrating the multiple limitations and injustices that this role implies for the women that assume it, such as Mafalda’s mother, Quino constructs an alternative model of Argentine femininity for the next generation, one that revolves around education, compassion, participation, and critical evaluation rather than unexamined acceptance of a role handed down through generations. Throughout history, the “angel in the house” has functioned as a model of prescriptive femininity whose social construction and maintenance has operated to establish and preserve patriarchal power. Depending on the time and place of its operation, this figure has been identified by different names, and has operated in different ways, depending on specific temporal and regional contexts. In sixteenth-­century Spain, for example, this model of domestic femininity was known as la perfecta casada (the perfect wife), taken from the book of the same title published in 1583 by Spanish religious figure Fray Luis de León. In both English- and Spanish-­speaking countries, however, “angel in the house” is the term that has most commonly been used since the mid-­ nineteenth century to refer to a general concept of prescribed domestic femininity; widespread use of the term can be traced to the 1854 poem of the same name by Coventry Patmore.3 Though this model of angelic femininity has been transformed through time and space in accordance with specific regional values, feminist scholars such as Sandra Gilbert, Susan Gubar, Nancy LaGreca, and Bridget Aldaraca maintain that a clear and unwavering place within the domestic realm is its definitive element and the one constant in its multiple manifestations and reformulations throughout history.4 In addition to assigning a circumscribed, isolated space for women to occupy, it also de-

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fines the roles and expectations that they are expected to fulfill, all of which revolve around home and family. The gendering of public and private spaces is not a naturally occurring phenomenon but rather the result of specific processes and systems. As Heidi Hartman explains in “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle,” the division between men’s work (in public) and women’s work (in private) ultimately operates to further both major goals of patriarchal capitalism: maximizing production and ensuring that the profits of that production benefit men rather than women (368–372). During periods of transition or crisis, however, the division of these spaces can be complicated, necessitating a national renegotiation of their boundaries. This renegotiation takes place not only personally, as individuals and families assess their own needs, desires, and personal politics, but also socioculturally, as entire communities grapple with the implications of shifting roles. In early- to mid-­twentieth-­century Argentina, the firmly established gendered division of public and private spaces was threatened by an increasing number of women working outside the home because of the intersecting forces of national industrialization and the international economic forces of the 1930s (Hollander, 183). This increase in female workers triggered a considerable cultural and political response, leading to an emphatic national reiteration of the Argentine woman’s proper place in the home. Throughout the 1930s and ’40s, as the number of women working outside the home continued to climb, “many prominent intellectuals and political economists blamed those women working outside the home for a series of crises such as a declining birth rate, the declining moral significance of the family, the increasing unemployment rate among men . . . and the consequent decline in the dominant position of the father within the family structure” (185). For leaving their homes and entering the public realm, Argentine women were accused of abandoning their families and threatening the established social order. This perceived violation was viewed as a threat to Argentina and one of its core national values. Indeed, the carefully crafted representation of the Argentine woman had been a crucial element in the nation-­building process of the nineteenth century, during which key intellectuals fashioned the housewife as a fundamental figure in both building and protecting Argentina as a newly independent country (Masiello, 53). Constructed as a maternal figure above all else, the Argentine woman was charged not only with caring for and protecting her family, but with nurturing the nation, as well: as Francine Masiello demonstrates, Argentine women, “like proper angels of the house, were thought to be the invisible caretakers of the nation” (54, emphasis added). Abandoning one’s home in the early twentieth century, then, was perceived as a sort of ma-

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ternal abandonment of the Argentine nation, and prompted a clear and emphatic social and political response. Because it was so central to Argentine culture and society, the national image of the Argentine woman as the angel in the house was carefully cultivated in the decades following the surge of female workers in the 1930s and ’40s, the goal being to restore proper order to Argentine society. The evocation of this figure took place on multiple levels. In the cultural realm, a variety of widely read and respected books, journals, magazines, and newspapers suggested that women belonged unequivocally in the home, and that work outside that space detracted from their responsibility as wives and mothers, which was their ultimate calling (Masiello, 185). This imperative was especially notable in magazines directed at female readers, such as Claudia, the most popular women’s magazine in Argentina at midcentury. In this magazine as in others, the image of the Argentine woman as a doting wife, mother, and housewife is thoroughly integrated into the images, articles, and advertisements. While there are articles and images regarding travel, art, and culture, the overarching trend within this magazine (and others like it) functioned to effectively “teach” women how to best perform their duties as wives, mothers, and household managers (Cosse). This emphasis on domesticity shifted to some degree by the early 1970s, when the magazine included more serious journalism and incorporated a wider variety of female voices and related experiences.5 Throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s, however, many of the images and “how to” articles fit into the larger social conception of Argentine women as domestic angels (Cosse). In addition to being promoted in women’s magazines and other mass-­ media forms, this prescribed model of Argentine femininity was sanctioned and encouraged by state leaders and legislatures. Even during periods of drastic political change, as when state-­sponsored liberalism officially championed women’s rights, the prescribed model of angelic Argentine femininity remained constant. The mid– to late twentieth century was a time of intense conflict in Argentina that saw a number of dramatic political and social shifts, many of them provoked by force. The tumultuous nature of Argentine politics reinforced traditional notions of femininity; constant political transformations made legislative advances pertaining to women’s individual, sexual, and reproductive rights nearly impossible to achieve (Barrancos). Even when legislation sought by feminist groups was proposed, it rarely had the chance to gain legislative approval before another regime came into power. The right to divorce, for example, was proposed and briefly sanctioned in 1954, but the dictatorship that took power in 1955 revoked the law immediately (134). Under populist Peronism, the most socially liberal Argentine political

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regime of the early to mid–twentieth century, the feminine ideal remained firmly in place even as Argentine women were afforded more political rights and social mobility than before. During Juan Perón’s first presidency, women were granted the right to vote in 1947 as well as the right (briefly) to divorce in 1954; much of his political rhetoric supported and encouraged women’s equality, especially in political participation (Hollander, 187). Though supportive of women’s political equality, Perón maintained the patriarchal view that the women’s place was in the home, caring for their families. First Lady Eva Perón, an otherwise quite transgressive female figure in her time, joined her husband in urging Argentine women to heed their “ultimate calling” as masters of home and hearth (Pite, 103), thereby negating the potential feminist power of her position. The social and political discourse reinforcing the national importance of this figure continued throughout the 1950s and into the ’60s as a chorus of voices continued to give value to the Argentine ama de casa. While some of these voices originated in Argentina, like the Liga de Amas de Casa (Housewives’ League), which sought to educate women about the importance of running an efficient and economically sound household (Pite, 103), some came in the form of imported cultural products. US television programs such as I Love Lucy (1951–1957), Father Knows Best (1954–1960), and Leave It to Beaver (1957–1963), for example, further reinforced national values regarding idealized femininity (105). By the beginning of the 1960s, the Argentine woman’s positioning as the angel in the house was thoroughly reestablished and firmly socially entrenched in Argentine culture, supported by political discourse, national media, and cultural products, both domestic and foreign.

Interrogating the Argentine Angel in the House Quino’s Mafalda pre­sents a definite departure from this idealization of the Argentine angel in the house. Although he was initially tasked with creating a strip revolving around a typical urban Argentine family, his interpretation and portrayal of the average wife and mother were markedly different from the other images and discourses that Argentine (and other) women were being bombarded with at the time. While there is most definitely an angel in the home that Mafalda inhabits, her presence is neither welcomed nor embraced but rather questioned and critiqued through the perspective of the playfully eloquent child protagonist. It is in fact the very spirit of play and imagination associated with the concept of childhood that facilitates the humorous expression of this critical perspective. The child’s ability to question takes on significant meaning as the strip explores questions posed by the unabashed to

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those who would rather not contemplate the answers. In the earliest strips, it is immediately apparent that the mother, Raquel, is a dutiful wife and mother who fits the prescribed mold of the Argentine angel in the house. She cooks the meals, cleans the house, washes and irons the clothes, watches over her children, and always attends to her husband’s needs. Like most middle-­class Argentine women, she does not work outside the home, although she once had dreams of becoming a concert pianist. Raquel is presented as a wife and mother above all else. The reader is given just enough information about her past dreams and goals, however, to understand that she is playing a different role from the one she had planned for herself as a younger woman. Most frequently shown within the confines of her home, Raquel is usually addressed simply as mamá or vos (you). For a figure that serves primarily as an archetype, this namelessness is fitting, since it allows her to easily fulfill the role of a quietly frazzled, ever-­accommodating presence that exists, it seems, merely to serve. In the initial forty-­eight Mafalda strips published in Primera Plana, the diegetic space of the strip is limited almost exclusively to the apartment that Mafalda and her parents inhabit in Buenos Aires. Until Felipe’s appearance on January 19, 1965, Quino had not created any friends for Mafalda to interact with, and her little brother, Guillermo, was not yet born, so the early strips are very much focused on Mafalda’s interactions with her parents. While her father is at work, Mafalda spends most of her time at home with her mother, observing the tasks and chores Raquel undertakes each day. Curiously, it is almost always Mafalda who points out, in her ironically humorous way, the difficulties and injustices of Raquel’s role as the angel of the domestic realm. It is also Mafalda who seems to be most upset by the limitations of this role and by what she perceives as Raquel’s failure to create a fulfilling, independent life for herself. On a textual level, then, Raquel’s role within the domestic realm is criticized primarily by her daughter, positioning the child protagonist as a voice of feminist critique within the strip. These criticisms are further reinforced by the graphic component of the series, which emphasizes the lack of mutual comprehension between these characters. In an early four-­strip series published in Primera Plana (November 10–17, 1964), Mafalda seeks to understand the connections between her mother’s past and present, unable to comprehend Raquel’s choice to dedicate her life to domesticity.6 In the first strip of the series, Mafalda watches her mother organize books on a shelf and asks where they came from. Raquel explains that they are from her years as a student, which Mafalda is both amused and confused by. With a cautious smile that gives way to distaste, Mafalda repeatedly proclaims that her “studies” were obviously “just a joke,” since she never

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Figure 5.1. Considering what could have been. Quino, Toda Mafalda, 542. © 1993 Joaquín Salvador Lavado (Quino).

finished (Quino, 542; my translations).7 Raquel looks perplexed, her hands folded over one of the books and the lines of her mouth completely enveloped by her expression, but she does not respond. The next strip, published the same week, begins with Mafalda asking her mother whether she left school when she got married, as she had told her previously. Continuing her sewing, Raquel replies affirmatively, which causes Mafalda to reflect on what she might have done and achieved had she not gotten married. According to Mafalda’s logic, which she vocalizes in front of her increasingly horrified mother, if she hadn’t gotten married, she would have finished school and gotten a degree, which means that she “would have been someone” (Quino, 542). The strip ends with Raquel in tears, seemingly devastated by Mafalda’s musings. While it is the parent that traditionally has the power to influence the behaviors and emotions of the child, in this case we see the child’s ability to critique the decisions of the parent, culminating in a tangible existential crisis. Although it led to tears the last time, Mafalda continues her interrogation in the following strip, published a week later. This time, Mafalda starts out by exclaiming: “Wouldn’t it be marvelous? If instead of getting married you had finished your studies, you would have a diploma in your hands right now instead of a stack of shirts” (Quino, 542).8 In spite of her dependence on her mother’s care and protection, Mafalda maintains an emphatic critique of the role that her mother has accepted, categorically rejecting the demands and limitations inherent in marriage and motherhood. Far from envisioning her mother as a nurturing angel, Mafalda sees her as a woman who could have had (and been) more if she would have remained true to her own goals and desires. The textual element of the strip uses Mafalda’s voice to interrogate her mother’s role as the angel in the house, and the graphic component likewise persistently signals the demands and limitations imposed by a life revolving around domesticity and the needs and desires of an entire family. One of the

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most effective critiques achieved through the graphic component alone is the depiction of the never-­ending nature of domestic work. Like every angel in the house, Raquel attends to household matters and her family’s needs while her husband works outside the home. Whereas contemporary magazines and television programs in 1960s and ’70s Argentina offered images of happy housewives doing light work and seeming to enjoy their household chores, the depiction of women’s work in Mafalda persistently undermines this social fiction, repeatedly pointing out the ways in which it is often exhausting, unnoticed, and undervalued. Although Mafalda’s father is finished with work when he leaves his office, and is frequently shown engaging in leisure activities while at home, Raquel is rarely represented without working on some sort of domestic task. In fact, in ten of the sixteen early strips in which she appears (the “early strips” being the forty-­eight strips published weekly in Primera Plana before Mafalda moved to daily publication in El Mundo), Raquel is pictured doing household tasks like sewing, cleaning, doing dishes, and organizing closets. In the first strip in which she plays a substantive role, published on October 20, 1964, Raquel washes dishes while talking with Mafalda about why she can’t use her official marriage booklet as a coloring book. The following four strips in which she appears show her engaged in housework, as well—in one of the next week’s strips, published on October 27, 1964, she sews a button onto a shirt in the living room while her husband sits in the chair behind her, reading the newspaper. In the next three strips, all of which form a part of the four-­strip series in which Mafalda questions her mother about her studies, Raquel organizes and dusts a bookshelf, sews, and puts her husband’s clean dress shirts away, presumably after laundering them. In the second strip published on December 8, 1964, Raquel cleans one bathroom while her husband dirties the other one while getting ready for work (Quino, 544). A few weeks later, on December 29, she arranges flowers in a vase as Mafalda looks on, voicing her opinion that they needn’t change the name of the year since everything remains the same (545). While this comment can be interpreted in a number of different ways, it is appropriate that Raquel is doing housework as Mafalda makes this statement, reinforcing the visual component’s assertion that a woman’s work in the home is both constant and never ending. In the six strips in which she is not actively engaged in housework, Raquel is still enclosed within the domestic sphere in all but one episode, in which she goes out shopping with Mafalda (Quino, 544). Although the reader does not know what they are shopping for, it is safe to assume that they are running errands rather than shopping for pleasure, especially given Mafalda’s complaint about not having a car to get around in (544). In the first strip in which Raquel

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appears, published on October 6, 1964, she sits in the living room, reading. In a later strip, published on December 15, 1964, she is eating dinner with her family, a meal that she undoubtedly cooked (544). And in the strip published on January 5, 1965, she is in bed asleep next to her husband, when Mafalda wakes her to ask a question about the three wise men (546). Even in her sleep, it seems, she is unable to rest uninterrupted. Only in one of the sixteen strips in which she appears does she enjoy some time to herself, and even this moment is interrupted by Mafalda’s attempt to gauge her reaction to a potentially shocking word she has recently heard (539). While the graphic component occasionally works either alone or against the text to invoke a certain meaning, it more frequently works in tandem with the textual narrative to support and further the messages created through dialogue, statements, and thought bubbles. In an early strip published on January 5, 1965, for example, Mafalda fills the frame of one panel, and she is surrounded by the gifts she has received for Three Kings’ Day: an Easy-­Bake Oven, a few pots and pans, a pail with a mop and broom, an iron, a sewing machine, and a doll. The dialogue bubble, along with Mafalda’s smile, suggests that she is pleased with her gifts. She exclaims: “The wise men really delivered this year! What pretty things!” (Quino, 546).9 The next panel moves to a depiction of Raquel in the kitchen, smiling at Mafalda’s words as she puts on her apron. In this panel and the next, she listens contentedly as Mafalda goes on to say, “I’m going to be just like Mom! I have everything I need to clean, wash, iron, sew . . . prepare delicious meals. . . . Anyway, everything I need.”10 In the movement between the third and final panel, Raquel’s smile changes to a shocked, blank expression as Mafalda finishes her thought out loud: “to play like I’m mediocre” (Quino, 546).11 Playing on her previous suggestion that her mother was a “nobody” because she had dropped out of school to become a housewife, Mafalda again voices her perception of her mother’s inferior status, even within the space that she runs efficiently and seemingly without complaint. Raquel, as usual, is hurt by her daughter’s curt appraisal of her role in the family, demonstrated by the mute expression that replaces her earlier smile in the final panel. While the textual narrative of this strip clearly emphasizes Mafalda’s critique of feminine domesticity, the graphic component provocatively reinforces and expands this critique. On one hand, the graphic depiction of Mafalda and the gifts that surround her mimics that of her mother and the space that she inhabits in the other room. Both Mafalda and Raquel are surrounded by domestic accoutrements: Raquel in the kitchen, with the stove, sink, and counter behind her, and Mafalda in the midst of her new toy stove, sewing machine, and cleaning tools. The parallel imagery between these two

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Figure 5.2. Playing at being mediocre. Quino, Toda Mafalda, 546. © 1993 Joaquín Salvador Lavado (Quino).

figures and the objects that surround them highlights the ways in which little girls are trained to become future housewives. Paradoxically, the profusion of gifts is meant to train Mafalda to grow up and become “just like Mom,” the very figure that she least wishes to emulate. This conceptual distance between mother and daughter is further emphasized visually, since Mafalda is physically separate from the space that her mother inhabits (the kitchen, the center of the domestic realm). Not only does she make disparaging comments about the girlish gifts she received, but the visual presence of her comments entering the kitchen in a dialogue bubble also emphasizes her refusal to physically occupy the same domestic space as her mother, even when gifts are involved. The success of Quino’s Mafalda lies in its ability to evoke humor even as it effectuates a number of bold commentaries and critiques. While certain subjects are more sensitive to address than others, Quino is able to temper the more delicate topics through humor, which is produced by a masterful combination of text and image. In many cases, the text or dialogue of Mafalda, if taken out of its graphic context, would lead to a much different reading or interpretation, such as that included in the final panel of strip number 1057, which is carefully set up to provoke laughter. In the first three panels, Mafalda wanders through the rooms of the apartment and looks at the housework, which has clearly just recently been done; in the first panel, she pauses to consider a stack of freshly ironed (men’s) dress shirts. In the second panel, she walks into the living room to find it spotless and perfectly organized, and in the third panel, she gazes at the numerous racks of dishes that are still drying after having been washed. Finding her mother in the laundry room in the final panel, washing clothes, she asks a simple question, her eyes wide with wonder: “Mom, what would you like to be if you had a life?” (Quino, 311).12 The mother’s frazzled appearance operates in stark contrast to the pristine rooms depicted in the previous panels, revealing the artifice of domesticity and undermining the idealized image of the angel in the house. This contrast

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Figure 5.3. What would you like to be if you had a life? Strip #1057, Quino, Toda Mafalda, 311. © 1993 Joaquín Salvador Lavado (Quino).

between the spotless rooms and the wearied figure shows the price to be paid for domestic order: ultimately, it comes at the cost of those forced to maintain it. Although her house is immaculate, Raquel herself is nearly undone by the work. As Mafalda’s question implies, playing the part of the angel in the house circumscribes female subjectivity and experience. Trapped in the confines of the domestic realm by the endless tasks required to maintain the perfect home, women like Raquel rarely have any time or outlets for pursuing personal interests. A life of one’s own, then, is relegated to the realm of speculation. For some critics, the humor provoked by Mafalda’s conversations with her mother falls flat at times, and some argue that the series fails to truly challenge contemporary gender norms or offer a compelling feminist critique.13 Certainly, the questions and statements that Mafalda directs at her mother throughout the years range from insensitive to shocking in their lack of consideration or sympathy. But Quino’s representation of Raquel in these strips, and throughout the course of the series, is quite sympathetic and, I would argue, even tender at times. In the final strip published in Primera Plana (March 9, 1965), Raquel is taking a shower when Mafalda tries on her glasses. Seeing the world through her mother’s “eyes,” which of course produces a blurred vision of reality, she hands them back immediately, saying, “Take these, if this is your vision of the world, I think from today on I’ll be able to forgive you a number of things” (Quino, 550).14 The inherent differences in “vision” between these two female characters is thus textually constructed as one defined by generational context and perspective, allowing Mafalda (and the reader) to evaluate her mother’s role with more compassion. Through a careful balance of text and image, Quino manages to explore the downsides of domesticity in a way that criticizes the role itself, not the women who act it out, either by choice or circumstance. What Quino ultimately questions via the voice of his powerful young protagonist is the idealization of an archaic model of prescriptive femininity:

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the belief that the domestic sphere is the only logical space for women to inhabit, or the notion that caring for one’s home and family is somehow more rewarding than any other path in life.

Constructing New Paths to Womanhood in the Next Generation The interrogation of the domestic angel continues in Mafalda’s interactions with her young friend Susana. While Mafalda’s critical stance regarding her mother’s role as a housewife seems at first to mark a simple generational difference, the younger generation espousing a critical view of women’s place in the domestic sphere, Susana’s character complicates this neat distinction through her constant yearning to grow up and assume this position. As Susana’s character suggests, the idealization of the Argentine angel in the house was successfully passed down to succeeding generations, nourished by political discourse and social norms. Through her interactions with this Argentine angel-­in-­waiting, however, as well as a plan for her future based on her own goals and desires, Quino’s Mafalda persistently insists that there are other options for women than the unquestioned assumption of angelic domesticity. While Raquel is constructed as a sympathetic character, Susana is presented much more critically. Perhaps because her desire for motherhood and domesticity is based on concepts she is too young to understand, the reader finds humor in her interpretation of womanhood as well as in her disdain for anything that she interprets as existing outside of its scope. Struggling to come to terms with the necessity of her own education, for example, Susana asks: “Why do I specifically have to go to school? If the only thing I want to do in life is to get married and have children!” (Quino, 212).15 Becoming increasingly indignant, she continues: “If they just taught me to read and add. . . . Fine! . . . That’s useful for when I go shopping. But the rest of it? Tell me! What good does the rest of it do for me? Huh?”16 In the final panel, as Mafalda looks on, Susana exclaims “Someone please explain to me how to reconcile national heroes and raviolis!” (212).17 As it often does in situations and conversations that include Susana and her views regarding womanhood, Mafalda’s expression of bewildered exasperation serves to register the absurdity of Susana’s logic. Though openly critical of Raquel’s acceptance of a limiting feminine role, Mafalda is even more disapproving of Susana’s choice to assume this position in the future, since Susana is presented as an unwitting agent of that same oppression that keeps women confined to the domestic realm. This critical perspective, which challenges the notion that housewifery is either a natural or

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an ideal role for contemporary women, was shared in the 1960s by a growing number of young Argentine women who began to envision liberating alternatives to traditional constructions of femininity (Pite, 110). During that decade of change, shifting social perceptions in the United States surrounding gender and the sexual revolution were especially key in encouraging expansive notions of personal and sexual freedom for women, particularly within the middle class (Feijóo and Nari, 8). Although these gains were tempered by social and political reactions, many of which sought to reinforce traditional notions of female propriety and conduct, they opened the door to a further examination of the Argentine female subject when similar examinations were taking place around the world (Feijóo and Nari 21–22). In urban centers like Buenos Aires, “young middle-­class women spoke the loudest through their actions, as many continued their educations or sought out extradomestic employment” (Pite, 110–111). Discussing how popular culture reflected and helped foment these changes, Rebekah Pite notes, “Mass media outlets were both responsive to and influential in shaping new ideas—or maintaining older ones—about women’s changing roles” (112), and many publications were both directed to and painted a positive image of “the ‘liberated’ young woman who rejected the principal role of homemaker” (111). While Pite doesn’t specifically mention comics here, I would argue that Mafalda, delivered daily to households around the country, was not only one voice in a growing chorus, but also one that prompted its readers, both male and female, young and old, to reflect on the logic and limitations of feminine domesticity. In all her interactions with Susana, Mafalda insists that there are other options for women to pursue. Mafalda, for example, has already planned her career as an interpreter at the United Nations, where she plans to promote world peace through a refusal to interpret threats and criticisms exchanged between world leaders, instead creating her own dialogue to encourage harmony and freedom from strife. From very early on, education is established as Mafalda’s way out of a role she refuses to accept; as she tells her mother in a strip originally published in El Mundo on March 15, 1965, Mafalda is going to “go to kindergarten and then study a lot so that I don’t end up one day being a frustrated and mediocre woman like you!” (Quino, 603).18 Mediocrity, for Mafalda, is synonymous with failure, and the angel in the house doesn’t offer the opportunity for anything beyond that. While kindergarten may not provide all the answers to Mafalda’s multiple and varied concerns, education is ultimately the tool that the series promotes as the most promising path toward women’s liberation. Although Mafalda often goes to her mother with questions about the world, she recognizes that

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Figure 5. 4. Coming face to face with the next generation. Strip #1781, Quino, Toda Mafalda, 497. © 1993 Joaquín Salvador Lavado (Quino).

this is one area in which her mother won’t be able to help her; in strip number 1781, this realization is made quite clear when, coming home from school one day, she begins to shout a question to her mother about the future of the women’s liberation movement. After walking through the living room, which is full of the signs of her mother’s housecleaning, Mafalda comes face-­to-­face with her mother in the kitchen. Finding her on her hands and knees, scrubbing a floor, Mafalda’s shout dies down to a whisper, represented via text in big, bold caps that shrink down to tiny, unreadable letters; “MOM, what future do you see in the women’s liberation moveme . . . no, nothing, forget it” (Quino, 497).19 Before she finishes the question, she realizes that she is asking the wrong person; the future of the women’s liberation movement depends on the women of her generation, not her mother’s. As Quino proposes through this classic comic strip, it is girls like Mafalda, along with other like-­minded young women of her generation, who are charged with carving out new paths for Argentine women.

Notes 1. Much has been written on this figure as constructed within both literature and culture, including the listed works by Elaine Showalter, Virginia Woolf, Bridget Aldaraca, and Nancy LaGreca. 2. For more on constructions of idealized Argentine femininity in the 1960s and ’70s, see the listed works by Dora Barrancos, Isabella Cosse, María del Carmen Feijóo and Marcela M. A. Nari, Nancy Caro Hollander, and Rebekah E. Pite. 3. Written by Coventry Patmore, The Angel in the House is a love poem written to his wife, Emily, in which Patmore exalts the traits that he most adores in her, including her beauty, grace, selflessness, and devotion. These traits, of course, reflect those most highly valued in the Victorian period, and so the portrait that Patmore paints of his “angelic” wife in 1854 England is also a picture of the ideal Victorian woman.

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4. For more work regarding conceptualizations of the angel in the house in English and Spanish-­language traditions, see the works by Elaine Showalter, Virginia Woolf, Christine Crouse-­Dick, and María Arrillaga. 5. Jorge Rafael Videla’s brutal authoritarian regime, forcibly installed in 1976, would put an end to this new direction, along with the magazine itself. 6. All strips referred to here are collected in Toda Mafalda, the only published work that compiles all of Quino’s Mafalda material, including previously unpublished strips, sketches, and biographical information about the artist. 7. “¡Era un estudio en broma, por supuesto!” (542). 8. “¿No sería maravilloso? Si en vez de casarte hubieras terminado tus estudios tendrías ahora en tus manos un título y no una pila de camisas” (542). 9. “¡Realmente los reyes se portaron! . . . ¡Qué de cosas lindas!” (546). 10. “¡Voy a ser como mamá! Tengo para limpiar, lavar, planchar, coser . . . preparar comidas ricas. . . . ¡En fin, todo lo necesario” (546). 11. “Como para jugar a que soy una mediocre” (546). 12. “Mamá, ¿qué te gustaría ser si vivieras?” (311). 13. See, for example, the works by Fernández L’Hoeste and Peppino Barale. 14. “Tomá, si ésta es tu visión del mundo, creo que desde hoy sabré perdonarte muchas cosas” (550). 15. “¿Y por qué justamente yo tengo que ir a la escuela? ¡Si lo único que pretendo de la vida es casarme y tener hijitos!” (212). 16. “Si solo me enseñaron a leer y sacar cuentas . . . ¡bueno! . . . es útil para cuando vaya a hacer las compras. Pero, ¿y todo lo demás? ¡Díganme! ¿De qué me sirve todo lo demás? ¡A ver!” (212). 17. “¡Alguien que me explique cómo congeniar próceres con ravioles!” (212). 18. “[Yo quiero] ir al jardín de infantes y luego estudiar mucho para no ser el día de mañana una mujer frustrada y mediocre como vos!” (603). 19. “Mamá, ¿vos qué futuro le ves a ese movimiento por la liberación de la muj . . . no, nada, olvídalo” (497).

Works Cited Aldaraca, Bridget. El ángel del hogar: Galdós and the Ideology of Domesticity in Spain. Chapel Hill: Department of Romance Languages, University of North Carolina, 1991. Arrillaga, María. “Resistencia femenina y el ángel del hogar.” Caribbean Studies 25, nos. 3–4 (1992): 355–372. Barrancos, Dora. “Problematic Modernity: Gender, Sexuality, and Reproduction in Twentieth Century Argentina.” Journal of Women’s History 18, no. 2 (Summer 2006): 123–150. Cosse, Isabella. “Claudia: La revista de la mujer moderna en la Argentina de los años sesenta (1957–1973).” Mora 17, no. 1 (January–­July 2011). Crouse-­Dick, Christine E. “Reframing the Domestic Angel: Real Simple Magazine’s Repackaging of the Victorian-­Era ‘Angel in the House.’ ” Communication Studies 63, no. 4 (2012): 441–456. de León, Luis. La perfecta casada. Madrid: Compañía iberoamericana de publicaciones, 1928; orig. pub. 1583.

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Feijóo, María del Carmen, and Marcela M. A. Nari. “Women in Argentina during the 1960s.” Translated by Luis A. Fierro. Latin American Perspectives 23, no. 1 (Winter 1996): 7–26. Fernández L’Hoeste, Hector D. “From Mafalda to Boogie: The City and Argentine Humor.” In Imagination beyond Nation: Latin American Popular Culture, edited by Eva Paulino Bueno and Terry Caesar, 81–106. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1998. Gilbert, Sandra, and Susan Gubar. The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-­Century Literary Imagination. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Hartmann, Heidi. “The Family as the Locus of Gender, Class, and Political Struggle: The Example of Housework.” Signs 6, no. 3 (1981): 366–394. Hollander, Nancy Caro. “Women Workers and the Class Struggle: The Case of Argentina.” Latin American Perspectives 4, nos. 1–2 (Winter–­Spring 1977): 180–193. LaGreca, Nancy. Rewriting Womanhood: Feminism, Subjectivity, and the Angel of the House in the Latin American Novel, 1887–1903. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2009. Masiello, Francine. Between Civilization and Barbarism: Women, Nation, and Literary Culture in Modern Argentina. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992. Patmore, Coventry. The Angel in the House. London: Macmillan, 1863. Peppino Barale, Ana María. “Mafalda: El humor gráfico según Quino.” Fuentes humanísticas: Revista semestral del Departamento de Humanidades de la UAM-­Azcapotzalco 21, no. 39 (July–­December 2009): 27–46. Pite, Rebekah E. “Entertaining Inequalities: Doña Petrona, Juanita Bordoy, and Domestic Work in Mid-­Twentieth Century Argentina.” Hispanic American Historical Review 91, no. 1 (2011): 96–128. Quino. Toda Mafalda. Buenos Aires: Ediciones de la Flor, 2011. Showalter, Elaine. “Killing the Angel in the House: The Autonomy of Women Writers.” Antioch Review 50, nos. 1–2 (Winter–­Spring 1992): 207–220. Woolf, Virginia. “Professions for Women.” In Collected Essays, vol. 2, edited by Leonard Woolf, 284–289. London: Hogarth, 1966; orig. pub. 1942.

Chapter 6

Sex, Comix, and Masculinity: The Rhetoric of Zap Comix ’ s Attack on the American Mainstream Ian Blechschmidt

From their birth in the mid-­1960s to the peak of their popularity in the mid-­1970s, independently produced and distributed works of comic art and comic narrative—underground “comix”—engaged in scathing critiques of American “boosh-­wa” culture (Crumb, “Mr. Natural”) through images of drug use, graphic sex, and outrageous violence.1 Whether depicting characters like Nancy from Nancy and Sluggo asking Santa for “a couple of tabs of acid” for Christmas (Shelton, “Hey Fellas”) or incestuous suburban families “staying together” by “laying together” (Crumb [as R. Crumbski], “The Family”), The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Bijou Funnies, Young Lust, and other titles mercilessly lampooned the norms of the American middle class. First published in 1968, Zap Comix largely set the tone for the movement that would come after it. It helped make the artists Robert Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, Rick Griffin, S. Clay Wilson, Victor Moscoso, Spain Rodriguez, and Robert Williams some of the most prominent artists in the underground comix scene, and Zap Comix continues to be an icon of that scene to this day.2 Through its chaotic and psychedelic style and its biting satire, Zap Comix claimed to reveal “kozmic trooths” for “adult intellectuals only” (Crumb, covers for Zap Comix #2 and Zap Comix #1). One of the series’ favorite techniques for doing so was the publication of shockingly graphic images of sex, more explicit than even Playboy was publishing at the time (Rosenkranz, 142–143). These depictions confronted mainstream norms deriving supposedly from anxieties about the country’s children and the effects of mixing kids and sex. Some strips, for example, featured children engaged in or exposed to explicit sexuality, as in Crumb’s infamous tale of suburban family incest “Joe Blow.” Other strips took Disney-­esque characters—and what is more associated with middle-­ class family-­oriented entertainment than Disney?—and depicted them in all manner of sexually adventurous situations (for example, Moscoso’s untitled strip on pages 24–25 of Zap Comix #3).

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Figure 6.1. Victor Moscoso, untitled, Zap Comix #3, 24–25. © Victor Moscoso, 1969.

Many artists and scholars claim that the crude and often offensive adventures of Mr. Natural, Wonder Wart-­Hog, Captain Pissgums and his Pervert Pirates, and other characters from the pages of Zap (and other comix as well) rejected restrictions on cultural expression and in so doing opened up new possibilities for artists to express themselves in the comics medium (Danky and Kitchen; Hatfield; Rosenkranz). Beyond that, however, it is not immediately clear why such gleefully graphic depictions of sex were so appealing to so many artists and readers. And yet with over a million copies of Zap in circulation by the early 1970s (Rosenkranz, 121), it is evident that somebody was reading them and that whatever “kosmic trooths” Zap Comix represented for its readers had some traction. Existing scholarship acknowledges the prominence of exuberant displays of outrageous sexuality in Zap and many other underground comix; less explored, however, is why these displays played such a large role in the comix, or how they contributed to Zap’s successful circulation. What was the appeal of these sexually explicit images, narratives, and gags, particularly those that violated the taboos against mixing children and sex, which were taken seriously by so many others? This chapter argues that Zap’s combination of images invoking children and childhood with graphic adult sexuality functions as a rhetorical device to critique, question, and reject powerful Cold War–­era imperatives (both formal and informal) to conform to rigid “mainstream” scripts for the performance of gender, particularly masculinity.3 This is more than simply a question of understanding Zap Comix or comix more generally. Examining Zap’s use of figures related to childhood provides an opportunity to better understand the role that prevailing ideas about what it means to be a child have played in the conflicts and upheavals that have helped shape US cultural history. A wealth of work has explored the ways in which childhood is a product of its context. Much has been done to show how the experience of being a child and the concept of childhood—what it should

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be and what defines its boundaries—are affected by cultural, economic, and historical forces. Increased affluence, demographic shifts (for example, the baby boom), developments in science and psychology (and their popularization in books like Benjamin Spock’s Baby and Child Care), and geopolitical anxieties (for example, the Cold War) have had profound impacts on how we think of and treat childhood (Fass and Grossberg; Mintz). This chapter, however, attempts to explore how the opposite has also been true. As Beth Bailey has shown, in much of the Western world, “childhood” has often been defined as a period free of knowledge of “adult” sexuality (191). Examining Zap’s symbolic combination of sex and children can help illuminate how this conception of childhood has served as a site and symbolic resource for contesting broader questions about Americans’ collective identity and priorities during a time when both were experiencing tremendous turbulence and upheaval. In the hands of the artists who produced Zap Comix, representations of children and childhood were rhetorical tools for highlighting and critiquing midcentury America’s obsession with sexual “deviance” and the threat such deviance supposedly posed to the nation’s children and to the nation itself. Zap’s flagrant violations of these norms about sex, as well as its habit of rubbing these violations in the faces of any “straights” who might object, is about more than simply questioning conventional wisdom about the relationship between kids and sexuality.4 They are also a symbolic rejection of the rigid gender norms informed and enforced by such wisdom. They particularly attack mainstream imperatives for the appropriate—that is, family-­oriented— performance of masculinity. Rather than embracing the kind of reserved masculinity that involves holding down a steady, reliable job in order to support a suburban family, Zap celebrates indulgence and the pursuit of self-­fulfillment, expressing skepticism about whether the reserve demanded by mainstream cultural norms was honest, desirable, or even all that possible. Zap Comix uses figures like children, superheroes, Disney characters, and even the comic book itself to reject mainstream prescriptions for stable, reserved, family-­ oriented masculinity in favor of a masculinity defined by authenticity, self-­ determination, and individuality. In the decades before comix reached the peak of their popularity, the institution of the family took on increased social importance as many Americans sought to soothe the trauma of war (and the Depression before that) by turning to the home for comfort (Spann, 4). Popular culture reflected an increasing obsession with the family, and media products including films such as Penny Serenade (1941) and Life magazine expounded on the joys of family life (Gilbert; May; Zaretsky). The postwar economic boom opened up new realms of possibility concerning consumer goods and luxury items for the

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average citizen, once available exclusively to the wealthy (Hurley, 12), such as single-­family suburban homes, domestic appliances, and family cars (Baritz; Lipsitz). The middle-­class suburban family became “the central symbol of the nearly perfected America of the 1950s . . . embod[ying] a long-­held American dream of a happy, secure family life” (Skolnick, 2). The idyllic, suburban, nuclear ideal frequently dominated discourses on and around representations of the American family, as could be seen in Life magazine (Zaretsky, 5) as well as the famous “Kitchen Debate” between Richard Nixon and Nikita Khrushchev (May, 19–22). Maintaining the stability of the family was perceived and presented as a defense against such threats as nuclear proliferation and communist expansion (Cook; May). Americans thus expended tremendous energy in rooting out and attacking such supposed threats to domesticity as juvenile delinquency or “deviant” sexuality (Cook; Gilbert; May). Perhaps the most intense pressure to conform came from the illusion of consensus itself. As Gilbert notes, “Widespread belief in the homogeneity of American culture emerged from many factors: the mass media; enlarged federal government participation in the economy; the bureaucratization of American business; political and social conservatism; and McCarthyism. And it seemed most rampant in the conformist lifestyle of the suburbs” (116). Scholars such as Kate Baldwin, Loren Baritz, Leerom Medovoi, Alan Nadel, and Stephen J. Whitfield have illustrated the perceived stakes of “performing” one’s commitment to this supposedly homogenous American identity during the time period. “Moving to the suburbs,” notes Medovoi, “was tantamount to doing one’s national duty” (19), and “those who had their doubts, who looked wistfully for other ladders of life to climb, were ridiculed, persecuted, or psychoanalyzed into conformity” (Braunstein and Doyle, 9). Conforming to the dominant gender scripts of the time became a key component of performing both one’s commitment to and fitness for membership in the American polity. In this context, masculinity was powerfully articulated as comprising stable employment for the financial support of a family, domestic authority, and fatherhood (Filene; May). “According to the common wisdom of the time,” notes Elaine Tyler May, “‘normal’ heterosexual behavior culminating in marriage represented ‘maturity’ and ‘responsibility’; therefore, those who were ‘deviant’ were, by definition, irresponsible, immature, and weak.” Indeed, it was a widespread belief that “sexual excesses would make individuals easy prey for communist tactics,” thus putting the nation at risk. As May notes: “Many high-­level government officials, along with individuals in positions of power and influence in fields ranging from industry to medicine and from science to psychology, believed wholeheartedly that there was

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a direct connection between communism and sexual depravity” (91). Many believed that the defense of the country from outside threats required sufficiently “manly” men who exhibited a high level of responsibility, self-­control, and “moral fiber” (91). Those who did not perform or were otherwise perceived to lack those qualities—because they failed to start a nuclear family in the suburbs, for example—were seen as threats to social stability and the national interest. One way that this belief found particular expression was in the “lavender scares,” in which homosexual Americans, especially gay men, were essentially purged from government employ (May, 92). Anticommunists justified this persecution by appealing to the belief that homosexuals’ so-­called deviance and supposed lack of character and “masculine backbone” made them points of particular susceptibility to corruption or infiltration by hostile, communist agents (91). Starting a heterosexual nuclear family was a way to “appear ‘normal,’ and patriotic,” which, according to May, “contributed to the rush into marriage” and even served as “a cover during these years for gay men and lesbians to escape stigma and prosecution.” It was also a way for both men and women to express their citizenship and endorse the collective priorities of the nation, at least as “expressed by major political leaders and experts” (151). In movies, magazines, and television, “fatherhood became a new badge of masculinity and meaning for the postwar man” (139). Being a family man was what came to define masculinity. Many women, men, and youths chafed under the pressure to conform, however, and even conforming successfully took its toll. Women faced barriers to public participation in work and in politics, as well as a lack of self-­ determination and a demanding workload in the home (Evans, Tidal Wave; May; Morgan; Robbins, The Great Women). Many faced physical and psychic isolation as “women in suburban families, especially housewives with young children, found themselves in a female ghetto as public and private spaces resegregated along geographic lines” (Evans, Born, 250). Men also struggled to adjust to this version of the “good life,” which “no longer provided arenas for the display of aggressive, ‘manly’ individualism” (May, 85). In the newly corporate-­dominated labor environment, men had to rely on more stereotypically “feminine” interpersonal skills to get along in their careers (Filene, 184).5 Magazines such as Life and Esquire; television shows such as Ozzie and Harriet, Father Knows Best, and Leave It to Beaver; and academic social science promulgated the social expectation that being a properly developed, mature, and masculine man “required subordinating one’s heroic vision to a dull routine” (Kimmel) in order to support a family. But many men found themselves unfulfilled by these roles, and “by the 1960s American men felt increasingly

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alienated, stuck in a rut, unable to escape the dull monotony of a cookie-­cutter corporate identity, a suit that was ready-­made and waiting to be filled” (264). During the postwar and Cold War periods, the United States also experienced a heightened preoccupation with raising children to be healthy and strong future citizens. Anxieties about the possibility of raising “sissies” who would be unable to defend America against communist ambitions surfaced in both popular and academic literature. These anxieties included an obsession with juvenile delinquency, which helped fuel—among other things—a furor over children’s entertainment, especially comic books. Fear abounded about the potential for maladjusted children to grow up to be “subversives,” and “psychologists fueled these connections by asserting as scientific fact the theory that the causes of ‘abnormality’ were rooted in early childhood” (May, 93). This idea helps explain the massive popularity of Fredric Wertham’s 1954 book, Seduction of the Innocent. The book attempted to explain how the violence and “lust” in comic books contributed directly to the problem of juvenile delinquency in the United States, suggesting that exposure to comics interfered with children’s proper development. Wertham’s book wasn’t the first or only voice criticizing comic book content at the time, but its popular uptake seemed to serve as a catalyst for the ensuing US Senate hearings. That high-­level scrutiny ultimately led to the comics industry’s adoption of the highly restrictive “Code of the Association of Comics Magazine Publishers, 1948”—often referred to as the Comics Code. The Code prohibited things like disrespectful depictions of authority figures and institutions, “excessive” blood and gore, and the depiction of crime as anything but “a sordid and unpleasant activity” (US Senate, 36–37). Not surprisingly, depictions of sex were also highly regulated. The code declared that “illicit sex relations” ought not be depicted or implied, that depictions of romance should be free of anything meant to “stimulate the lower and baser emotions,” and that “love-­ romance” stories must “emphasize the value of the home and the sanctity of marriage” (37). The code was enforced by the Comics Magazine Association of America, whose stamp of approval on comic book covers indicated to parents their contents’ suitability for children. Many publishers who failed or refused to keep their comics’ content within CMAA-­sanctioned parameters found themselves struggling to stay afloat. Many shut down altogether, the most famous example being William Gaines’s EC Comics (Nyberg, 117–127). As a result, most comics published by major publishers between the mid-­1950s and the early 2000s carried the seal and adhered to its prescriptions. Notable exceptions included the Dell Publishing Company, whose titles were paragons of child-­friendly entertainment without any intervention from the CMAA

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(Hajdu; Nyberg). “The Dell trademark is, and always has been,” claimed the company’s “Pledge to Parents” campaign, “a positive guarantee that the comic magazine bearing it contains only clean and wholesome juvenile entertainment . . . That’s why when your child buys a Dell Comic you can be sure it contains only good fun” (Nyberg, 117). Amidst pervasive anxiety about the relationship between masculinity, sexuality, social stability, national security, and childhood development, formal and informal norms (such as the Comics Code) abounded to ensure that Americans conformed to sanctioned gender scripts. These dictated that the properly “manly” man devoted his creative energies to reproducing healthy, “normal” masculinity for the strength and defense of the nation, both in his own character and life choices and by raising “normal,” well-­adjusted, non-­“sissy” children. This meant (among other things) demonstrating one’s maturity and responsibility by performing one’s “normal-­ness,” or absence of deviant behavior. Performing normal-­ness meant exercising sexual energies entirely within the (heterosexual) marital home, directing them at the maintenance of the marital relationship and the production of children, and, perhaps most importantly, maintaining a general environment sufficiently sexually sterile for the raising of well-­adjusted children. It is pretty easy to see at a glance just how seriously Zap Comix took these imperatives. Anything but restrained, its gleeful orgy scenes flaunted its disdain for the idea of keeping sex reserved and oriented toward the production of healthy future citizens. Its images of organs, orifices, their interactions, and the fluids they produce were flagrant violations of both the Comics Code and wider norms about representing sex. Zap was particularly merciless in its attacks on the cult of childhood innocence and the role that it played in defining what was and wasn’t acceptable for adult behavior. While the culture around it worked hard to keep children and sex as far away from each other as possible, Zap regularly published images of children or characters who otherwise evoked childhood and childhood innocence engaging in sexual acts, criminality, and other pursuits that no reasonable person could call “innocent.” These were framed within and by verbal and visual tropes associated with childhood entertainment, such as superheroes, cute furry animals, and even the comic book itself. The rhetorical effect of these images is the satirizing and ultimate rejection of midcentury cultural imperatives to perform the kind of reserved, family-­oriented masculinity that was ostensibly essential for the good of the nation and its children. The most immediately obvious way in which Zap satirizes or rejects conventions about maintaining childhood as a period of (sexual) innocence is by simply refusing to follow those conventions. The series is replete with

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Figure 6.2. R. Crumb, “Horny Harriet,” Zap Comix #4, 34. © Robert Crumb, 1969.

images that violated both informal norms and more formal restrictions on what could and could not be pictured in children’s entertainment (or for that matter, adult entertainment). Zap’s images of genitalia, bodily fluids, penetration, and excretion were unlike anything else on the newsstands,6 much less what was appearing in other, top-­selling comic books like Superman or Archie.7 It goes without saying that fully detailed images of a pirate cutting the end off of another pirate’s massively oversized penis and consuming the dismembered part violate at least a few of the restrictions laid out in the Comics Code (Wilson, “Head First”). Many images include pictures of children or characters that otherwise invoke childhood and innocence with chubby, cherubic faces and diminutive names, like “Coochy Cooty” (Williams, “Coochy Cooty”). In “Horny Harriet,” for example, a freckled, chubby-­cheeked, pigtailed girl notices a cow licking a salt lick, and pours salt on her genitals in order to entice the cow to do the same to her (Crumb, “Horny Harriet”). Another Crumb creation called “Freak Out Funnies Presents Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies” features talking, anthropomorphic bears with soft faces, comically exaggerated features, and cutesy names, much like those

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found in the “funny animal” genre of comics, such as the popular titles put out by Dell. Over the course of the one-­page strip, the characters rob, steal, murder, engage in group sex, and prostitute the female member of their group in order to raise funds to maintain their indulgent lifestyle. But nowhere is Zap Comix more brutal in its assault on family values than in its most controversial strip, Crumb’s “Joe Blow,” which depicts a “typical” suburban family (a clean-­cut heterosexual couple and their two children) engaging in sex—with one another. It is not hard to see how Zap is in defiance of the more formalized restrictions of the time. The Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies, for example, transgress at least twenty Comics Code restrictions on a single page. But Zap also transgresses the cultural taboos against thinking about kids and sex together, refusing to maintain the conceptual boundary essential to maintaining the idea of childhood as a time of purity and sexual innocence. Beth Bailey notes the “elaborate systems of law, institutions, and ideologies” that modern Western cultures erect to enforce the strict separation between kids and sexuality (191). Zap not only dares to put kids and sex together, in direct opposition to those laws, institutions, and ideologies, but also confronts its readers with having to do the same thing, by literally putting kids and sex together in the same visual and, thus, conceptual space, and daring them to exercise some self-­awareness of their own reaction to it. A strip in Zap Comix #4 satirizes quite explicitly both the popular anxiety about “perverts” exposing children to sex and the reactionary nature of the moral panics that such anxiety fueled (Shelton, “Wonder Wart-­Hog”). In it, a protagonist called Wonder Wart-­Hog—a spoof of DC’s Superman and superheroes more broadly—tracks down a “degenerate” who is suspected of exposing schoolchildren to “smut.” Spurred to action by a soapbox speech given by a fist-­waving politician, Wonder disguises himself as a young girl in a polka-­dot dress and a matching bow in her hair and goes undercover to find the perpetrator (identified as “Robert Scum, King of the Underground Cartoonists”). Upon finding the “degenerate,” Wonder reacts with his typical lack of restraint—stomping the perpetrator to death and tearing off his head while screaming, “I’ll teach you to corrupt innocent American kids, you goddamn fucking son of a bitch! You prick! You cocksucker!” while being cheered on by a gaggle of schoolchildren. In a very short space, the strip comments on the popular articulation between kids, sexual innocence, and the state (“I’ll teach you to corrupt innocent American kids . . . !”) by presenting a visual and verbal reductio ad absurdum of the reactionary approach to preserving childhood and sexual innocence that lead to things like the Comics Code. Zap certainly refuses to play by the mainstream’s rules about sexual devi-

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ance, but it doesn’t stop there. It also lets its readers know that it knows exactly what it is doing through its use of forms and tropes that normally constitute part of the “whole constellation of social practices” (Bailey, 192) developed to keep kids and sex separate. The series frequently appropriates patterns of content associated with child-­friendly entertainment, particularly those commonly found in Code-­sterilized comics. Wonder Wart-­Hog is a clear example, given his tendency toward violence and sexual excess, including one scene in which he “ravages”8 a naked, unconscious “Lois Lamebrain” with his phallic snout (Shelton, “Wonder Wart-­Hog”). Another favorite strategy, particularly of Victor Moscoso’s, is to picture characters that loosely but recognizably resemble Disney characters, such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck, in decidedly adult situations. Disney, of course, was one of the most massive and visible purveyors of children’s entertainment in the years leading up to Zap’s publication, and remains so (Dirks; Miller; Telotte). Moscoso draws Disney’s most famous characters with human genitalia engaged in sexual intercourse, as in the aforementioned untitled strip in which characters with some of Donald and Daisy Ducks’ more iconic physical features engage in explicit mutual oral sex. In all these examples, Zap takes some of the most recognizable icons of childhood and symbolically subjects them to all manner of adult knowledge to which they were supposed to be antithetical. It uses them to highlight the fact that its creators know exactly what those images mean to the broader culture, exactly what “laws, institutions, and ideologies” they are refusing to uphold, and which values and priorities they are undermining by doing so. As if that were not enough, Charles Hatfield also points out Zap’s explicit acknowledgment of the specific codes it was violating with a stamp on the cover indicating that the comic had been “Approved By the Ghost Writers in the Sky” in a mocking parody of the Comics Code Authority’s seal of approval (12). Zap does not just violate cultural norms—it flaunts the fact that it is doing so. The use of the comic book form further comments on mainstream anxieties and imperatives. Hatfield discusses how underground comix ironize the familiar form of the comic book by filling it with the kinds of complex and radical ideas and themes that a comic book wouldn’t be expected to address (or even to be able to address) because of its enduring status as essentially corporate, commercialized entertainment (Hatfield, 7–8). To this observation I would add that Zap also ironizes the form by filling it with ideas and images that it shouldn’t address (according to the “square” mainstream) because of its historical status as a vehicle of children’s entertainment. In so doing, Zap highlights and exposes the ideology underlying the logic of having such distinctions between children’s and nonchildren’s entertainment in the

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Figure 6.3. R. Crumb, cover, Zap Comix #1. © Robert Crumb, 1969.

first place—that children were sexually innocent by definition and that premature exposure to adult sexual knowledge necessarily risked abnormality and deviance later in life. It highlights the strangeness of attempting to ensure that kids never encounter sexuality of any kind—as though there are not a host of other opportunities outside the pages of comic books for exactly that to happen. And it questions the terror with which the rest of (middle-­class)

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America apparently approached the topic of kids and sex, by daring to throw the two ideas together and demonstrating that that the world continues to turn and the republic continues to stand. In highlighting these ideologies in all these ways, Zap refuses to perform its fealty to the supposed consensus over American values and priorities related to kids and sex, thus potentially disrupting the appearance of cultural homogeneity and that homogeneity’s role in enforcing that consensus. Filling a comic book with stories like S. Clay Wilson’s “He’s Shitting” (in which an unnamed character flings the contents of his chamber pot at two companions) or Robert Williams’s “The Supreme Constellation of Dormasintoria” (an explicit tale of cosmic fornication narrated by a highly detailed anthropomorphic clitoris) is more than just the presentation of shocking toilet humor for cheap laughs. It also undermines a host of cultural logics behind the imperative to follow particular scripts for acceptable adult behavior. These logics were strengthened by the appearance of consensus over national values and priorities, such as the importance of nondeviant sexuality and the importance of organizing one’s life around protecting children from it. Zap explicitly telegraphs its dissent from that consensus through its deliberate misuse of forms and tropes meant to uphold it. It works to disarticulate childhood, sexual innocence, social stability, and masculine restraint by sati-

Figure 6. 4. From Robert Williams, “The Supreme Constellation of Dormasintoria,” Zap Comix #4, 18. © Robert Williams, 1969.

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rizing and thus symbolically severing those articulations, undermining the appearance of American consensus and cultural homogeneity, which helped maintain them in the first place. After all, scholars have shown that the common ideal that Zap rejects was “common” in word more than deed, even in the cultural mainstream. The famed Kinsey reports, for example, made it fairly clear that Americans were hardly as staid and reserved in private as the images of families in popular culture suggested. Despite this, large numbers of people still reported that they considered “taboos against premarital intercourse, homosexuality, and other forms of nonprocreative sex” as defining characteristics of proper, “moral” sexuality (May, 110–111). Zap’s riffs on the mainstream’s concerns over sexual deviancy can easily be read as a criticism of this disparity on the grounds of its inauthenticity. A clear expression of this can be found in one of the very first strips in Zap Comics #1 in which a character called “Whiteman” attempts to keep control over his internal drives of lust and violence in order to uphold the responsibilities inherent in adulthood and citizenship. As he struggles with his “real self deep down inside . . . the raging lustful beast that craves only one thing! Sex!” he gives voice to the social pressures that, in his world, require restraint: “Got to get a grip on myself . . . I’m a grown man! An intelligent adult! With responsibilities! I’m an American!9 A citizen of the United States! A real hard charger! . . . The man with the know-­how! A citizen on the go! I must maintain this rigid position or all is lost!” (Crumb, “Whiteman,” 2). Whiteman’s attempts at restraint ultimately lead him to neurosis and despair. By contrast, Zap is rife with sympathetic—or at least, less neurotic— characters who make no attempt whatsoever to rein in their impulses. Crumb’s robe-­bedecked, guru-­like life coach Mr. Natural wanders through life unencumbered by social pressures or niceties, indulging his own sexual appetites (see, for example, Crumb, “Mr. Natural”). S. Clay Wilson’s Checkered Demon drinks, fights, and fucks whenever he pleases (for example, in Wilson, “The Hog Ridin’ Fools”). Whatever the impulses of these and other characters like them, there is no disparity between their impulses and their actions. Unlike the population at large, the characters who have it all together in Zap Comix— or those who, at least, appear to maintain happiness and a sense of agency— don’t maintain rigid distinctions between their private, internal impulses and their public behavior. This is in distinct contrast to characters like Whiteman or Flakey Foont (Mr. Natural’s neurotic, tightly wound foil) or, more importantly, to the disparity between professed ideals and real-­life actions that the work of Kinsey, May, and others strongly suggests was common among midcentury Americans. Zap’s sexually explicit images thus serve as a critique of the hypocrisy of declaring an ideal standard of sexual “morality” to which so

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few live up. It dares readers to admit their own impulses to themselves or at least to confront the disparities between their own concept and embodiment of sexual morality. This is not to suggest that Zap was attempting to sanction any of the specific acts or encounters pictured in its pages, nor to suggest that the comic sought to imply that its readers engaged in any of them in particular. What it does is to forcefully invite readers to question their own commitment and willingness to consent to a mainstream culture that pursued a restrictive sexual morality with a reactionary vigor that ignored the costs it imposed on its citizens’ personal freedom and self-­consistency—not to mention whether the repression produced sufficient social stability to justify the limits that it placed on free will and self-­expression or whether stability was really what Americans wanted to prioritize. From these analyses, we can begin to parse the alternative scripts for masculinity that Zap pre­sents. Zap is not simply rejecting or negating certain elements of mainstream cultural values, but is also projecting a set of values that were missing or de-­emphasized in mainstream cultural narratives. While more mainstream narratives projected restraint in the service of family and fatherhood as the definitive markers of mature masculine adulthood, Zap defines it as individuality and authenticity, as trueness to one’s nature. While mainstream narratives invite audiences to channel desires into the production of national citizenship and (future) citizens, Zap invites them to pursue desire for its own sake. Masculinity in Zap is defined as the ability to be an autonomous and self-­determining individual, and to prioritize—well, anything—over the production of healthy children, no matter what the Man says. One could argue that this call to authenticity in Zap is of a more universal stripe, an invitation for all people—regardless of the particular gender scripts they are being pressured to follow—to think more critically and more for themselves. But Zap’s concerns with masculinity per se are fairly clear. Also clear is the fact that both the call to authenticity and the way that Zap goes about making it address some (frequently male) readers more than others (frequently female). For one thing, the pressures to perform specifically socially sanctioned masculinity are referred to numerous times in the series. Sanctioned masculine roles and role models—the organization man, the domestic authority (as in “Joe Blow”), the police officer (who makes numerous appearances, as in Shelton’s “What’s the Door Doing Open at the Freak Brothers’ Place at This Time of Night?” and Williams’s “Bludgeon Funnies!”), even the (male) superhero—were referred to and satirized far more than their feminine counterparts.10 One of Zap’s most explicit references to this prevailing concern appears in “Bludgeon Funnies!” in which a massive, muscular, clean-­cut,

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square-­jawed police officer—the very image of Mike Hammer–­esque masculinity—polices a hippie by blowing his brains out with a shotgun. The strip makes it clear that the hippie cannot possibly be posing a threat to anyone— he’s frail and thin and seated in a wheelchair. The hippie’s “crime” is nonconformity, particularly to sanctioned masculine scripts. The police officer makes this clear in his command to the hippie, who is making a peace sign with his fingers: “No secret hand signals, ya filthy queer!” (Williams, “Bludgeon,” 3). What is more, we can’t ignore what Charles Hatfield calls the “masculine ethos” pervasive in underground comix at the time, what Trina Robbins calls “panels of rape, torture, and murder” (“Wimmen’s Studies,” 30), usually of female characters by male ones. In Zap, characters with agency are typically coded male (often quite explicitly by the presence of graphically illustrated phalluses). These characters often demonstrate this agency via their control over women-­as-­objects—Mr. Natural cavorting with never-­named hippie girls (Crumb, “Mr. Natural” and “Mr. Natural Takes a Vacation”); Wonder Wart-­Hog “balling” Lois Lamebrain, an event that starts when she is unconscious (Shelton, “Wonder Wart-­Hog”); female characters being raped, killed, or both by male characters (Wilson, “The Hog Ridin’ Fools,” “A Ball in the Bunghole,” “Lester Gass,” “Snake Snatch Tale,” and “Angels & Devils”); a “galaxy cluster” shaped like a naked woman being caught and sexually conquered by the Supreme Constellation of Dormasintoria (a “nebulistic deity” with a beard and a penis) in Robert Williams’s strip by the same name; and the list goes on. Notably, Trina Robbins has asserted that female creators who objected to such content “were often told by men that they simply had no sense of humor” and were excluded from publication (“Wimmen’s Studies,” 30).11 Perhaps it would be unfair to say that Zap includes no female agents in its pages. But given the above, it seems quite clear on balance that its rhetoric has more to do with masculine agency than a universal call to authenticity. In any case, we have seen how images of children and childhood served as rhetorical resources for Zap’s critique of Cold War–­era scripts for the acceptable performance of masculinity. Zap refuses to take seriously mainstream America’s fear and distrust of sexual “deviancy” and its efforts to contain it, mixing images, forms, and tropes associated with children and childhood innocence with those invoking adult sexual knowledge. The comic makes it clear to readers that it knows exactly what it is doing and how shocking it is (or was), at once acknowledging and rejecting mainstream imperatives to perform a “normal,” “acceptable” relationship regarding children, sex, and national priorities. It does all this alongside a pervasive concern with masculine agency, thus also rejecting the articulation between masculinity and

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“normal” sexual morality, rearticulating it with authenticity and personal consistency. For those disillusioned with the mainstream’s repressive demand to embrace sanctioned performances of masculinity, this must have been highly resonant. And for those who embraced mainstream norms, it must have been mind blowing indeed. Though this chapter has focused on a case from a very particular time in US cultural history, that case continues to be relevant today, since childhood and the anxieties surrounding it continue to serve as sites for contested American values and priorities. Even as family structures and gender ideologies change and evolve, the post–­Cold War family model and its ideals about childhood continue to inform debates about what American families can and should look like. Some scholars of the family continue to advocate for the nuclear family model as the best environment for raising healthy young Americans (Popenoe) even as others investigate the ambivalent impact of that model and its attendant ideas about childhood on actual families (Cate; Hansen; Kellas and Suter; Knabe; McLelland; Skolnick). These ideals have also historically (mis)informed debates over topics as varied as the impact of second-­wave feminism (Laurie and Stark; Skolnick) and public responses to the Vietnam War (Zaretsky), and they continue to exert a powerful influence over contemporary political discourse on subjects including marijuana grow-­ops (Boyd and Carter) and the presidency (Burnette and Fox). Indeed, the link between childhood purity and America’s conception of itself and its place in the world is as strong today as ever (Coviello; Knabe). Understanding the “kosmic trooths” that have been contested on the sites of childhood and childhood innocence are as relevant today as they were in 1967.

Acknowledgments This research was supported by the 2013 James P. Danky Fellowship, granted by the Center for the History of Print and Digital Culture at the University of Wisconsin–­Madison in association with the Wisconsin Historical Society.

Notes 1. This chapter uses the term “comics” to refer to the medium—sometimes also called “sequential art”—more broadly. The chapter uses “comix” to refer to the specific iteration of that medium as described in its opening sentences. 2. Strips like Jaxon’s God Nose and Foolbert Sturgeon’s The Adventures of Jesus appeared as early as 1963 in college humor magazines like the University of Texas’s Texas Ranger (Rosenkranz, 26–29), and Joel Beck’s Alienated War-­Baby Reports (for example, Lenny of

124  Ian Blechschmidt Laredo and The Profit) were published as early as 1965. But Zap Comix was the publication that cemented the format of the comix book taken up by the rest of the underground comix movement. 3. Though issues of Zap continued to be published until at least 2005, this chapter focuses on those published during the height of underground comix’ popularity—the mid-­ 1960s to 1975, according to Patrick Rosenkranz’s exhaustive history of underground comix, Rebel Visions. This covers issues 1–8 (1968–1975), including issue 0 (1968). This bounding of the archive is meant to capture Zap at its most culturally relevant, when it can tell us the most about the cultural history within which it is embedded (and vice versa). 4. That is, a nonhippie or noncountercultural person; someone who endorsed or embodied (or was perceived to endorse or embody, according to whoever is using the word) mainstream cultural values and norms, especially white middle-­class ones. 5. George Lipsitz, for example, details the wartime and postwar domination of large corporations over smaller businesses. “During the war,” he notes, “more than a half million small retail, service, and construction companies went out of business” (7). Though the appeal of working for one’s self—embodying what Michel Kimmel might call the “Heroic Artisan”—continued, “its increasing impracticality forced many Americans to face a life of working for others” (Lipsitz, 7). 6. This is why underground comix, unlike their mainstream contemporaries, could not be purchased from newsstands. Buying underground comix often required visiting more “underground” locales, such as head shops (Sabin, 94). 7. These were the top-­selling titles of 1968—the year Zap #1 was published—according to Comichron.com (Miller). 8. One of the sound effects in this strip is rendered as “Ravage.” 9. Emphasis in the original. It should be noted that in the panel in which Whiteman speaks this sentence, he is in the foreground, with Capitol Hill and a waving American flag in the background. 10. Ideal femininity in the form of the housewife or the sexually chaste virgin girl or even the demure, infantilized female “superhero” (for example, Supergirl) was roundly skewered elsewhere, especially in feminist comix like Wimmen’s Comix, It Ain’t Me, Babe, and Tits & Clits. Such tropes receive little or no attention in Zap, however. 11. It is perhaps fair to note that Robbins is referring to underground comix more broadly, not Zap in particular. Zap may not have been the only underground comix where this “masculine ethos” was prominent, but it was certainly no exception. This, of course, was one part—though not necessarily the only—of the impetus for the creation of comix with a more feminist bent, such as It Ain’t Me, Babe, Wimmen’s Comix, Tits & Clits, and others.

Works Cited Bailey, Beth. “The Vexed History of Children and Sex.” In The Routledge History of Childhood in the Western World, edited by Paula S. Fass, 191–210. New York: Routledge, 2013. Baldwin, Kate A. “Between Mother and History: Jean Stafford, Marguerite Oswald, and U.S. Cold War Women’s Citizenship.” Differences 13, no. 3 (2002): 83–120. Baritz, Loren. The Good Life: The Meaning of Success for the American Middle Class. New York: Knopf, 1989.

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Boyd, Susan, and Connie Carter. “Using Children: Marijuana Grow-­Ops, Media, and Policy.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 29, no. 3 (2012): 238–258. Braunstein, Peter, and Michael William Doyle, eds. Imagine Nation: The American Counterculture of the 1960s and ’70s. New York: Routledge, 2002. Burnette, Ann E., and Rebekah L. Fox. “My Three Dads: The Rhetorical Construction of Fatherhood in the 2012 Republican Presidential Primary.” Journal of Contemporary Rhetoric 2, nos. 3–4 (2012): 80–91. Cate, Shannon L. C. “Not Our Memory: Contested Visions of Family at the Turn of the American Century.” PhD diss., George Washington University, 2005. Cook, Robert. “Bruce Catton, Middlebrow Culture, and the Liberal Search for Purpose in Cold War America.” Journal of American Studies 47, no. 1 (2013): 109–126. Coviello, Peter. “The Sexual Child; or, This American Life.” Raritan 27, no. 4 (2007). Crumb, Robert. Cover. Zap Comix #1, 1968. ———. Cover. Zap Comix #2, 1968. ———. “Freak Out Funnies Pre­sents Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies.” Zap Comix #0, 1968, 13. ———. “Horny Harriet.” Zap Comix #4, 1969, 34. ———. “Joe Blow.” Zap Comix #4, 1969, 7–12. ———. “Mr. Natural.” Zap Comix #2, 1968, 43–47. ———. “Mr. Natural Takes a Vacation.” Zap Comix #4, 1969, 26–29. ———. “Whiteman.” Zap Comix #1, 1968, 1–4. Crumbski, R. [Robert Crumb]. “The Family That Lays Together Stays Together!” Snatch, 1969, 17–18. Danky, James, and Denis Kitchen, eds. Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix. New York: Abrams, 2009. Dirks, Tim. “All-­Time Box Office Hits.” Filmsite.org, American Movie Classics, 2014. Evans, Sara M. Born for Liberty: A History of Women in America. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1997. ———. Tidal Wave: How Women Changed America at Century’s End. New York: Free Press, 2003. Fass, Paula S., and Michael Grossberg, eds. Reinventing Childhood after World War II. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Fass, Paula S., and Mary Anne Mason. Childhood in America. New York: New York University Press, 2000. Filene, Peter G. Him/Her/Self: Gender Identities in Modern America. 3rd ed. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1998. Gilbert, James. Another Chance: Postwar America, 1945–1985. 2nd ed. Chicago: Dorsey, 1986. Hajdu, David. The Ten-­Cent Plague. New York: Picador, 2008. Hansen, Karen V. Not-­So-­Nuclear Families: Class, Gender, and Networks of Care. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 2005. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Hurley, Andrew. Diners, Bowling Alleys, and Trailer Parks: Chasing the American Dream in the Postwar Consumer Culture. New York: Basic Books, 2001. Kellas, Jody Koenig, and Elizabeth A. Suter. “Accounting for Lesbian-­Headed Families: Lesbian Mothers’ Responses to Discursive Challenges.” Communication Monographs 79, no. 4 (2012): 475–498.

126  Ian Blechschmidt Kimmel, Michael. Manhood in America: A Cultural History. New York: Free Press, 1996. Knabe, Susan. “Suffer the Children: National Crisis, Affective Collectivity, and the Sexualized Child.” Canadian Review of American Studies 42, no. 1 (2012): 82–104. Laurie, Timothy, and Hannah Stark. “Reconsidering Kinship: Beyond the Nuclear Family with Deleuze and Guattari.” Cultural Studies Review 18, no. 1 (2012): 19–39. Lipsitz, George. Class and Culture in Cold War America: “A Rainbow at Midnight.” South Hadley, Mass.: Praeger, 1981. May, Elaine Tyler. Homeward Bound: American Families in the Cold War Era. New York: Basic Books, 2008. McLelland, Mark. “Australia’s ‘Child-­Abuse Material’ Legislation, Internet Regulation and the Juridification of the Imagination.” International Journal of Cultural Studies 15, no. 5 (2012): 467–483. Medovoi, Leerom. Rebels: Youth and the Cold War Origins of Identity. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005. Miller, John Jackson. “Comic Book Sales in the 1960s.” Chomichron: The Comics Chronicles, www.comichron.com/yearlycomicssales/1960s.html. Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap, 2004. Morgan, Robin. “Introduction: The Women’s Revolution.” In Sisterhood Is Powerful: An Anthology of Writings from the Women’s Movement, edited by Robin Morgan, xiii–­xli. New York: Random House, 1970. Moscoso, Victor. Untitled strip. Zap Comix #3, 1968, 24–25. Nadel, Alan. Containment Culture: American Narratives, Postmodernism, and the Atomic Age. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995. Popenoe, David. War over the Family. New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 2005. Robbins, Trina. The Great Women Cartoonists. New York: Watson-­Guptill, 2001. ———. “Wimmen’s Studies.” In Underground Classics: The Transformation of Comics into Comix, edited by James Danky and Denis Kitchen, 31–33. New York: Abrams, 2009. Rosenkranz, Patrick. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2002. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels. London: Phaidon, 1996. Shelton, Gilbert. “Hey Fellas, I Got a Job as Santa Claus.” The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers #1, February 1971, 26. ———. “What’s the Door Doing Open at the Freak Brothers’ Place at This Time of Night?” Zap Comix #7, 1974, 10–11. ———. “Wonder Wart-­Hog . . . Breaks Up the Muthalode Smut Ring and Also ‘Balls’ Lois Lamebrain!” Zap Comix #4, 1969. 19–23. Skolnick, Arlene. Embattled Paradise: The American Family in an Age of Uncertainty. New York: Basic Books, 1991. Spann, Edward K. Democracy’s Children: The Young Rebels of the 1960s and the Power of Ideals. Wilmington, DE: SR Books, 2003. Telotte, J. P. Disney TV. Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 2004. US Senate. Committee on the Judiciary. Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency. Comic Books and Juvenile Delinquency. Washington, DC: Government Printing Office, 1955. Whitfield, Stephen J. The Culture of the Cold War. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996. Williams, Robert. “Bludgeon Funnies!” Zap Comix #5, 1970, 1–4.

Sex, Comix, and Masculinity   127 ———. “Coochy Cooty in ‘Gizmo Therapy.’” Zap Comix #8, 1975, 20–23. ———. “The Supreme Constellation of Dormasintoria.” Zap Comix #4, 1969, 15–18. Wilson, S. Clay. “Angels & Devils.” Zap Comix #6, 1973, 11–18. ———. “A Ball in the Bunghole.” Zap Comix #4, 1969, 13–14. ———. “Captain Pissgums and His Pervert Pirates.” Zap Comix #3, 1969, 27–36. ———. “Head First.” Zap Comix #2, 1968, 38. ———. “He’s Shitting.” Zap Comix #2, 1968, 34. ———. “The Hog Ridin’ Fools.” Zap Comix #2, 1968, 18–31. ———. “Lester Gass The Midnight Misogynist.” Zap Comix #5, 1970, 11–14. ———. “Snake Snatch Tale.” Zap Comix #5, 1970, 48. Zaretsky, Natasha. No Direction Home: The American Family and the Fear of National Decline, 1968–1980. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007.

Chapter 7

RAW and Little Lit: Resisting and Redefining Children ’ s Comic s L ara Saguisag

In 1998, Françoise Mouly, the art editor of the New Yorker, and her husband, the Pulitzer Prize–­winning cartoonist Art Spiegelman, founded RAW Junior, an imprint specializing in the publication of children’s comics. RAW Junior was established as a response to what Mouly and Spiegelman perceived to be a dearth of comics for young readers (Heer, 114; Spiegelman, Co-­Mix, 68). The imprint’s first venture was the Little Lit series, which consisted of three volumes published between 2000 and 2003. Each volume—Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies (2000), Strange Stories for Strange Kids (2001), and It Was a Dark and Silly Night (2003)—was edited by Mouly and Spiegelman. The compendiums featured comics, illustrations, and visual games by renowned alternative comics artists such as Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes, Chris Ware, and Spiegelman himself, and by writers and illustrators well known for their work for children, including Daniel Handler (writing as Lemony Snicket), Ian Falconer, Neil Gaiman, David Macaulay, and Maurice Sendak. Little Lit also reprinted several mid-­twentieth-­century comics narratives, such as Crockett Johnson’s “Barnaby” and Walt Kelly’s retelling of the Gingerbread Man tale. In 2006, selected works from each volume were republished in Big Fat Little Lit. Although Little Lit has not received the same critical attention as Spiegelman’s graphic narratives Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (1986) and In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), nor generated the same amount of controversy as several New Yorker covers that were published under Mouly’s tenure, the series drew considerable interest from educators, librarians, and scholars working in the fields of children’s literature and comics studies. Mouly and Spiegelman, after all, are considered vanguards of comics and are particularly celebrated for the prominent roles they played in the alternative comics movement of the 1980s. Between 1980 and 1991, Mouly and Spiegelman edited, designed,

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and distributed eleven issues of RAW, and the magazine has been hailed as a “seminal” publication that pushed the formal, stylistic, and narrative boundaries of the comics medium (Hatfield, Alternative, 5; Spiegelman, Co-­Mix, 36, 38). Arguably, RAW revolutionized comics, and the establishment of RAW Junior and the publication of Little Lit are largely perceived to have enacted a similar revolution in the genre of children’s comics. In the catalogue of a recent Spiegelman retrospective, Little Lit is commemorated as an effort to “reinvigorat[e] kids’ comics” (Spiegelman, Co-­Mix, 68). Commenting on TOON Books, a RAW Junior line that was launched in 2008, Natalie op de Beeck suggests that Mouly and Spiegelman’s pioneering work in the alternative comics movement necessarily translates to radical forms of children’s comics: “If subversives encroach on the picture book field—if the former creators of RAW handle a Candlewick imprint . . . how will we forestall the next generation’s media revolt?” (476).1 It is imperative, however, to recall that through RAW, Mouly and Spiegelman actively sought to remove comics from the sphere of childhood. As discussed in this chapter, their attempt to redefine comics often came at the expense of children’s comics. RAW vigorously campaigned for the “adultification” of the genre; it expressed an insistence that comics could deliver meaningful, “mature” narratives and that adults could read certain graphic narratives without embarrassment or the anxiety of being labeled “childish.” As stated in the blurb of one RAW issue, “Now it’s safe for adults to read comics. You don’t automatically lose IQ points” (Spiegelman and Mouly, RAW, vol. 2). The Comics Journal hailed the magazine for making a “declaration that comics are a sophisticated, adult medium” (quoted in Sabin, 189). What does it mean, then, for Mouly and Spiegelman to create and publish children’s comics after spending more than a decade asserting that comics needed to be dissociated from childhood? How do they (re)define comics for young readers after spearheading a movement that tended to diminish the genre of children’s comics? This chapter addresses these questions. I examine RAW and Little Lit as sites of redefinition and resistance, showing how both projects reject the traditional comic book—the mass-­market, 6½″ × 10″ thirty-­two-­page booklets printed on cheap paper—in an effort to elevate the genre. I begin with a discussion of children’s comics published in the mid-­twentieth century, outlining how these materials allowed for a distinct children’s culture to emerge. Children were able to purchase comics and to shape the narratives by communicating with artists and writers through letter columns and contests. But while child readers may have been empowered by the comics, numerous parents,

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teachers, and civic leaders feared that such empowerment threatened childhood innocence and had the potential to turn children into social menaces. Many adults thus sought to regulate the contents of comics. RAW emerged partly as a rejection of attempts to censor comics, but it also defined itself against the comics that children read. But as discussed later in this chapter, the magazine could not completely sever its link with childhood. For one, the status of comics as an infantile, marginal art form provided RAW artists the freedom to experiment and challenge formal and cultural taboos. Moreover, while RAW was aimed at an adult reader with the knowledge and experience to appreciate and interpret its narratives, some of the magazine’s stories gesture toward the complexities of childhood and adolescence, characterizing young people as competent agents actively making meaning of their social environment. Little Lit, modeled after RAW rather than mass-­market comic books, is packaged as alternative children’s comics. The series is presented as sophisticated comics for children, a quality substitute for the disposable, commercialized comic book. In the last section of this chapter, I discuss how Little Lit sheds the elements of traditional comic books that allowed children to participate in creating the texts that they read. Instead, Little Lit upholds the adult’s role as creator and mediator of children’s texts. The series thus positions children as recipients rather than active, participatory readers. In a number of strips that Spiegelman has drawn for adult readers, he sometimes interrogates the notion that children are passive recipients of culture. In “In the Dumps,” a comic strip that he drew in collaboration with Maurice Sendak, the fictionalized Spiegelman at first insists that adults need to carefully monitor the texts that children engaged with. In declaring “when parents give Maus, my book about Auschwitz, to their little kids, I think it’s child abuse,” he expresses the belief that children lack the ability to process and manage difficult and potentially traumatic narratives (Spiegelman and Sendak, 80). In the next panel, the figure of Spiegelman characterizes children as possessing a limited (and laughable) understanding of the world when he relates how his six-­year-­old daughter Nadja thinks “Daddy draws mice” for a living (80). The character of Sendak, on the other hand, boldly claims, “[Kids] know everything!” (80). He eviscerates adults who maintain children are inherently innocent, vulnerable beings, and claims, “In reality, childhood is deep and rich. It’s vital, mysterious, and profound. I remember my own childhood vividly. . . . I knew terrible things. . . . But I knew I mustn’t let adults know I knew . . . it would scare them” (80). Sendak thus depicts his childhood self as not only having access to the “forbidden” adult world but also possessing the savvy to maintain a performance of childhood inno-

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cence for the sake of adults. While Sendak exposes childhood innocence as a social construct, his viewpoint is itself in line with “knowing childhood,” a construction of childhood that emerged in the late twentieth century. According to Anne Higonnet, “Knowing Children” “have bodies and passions of their own” and “are also often aware of adult bodies and passions, whether as mimics or only witnesses” (207). In the latter half of “In the Dumps,” the figure of Spiegelman remains silent, signifying his acquiescence to Sendak’s argument that children are perceptive actors who often disrupt adult ideals of childhood purity and passivity. Yet in creating comics for children, Spiegelman, as well as Mouly, appears to maintain a diminutive view of childhood. The labels Little Lit and RAW Junior work to infantilize texts for children, reinforcing the minority status of both young readers and the materials they read. The terms “little” and “junior” maintain that children’s comics are puerile texts that lack the sophistication of “adult literature” and “comics for grown-­ups.” Arguably, the producers of Little Lit envision the series as preparatory material, important not in and of itself but rather for its capacity to prime children for “real” literature later in life. This notion of children’s comics (and children’s literature, more broadly) as a rudimentary form of literature is influenced by the developmental model of childhood, which envisions children as “human becomings” rather than “human beings” (Qvortrup, 4). The view of the child as “becoming” is problematic: “[It] necessarily places the onus of importance on that which the child will be rather than that which the child is. The child is seen as a ‘future adult’ rather than a ‘young human being’ in his or her own right” (Uprichard, 304). The discourse of “child as becoming” assumes and perpetuates a binary view of childhood and adulthood, representing the child as incomplete and incapable and the adult as necessarily fully formed and competent (Qvortrup, 4). Thus, the purportedly more knowledgeable adult can assume responsibility for dictating and regulating the child’s needs, wants, and environments.

Comic Books and Childhood in “ Crisis ” In the twentieth century, many adults seemed eager to embrace such responsibility. Progressive era reformers vigorously campaigned against nickelodeons, dance halls, and newspaper comic strips; the later decades of the century were full of moral panics over the effects of television, advertising, and video games on children. The infamous and much-­documented “comic book scare” of the 1950s is another example of how adults attempted (and largely succeeded) in policing young people’s culture. In the 1940s and 1950s, children constituted the majority of comic book

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readers (Nyberg, 1). A wide variety of comic book genres were published for different audiences, such as romance titles for young women, and action, adventure, and war comics for servicemen (see Wright). But comic book publishers recognized children as a viable, discrete market and produced numerous titles that specifically addressed young readers. Their publishing efforts were undeniably successful. In the mid-­1940s, around 90 percent of children age six to eleven, and 80 percent of youth age twelve to eighteen, read comics regularly (Gordon, 132). In the early 1950s, as many as 100 million copies of comics were being sold each month (Wright, 155). Publishers produced material that was understood to appeal to children. With the introduction of Superman in Action Comics #1 in 1938, superhero titles were consistently in high demand among young readers. Publishers made a concerted effort to maintain their child readership by introducing young superhero characters, such as the sidekicks Robin, the Boy Wonder (in Batman), and Bucky Barnes (in Captain America), and the orphans that made up the Newsboy Legion. In 1940, Dell, through a licensing agreement with the Disney Company, began publishing Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, which featured characters such as Mickey Mouse and Donald Duck. The success of Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories led to the emergence of other “funny animal” comics (Sabin, 35–36). In 1941, Pep Comics introduced humorous stories about teen romance and school life, featuring characters such as Archie Andrews and Betty Cooper. The stories proved popular with readers, and Pep Comics was soon renamed Archie. In the late 1940s and early 1950s, some publishers—most famously, William Gaines’s EC Comics—churned out crime and horror comics, filling them with gory images and story lines. Children avidly read these comics, and publishers responded by printing even more gruesome material in the comic books (Wright, 149). Comic book producers, however, were not blindly guessing what interested young readers. Many writers, artists, and editors communicated with their audience through letter pages and contests that solicited ideas from children. Obviously, these venues were marketing ploys designed to build and maintain readership; the possibility that a reader’s letter or plot suggestion would appear in print was a means to encourage him or her to purchase future issues. But these features also gave children a means of expressing their opinions and interpretations of characters and plotlines, to participate in building the stories that they read, and to expand the narratives beyond what the writers and illustrators put on the page. In other words, these features encouraged children to become participatory rather than passive, facilitating the formation of “a sense of cooperation between readers and creators” (Pustz, xi). The letters column also provided children a sense of community, since it

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became a place for them to “meet” like-­minded readers, find pen pals, and recruit members for fan clubs (39). But perhaps what children found most appealing about the comic book was that it was a cultural form they could access with little adult intervention. Comic books cost ten cents and were widely available in drugstores and newsstands, and many children were able to select and purchase comics on their own. The ability to choose and buy comic books may have felt liberating to young readers, especially since other forms of children’s reading material were often determined and regulated by adults. While picture books, early readers, and children’s magazines were selected, purchased, and approved by parents, teachers, and librarians, comic books were a form of “children’s leisure reading that escaped the control of parents and professionals” (Nyberg, 19). As Bradford Wright posits, “how refreshing it must have been for young people to discover a source of entertainment that spoke directly to them as independent consumers” (29). Comics were key to the development of an exclusively youth-­oriented consumer culture, since “the comic-­book industry clearly demonstrated the viability of a children’s market by turning out a product that children could buy with their own hard-­to-­come-­by pennies” (Kline, 103). Furthermore, like other popular cultural forms that emerged in the mid-­ twentieth century, such as rock and roll music, television, and movies, comic books worked to “peel young people away from their families into a world of peers” (Mintz, 309). Thus the purchase of a comic book was, for children, an exercise in agency, choice, and autonomy. While comic book producers sought to learn more about the preferences of child consumers, many parents, educators, and civic leaders were discomfited by their inability to monitor children’s reading. As Joe Sutliff Sanders puts it, comics “anticipate a child who reads without adult supervision” (Sanders, 72). Children often read comics without “a text or a mediator who will see to it that those children make meaning in ways that fit with existing adult prejudices,” and this independence could be worrisome: “Comics traditionally have been seen as a threat to the power of adults . . . because comics are for solitary, unmonitored readers who are making meaning without the immediate involvement of adults” (75). Anxious about the burgeoning autonomy of children, adults led campaigns that claimed comic books caused childhood to fall into a state of crisis. These anticomics crusades were also fueled by adults’ desire to “regain much of the consumer power behind choosing what youngsters would read” (Honeyman, 189). In the 1940s, librarians, teachers, and civic groups denounced comics as lacking in literary and artistic merit, claiming the texts impeded the development of reading skills (Nyberg, 3–13). While some commentators upheld the affordable, mass-­

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market comic book as a democratic medium, others were troubled by what they perceived to be the shameless commercialization in these publications, alleging that publishers were more concerned about profit rather than literary and artistic quality (Kline, 103). The public outcry over comic books, however, swelled once critics began linking the texts with immorality (Nyberg, ix). In 1948, the psychiatrist Fredric Wertham organized a symposium titled “The Psychopathology of Comic Books,” in which he declared that comics caused juvenile delinquency and sexual deviance. Soon thereafter, several towns and municipalities passed laws and ordinances to control the sale of comic books, and comic book burnings were held in places such as Spencer, West Virginia; Binghamton, New York; and Cape Girardeau, Missouri. As has been widely documented, Wertham emerged as a leading figure of the anticomics crusade, and his book Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth, published in 1954, further fueled mass hysteria over comic books in the postwar era. In it, Wertham writes, “Why does our civilization give to the child not its best but its worst, in paper, in language, in art, in ideas?” (492). His lamentation appears to express a genuine concern for the well-­being of children, arguing that cultural forms should work to uplift rather than corrupt young people. Yet his comment—and his spirited crusade against the comics—assumes that children are necessarily naïve and vulnerable to the “depravities” of mass media, and that adults inherently possess the knowledge and authority to speak and act on behalf of the young. As Carol Tilley reveals in a 2012 study, Seduction “included numerous falsifications and distortions,” and Wertham “manipulated, overstated, compromised, and fabricated evidence . . . for rhetorical gain” (386). Indeed, some of Wertham’s contemporaries criticized him for his flawed methodology and tendency to make sweeping generalizations. But in the 1950s, many parents, educators, religious leaders, and politicians embraced rather than rejected his claims. Numerous newsstands and drugstores refused to sell comics deemed lurid and harmful to children, and as a result, sales of crime and horror comics plummeted, and the comic book industry as a whole suffered a severe blow. The Comics Magazine Association of America (CMAA) responded by vowing to self-­regulate the contents of its members’ publications. On October 27, 1954, the CMAA released the Comics Code, a list of forty-­one guidelines that defined what storylines, words, and images were suitable and unsuitable for publication. Artists, writers, and editors working in the mainstream comic book industry were compelled to abide by the Code, even though many of them felt it was restrictive and essentially a means of censorship (Nyberg, 129). The Code, however, was not only designed to police adult producers of

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comics. It was also a means for adults to control and “confiscate” a cultural form that young people had claimed as their own. The anticomics movement was an attempt to limit children’s agency, an effort to repudiate “children’s rights to express their wants and preferences within the market” (Kline, 103). Funny animal and superhero comics filled the niche left open by the demise of crime and horror comics. Harvey Comics flooded the market with titles headlined by child characters, such as Little Audrey, Casper the Friendly Ghost, Little Dot, and Richie Rich. For Spiegelman, who was a young boy when the Comics Code was enforced, these post-­Code comics were sanitized, “relatively insipid” fare (Breakdowns). In a section of Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@§*! (1977; unpaginated), he parodies comic books that featured Mickey Mouse, Superman, and Dennis the Menace, labeling them “very nice” and “now with no blood!” as a way of emphasizing their blandness. He represents his accidental encounter with “lurid, truly troubling comics” such as Strange Love, Crime SuspenStories, and Mystery as eye opening, causing him to fall “head over heels into a dangerous adult world of violent, sexually charged images.” In this narrative, Spiegelman implies that post-­Code comics for children, filled with stories in which “good always wins,” are somewhat disingenuous because they tend to withhold “truth” from children. What Spiegelman neglects to acknowledge here is that children’s comics produced after the comic book scare of the 1950s maintained a measure of complexity and even radicalism.2 As Susan Honeyman argues, even as “the Comics Code hindered artists and writers . . . it may have also forced them into more subversive methods of addressing child readers” (191). In her analysis of Sugar and Spike, a comic book series by Sheldon Mayer that ran from 1956 to 1971, Honeyman discusses how Mayer “thematized the importance of escaping restrictions” (188). One of his recurring motifs showed infant characters escaping enclosed spaces (Honeyman, 188–189). Thus, while the Code was meant to make the comic book “safe” for children, it did not necessarily erase subversive messages from the texts. The comic book’s association with childhood may have been exactly what allowed it to develop into a space for interrogation and disruption. As Anna Mae Duane reminds us, peripheral spaces such as childhood can have “an intense sense of freedom and creativity precisely because one’s voice is out of earshot” (1). As a form typically belittled and marginalized because of its link with childhood, comic books, arguably, enable artists, writers, and readers to ask questions and break certain taboos that may not be possible in mainstream cultural forms. As Kimberley Reynolds suggests, texts written for children can be active sites of innovation and sociocultural interrogation because avoid-

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ance of “the cultural spotlight” allows writers to explore “ideas that they feel may not sit comfortably within the literary establishment or other cultural institutions” (16).

RAW: Resisting the Childishness of Comic s While Sugar and Spike demonstrates that post-­Code comics were able to function as sites of resistance, RAW tends to depict traditional comic books for children as devoid of radical, significant messages. In the blurb for the second volume of RAW: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix, for example, children’s comics are dismissed as “superhero escapist fantasies [and] fuzzy funny animal stories” (Spiegelman and Mouly, RAW, vol. 2). RAW’s narratives, on the other hand, are described as “intimate and intense, boiling over with emotional energy, subversive bite, new ideas,” implying that passion, experimentation, and the interrogation of cultural mores are qualities that cannot be found in comics for the young. The cover of RAW’s 1991 issue, drawn by Robert Crumb, similarly dismisses “childish” forms of comics. Crumb’s cover features a man praying to God to save the planet and ensure the demise of Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles (1984–2010). At the time, Kevin Eastman and Peter Laird’s series about crime-­fighting reptiles was at the height of its popularity; a live-­action feature film inspired by the comics had been released the previous year. Crumb’s dismissal of TMNT ignores how Eastman and Laird’s comics were self-­reflexive texts that simultaneously celebrated and mocked superhero narratives. Instead, the RAW cover implies that TMNT, being associated with the “immature” superhero genre, is an insignificant comics series. In drawing a line between children’s comics and “adult” comics, RAW was taking some cues from the underground comix movement, in which Spiegelman began his career. In the 1960s, Spiegelman worked alongside underground comix stalwarts such as Crumb, Trina Robbins, and Kim Deitch (see Rozenkranz). Underground comix clearly rejected the Code; they were filled with images of sex and drug use and often mocked authority figures. These comix were produced outside mainstream channels, either self-­ published or printed by small presses that specialized in pornography and drug magazines. As Spiegelman puts it, the underground movement produced “comics by adults, for adults,” and its artists “smash[ed] formal and stylistic, as well as cultural and political, taboos” (Read Yourself RAW; unpaginated). Underground comix, for Spiegelman, were a welcome signal that “comics were coming of age, achieving a boisterous adolescence, even full

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adulthood.” Coded in his statement is the belief that comics can shed their “low culture” status once they are removed from the sphere of childhood. Spiegelman eventually became disillusioned with the underground comix movement, claiming that many of his peers became satisfied with repeating themes of “Sex, Dope, and Cheap Thrills” (Spiegelman and Mouly, Read Yourself RAW). RAW emerged as a means to see through with the “maturation” of comics. Like underground comix, RAW printed “forbidden” images and themes and circumvented the normal channels through which comics were produced and distributed. RAW was also packaged as a “luxurious” comics magazine (Spiegelman and Mouly, Read Yourself RAW). It was oversized, measuring 10½″ × 14¼″, and printed on quality paper. It was more akin to New Wave magazines such as Interview, Wet, and Slash rather than the traditional comic books printed on newsprint (Heer, 55). The magazine explored topics often assumed to lie outside the experience and understanding of children, such as sex, politics, depression, suicide, and musings about the nature of work and suburban life. RAW, arguably, changed the landscape of comics. For Hillary Chute, the magazine was a venue for Spiegelman to “translate and transvalue an anti-­narrative avant-­garde aesthetic for the popular and populist medium of comics” and to demonstrate that comics were “structurally equipped to challenge dominant modes of storytelling and history writing” (456). Although most comics histories and criticism have focused on Spiegelman’s role in RAW, Jeet Heer has recently shed light on how Mouly’s vision, meticulous editing, and attention to production were crucial to shaping the magazine (79–80). Chris Ware, who was an avid reader of RAW as a teen, remarks, “[It is] really astonishing when you think of the variety of experimentation and genuine expression that was going on in those periodicals” (quoted in Heer, 75). RAW served as a launching pad for many cartoonists, including Ware, Lynda Barry, Charles Burns, and Gary Panter, and introduced European artists such as Joost Swarte and Jacques Tardi to American audiences. Notably, Spiegelman’s critically acclaimed Maus was first serialized in RAW. The first six episodes of Maus were compiled and released as a graphic novel in 1986, and it is often held up as proof that comics can be provocative and effective in exploring “serious” topics. Its commercial success “established a beachhead for ‘graphic novels’ in the book trade” (Hatfield, Alternative, 30). The second volume of Maus, released in 1991, received the Pulitzer Prize, signaling that “lowbrow” comics had gained “highbrow” status. Maus was, arguably, instrumental in helping comics gain cultural as well as academic legitimacy. Through aesthetic experimentation and sharp social-­political commen-

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Figure 7.1. Pascal Doury, “Paul,” RAW: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix, 87. © 1983 Pascal Doury; 1989 RAW Books and Graphics.

tary, RAW broke the conservative restrictions that tended to shape post-­Code comics. Yet even as RAW criticized the Comics Code as a mode of censorship, it did not question the Code’s assumption that children needed to be shielded from particular grown-­up themes. In framing itself as comics for and by adults, RAW supported the Code’s insistence that certain materials should be withheld from children. Paradoxically, while RAW equated “complex” and “serious” themes with adulthood, some of its narratives explicitly depicted childhood and adolescence as times full of perplexities and profundities. In “Paul,” reprinted in the 1989 issue of RAW, Pascal Doury juxtaposes simple verbal statements and frenetic, layered images, representing how (linguistic) conceptualizations of childhood fail to fully describe the actual experiences of children. The caption of the first panel, for example, is a matter-­of-­fact statement: “As a little boy, Paul bicycles behind his father on the week-­end.” This straightforward statement, however, is contradicted by the visual tumult in the panel. Although the image is wordless, it communicates that the weekend ride that Paul and his father are taking is anything but quiet and relaxing. Paul’s father appears harried, flailing his arms and legs so wildly that he appears to have multiple limbs. Paul is wide-­eyed, and a jagged balloon behind his head suggests surprise and anxiety. Most of the panels in “Paul” also feature images of erect penises. While these pictures of phalluses indicate that

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Paul (like other male characters) is easily aroused, the captions make no reference to them, as if asserting the sexual innocence of the young protagonist. In “Teen Plague,” published in the same issue of RAW, Charles Burns likewise depicts children and adolescents as not-­so-­innocent beings. Young Tony Delmonto reads comic books that are full of sexual and violent images; his babysitter, Joyce, and her boyfriend, Jeff, engage in sex. The image of Tony hiding the comic book from adults shows that he is not only keenly aware of the illicit status of comics, but also capable of devising strategies that enable him to keep reading these forbidden books (Burns, 6, 13, 16). These scenes of Tony furtively reading comics remind us how, despite numerous efforts, adults cannot fully monitor and regulate childhood or children’s culture. In fact, the adults in “Teen Plague” appear ignorant of the lives of young people. Tony’s parents, for example, are oblivious of, even indifferent to, the concerns and activities of their son. When Joyce contracts a disease, they make no reference to the fact that she has fallen ill and instead become preoccupied with finding a new babysitter to replace her (25). In this narrative, however, Burns is not entirely sympathetic to young people. For one, while his narrative acknowledges teen sexuality, it also serves as a cautionary tale in which adolescents are punished for being sexually active. The protagonist Tony is depicted as a naïve child, unable to distinguish fact from fiction. After reading “Sweet Sick Teen,” a comic book story about an alien named Kaballa-­Bonga who attempts to take over the planet by spreading a disease through promiscuous teens, Tony believes that the hickey on Joyce’s neck is a sign of an impending alien invasion. Even when it is revealed that both Joyce and Jeff have contracted a sexually transmitted disease, Tony remains adamant that they have fallen victim to Kaballa-­Bonga. Tony’s childishness is emphasized visually and linguistically. His caricaturish round,

Figure 7.2. Charles Burns, “Teen Plague,” RAW: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix, 19. © 1989 C. Burns; 1989 RAW Books and Graphics.

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bald head—in sharp contrast to the mimetic features of other characters— makes him appear like a giant toddler. He is thus nicknamed “Big Baby.” Tony, however, also represents young people’s attempts to negotiate a world in which information is often withheld from them. He is suspicious of adult authority figures, concluding that they participate in cover-­ups because they fear the truth would “creep everyone out” (Burns, 25). Interestingly, the comic book serves as a tool for Tony to challenge the boundary drawn between childhood and adulthood. For Tony, the comic book is the only object that dares to offer the truth. When his teacher confiscates his comic book and dismissively states, “I suppose you think comic books are more important than learning about the human body,” Tony cries out, “It IS important!” (19). He expresses the frustration young people feel when their beliefs and cultural forms are belittled. Just as Spiegelman claims that horror and crime comics granted him entry to the world of adults, Tony’s encounter with “Sweet Sick Teen” provides him a glimpse of a world from which he is shut out.

Little Lit: Alternative Children ’ s Comic s RAW’s campaign to redefine comics as “serious” reading material was part of a shifting comics landscape in which mainstream and alternative presses both sought to build a robust adult readership. The same year that the first volume of Maus was released, DC Comics released Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns as graphic novel compilations. In 1993, DC launched its Vertigo imprint, publishing titles that were, as the label on the covers stated, “Suggested for Mature Readers.” By the 2000s, alternative comics had entered the mainstream (Hatfield, Alternative, 5). Publications such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003, 2004), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (2006), and Ware’s Building Stories (2012) have enjoyed critical and commercial success, carrying on the legacy of Mouly and Spiegelman’s graphic magazine. Over the past two decades, the study of comics has also gained legitimacy in academic circles, largely because scholars, like RAW’s producers, have worked to ignore, even deny, the connections between comics and childhood (Hatfield, “Comics,” 376). But as Naomi Hamer notes, the positive critical reception of graphic novels for adult readers and the steady development of the academic study of comics in the late twentieth and early twenty-­first centuries has, ironically enough, led to a resurgence in comics published for children and adolescents (167). Today’s educators have largely abandoned the view that comics disrupt learning. Whereas in the mid-­ twentieth century, comics were denounced as detrimental to the development of literacy, educators now claim that “comics and graphic novels can help

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your kids love to read!” (Jaffe; unpaginated). This prizing of comics as a pedagogical tool is certainly linked to recent trends in education that focus on “empower[ing] 21st century learners” to become more adept at interpreting visual and digital media (Jaffe). But the larger cultural acceptance of comics has undoubtedly allowed these visual-­verbal texts to be embraced as literacy tools for the young. The Little Lit series was launched during this period of reclaiming comics for children. As Spiegelman puts it, the series was also meant to atone for RAW’s perpetuation of a derisive view of children’s comics: There’s a new vacuum that was coming along in the wake of our having the tagline “Comics are not just for kids anymore” at the very beginnings of RAW. [We went] “Wait, wait! They’re for kids, also!” It’s not supposed to be just some kind of rarified adult world . . . We said, “Let’s do some all ages version for younger people of what RAW was and just get the best artists we can to do the best work they can. The parameters would be that the results wouldn’t be out of reach of the younger readers, but not so tedious that the adult would find no pleasure in it. (Irving)

Little Lit is shaped by sensibilities similar to those that formed RAW. The Little Lit books, like RAW titles, are oversized comics printed on quality paper. Many of its contributors are RAW alumni. While the Little Lit series pre­sents itself as “new” comics for children, it also commemorates older comics formats. The sturdy binding of Little Lit is a throwback to the comics albums that Mouly read as a young girl in France (Heer, 17). In “The Adventures of Art Aimesworth, Crime Fighting Boy Buckaroo,” which appears in the volume It Was a Dark and Silly Night, William Joyce not only re-­creates the appearance of early-­twentieth-­century comic supplements but also alludes to Harry Grant Dart’s The Explorigator, a short-­ lived comic strip series that ran in the New York World in 1908. The covers of the three Little Lit volumes show characters reading newspaper comic supplements and traditional comic books. Yet for the implied twenty-­first-­century child reader, these formats are likely unfamiliar, even archaic. While Little Lit cultivates a sense of nostalgia for supplements and comic books, it also resists these forms, presenting itself as an alternative, even loftier form of comics. In fact, each Little Lit volume, with its hardbound cover, sturdy binding, and heavyweight matte paper, resembles a quality children’s picture book more than a “disposable” comic book. The series also subscribes to the same ideology that shapes picture books. In a recent symposium on the similari-

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ties and differences between comics and picture books, Charles Hatfield and Craig Svonkin summarize the conclusions made by several children’s literature scholars: even though picture books and comics share certain formal traits, they operate under “different ideological frameworks: picture books are generally seen as empowering young readers to take part in a social structure that prizes official literacy, while comics, in contrast, are often seen as fugitive reading competing with or even obstructing that literacy” (431). As op de Beeck puts it, “Comics retains its ‘seduction of the innocent’ status whereas well-­behaved picture books participate in the socially acceptable indoctrination of the innocent” (476). But this characterization of comic books as “fugitive” texts may not apply to children’s comics published in the twenty-­ first century. In the post-­RAW era, comics for young readers, such as Little Lit, tend to be highly mediated by adults. Understood as effective pedagogical tools, these comics are given the seal of adult approval. Thus, they may have shed some of what op de Beeck calls their “countercultural function” (476).3 Of course, one can argue that Little Lit subverts the “crass” commercialism of the traditional comic book. The stories in Little Lit are self-­contained and do not overtly instruct the reader to wait for—and purchase—the next installment. Packaged as quality books, the series rejects the image of comics as objects to be quickly consumed and discarded. The advertisements and promotional features that appear in traditional comic books are also absent in Little Lit. The series, in other words, removes features that promote consumerism. But as discussed above, the commercial aspects of mass-­market comics are what allowed children to exercise autonomy, gain a sense of community, and shape narratives in cooperation with adults. In doing away with the participatory features of traditional comics, Little Lit employs a top-­down approach in which adult producers deem what sort of content is fit for children. Moreover, in opposing the commercialism of mass-­market comic books, the series implicitly envisions children as vulnerable readers who can be easily victimized by marketing ploys. That said, some of the narratives in Little Lit challenge the notion that content for children should be “proper” and “safe,” forcing readers to confront and reassess their beliefs about age-­appropriateness. The title of Maurice Sendak’s contribution, “Cereal Baby Keller,” could strike some readers as making a troubling pun, for it conjures the image of infanticide. The titular character is a ravenous infant who indiscriminately gulps down food and various objects. When he falls asleep, he dreams about gobbling down live animals as well as his parents. Baby Keller is reminiscent of Max, the protagonist of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are, who yells, “I’ll eat you up!” to his mother. But while Max is tamed at the end of Wild Things, shedding his wolf suit and

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Figure 7.3. Maurice Sendak, “Cereal Baby Keller,” Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, 11. © 2000, 2001, 2003, RAW Junior LLC.

presumably consuming hot soup instead of his mother’s flesh, Baby Keller’s hunger is not necessarily satiated at the end of “Cereal Baby Keller.” His parents, unaware of his fantasies of cannibalism, are unable to reform him. Instead, they gaze at their sleeping child and declare, “What a swell kid! Precious!” (Sendak, 91). The narrative exposes adults’ ignorance of, and tendency to deny, children’s dreams and desires. The fairy tale retellings in Little Lit also challenge adults’ impulse to sanitize stories for children. Daniel Clowes narrates part of the Sleeping Beauty fairy tale that has been excised from most retellings, depicting the events that unfold “after ‘they lived happily ever after’ ” (115). After marrying Sleeping Beauty, the young king returns to his kingdom. He finds it necessary to protect his wife and their children from his mother, who is descended from “the race of ogres” (115). When the king rides off to battle, the ogress instructs the cook to serve the children and the young queen for dinner. The cook manages to trick her, and the king’s family goes into hiding. The ogress eventually discovers the deception and orders the cook, the queen, and the children to be thrown into a vat teeming with vipers, toads, and serpents. But when the king returns unexpectedly, the panicked ogress throws herself into the vat and dies. Clowes’s retelling, with its references to murder, suicide, and the consumption of human flesh, disrupts the common notion that children’s narratives must be untainted by images of violence and death. The last panel also withholds a happy, fairy-­tale ending from its readers. While the caption states that the young king “comforted himself with his wife and children, and, in time, happiness was theirs,” the royal family gazes at the reader with severe, joyless expressions, suggesting there is no comforting, jubilant conclusion to this story (119). Overall, Little Lit questions reductive constructions of childhood while also maintaining a diminutive view of childhood and children’s culture. Examining Little Lit reminds us of the complicated relationship between adult

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Figure 7. 4. Jules Feiffer, “Trapped in a Comic Book,” Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids, 29. © Jules Feiffer; 2000, 2001, 2003, RAW Junior LLC.

producers and child readers, of how comic books are sites in which children and adults reinforce and contest cultural constructions of childhood. Jules Feiffer’s contribution, “Trapped in a Comic Book,” encapsulates Little Lit’s ambivalent stance toward children and children’s comics. In Feiffer’s strip, a young boy intrudes on a cartoonist’s work and makes suggestions for plot changes. “Normal kids like me are the ones who read his stuff,” the boy says, “so shouldn’t he want to know what I think?” (76). Unlike comic book creators who openly solicited ideas from their child readers, the cartoonist in “Trapped” is peeved by the boy’s recommendations. He punishes the boy by instructing him to “look very close” at the page he is drawing (77). The boy then “fall[s] in” and finds himself “totally inside this picture” (78). Trapped inside a superhero narrative, the boy concludes that such comics are “evil, stupid, boring puke” (79). His imprisonment is a figurative denunciation of child readers and traditional comics (particularly the superhero genre), suggesting that children are indiscriminate readers who are easily ensnared by “insipid” texts.

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But the boy is able to escape this comic book trap. He is not completely sucked into its world. Remaining visually distinct from an environment shaded with Benday dots, he is able to break through the panel borders. Ultimately, the boy manages to redirect the plot of the superhero comic book: he flees the fighting scenes and turns the story’s focus on himself. The strip implies that the child reader is capable of escaping the prison of adult-­mediated comics, demonstrating how the “trapped” child is still able to exercise some resistance. The narrative reminds us that while adults constantly attempt to regulate and define children and their culture, children test and even evade the borders set up by adults.

Notes 1. Although limited space prevents me from discussing TOON Books here, it is worth noting that its publications may be not-­so-­radical texts, since they are intentionally designed as pedagogical tools and are vetted by educational and literary experts. 2. In “In the Minority: Constructions of American Dream Childhood in 1950s–­Early 1960s Little Audrey Comics,” chapter three in this anthology, Christopher J. Hayton and Janardana D. Hayton argue that the comic book series Little Audrey actively promoted gender and racial equality, thus contesting Spiegelman’s characterization of post-­Code comics as lackluster and insubstantial. 3. An important exception is Dav Pilkey’s Captain Underpants and Super Diaper Baby books. The books, which trade on scatological humor and portray adults as buffoons, are often on the list of the American Library Association’s “most challenged books.” In the series, the two main characters, George and Harold, create comic books that explicitly mock adults and adults’ attempts to control children.

Works Cited Burns, Charles. “Teen Plague.” In Spiegelman and Mouly, RAW: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix, 5–25. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123, no. 2 (2008): 452–465. Clowes, Daniel. “The Sleeping Beauty.” In Spiegelman and Mouly, Big Fat Little Lit, 115–119. Doury, Pascal. “Paul.” In Spiegelman and Mouly, RAW: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix, 87–114. Duane, Anna Mae. Introduction to The Children’s Table: Childhood Studies and the Humanities, edited by Anna Mae Duane, 1–14. Athens: University of Georgia Press, 2013. Feiffer, Jules. “Trapped in a Comic Book.” In Spiegelman and Mouly, Big Fat Little Lit, 75–80. Gordon, Ian. Comic Strips and Consumer Culture, 1890–1945. Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1998. Hamer, Naomi. “Jumping on the ‘Comics for Kids’ Bandwagon.” Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures 5, no. 2 (2013): 165–187.

146  L ara Saguisag Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. ———. “Comics, Children’s Literature, and the New Comic Studies.” Lion and the Unicorn 30, no. 3 (2006): 360–382. Hatfield, Charles, and Craig Svonkin. “Why Comics Are and Are Not Picture Books: Introduction.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2012): 429–435. Heer, Jeet. In Love with Art: Françoise Mouly’s Adventures in Comics with Art Spiegelman. Toronto: Coach House, 2013. Higonnet, Anne. Pictures of Innocence: The History and Crisis of Ideal Childhood. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1998. Honeyman, Susan. “Escaping the Prison-­House: Visualcy and Prelanguage in Sheldon Mayer’s Sugar and Spike.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 39, no. 2 (2014): 187–215. Irving, Christopher. “Art Spiegelman: Still Movin’ with Comix.” Graphic NYC, November 17, 2010, www.nycgraphicnovelists.com/2010/11/art-­spiegelman-­still-­movin-­with-­comix .html. Jaffe, Meryl. Raising a Reader! How Comics and Graphic Novels Can Help Your Kids Love to Read! New York: Comic Book Legal Defense Fund, 2014. Kline, Stephen. Out of the Garden: Toys and Children’s Culture in the Age of TV Marketing. London: Verso, 1993. Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004. Nyberg, Amy Kiste. Seal of Approval: The History of the Comics Code. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1998. op de Beeck, Nathalie. “On Comics-­Style Picture Books and Picture-­Bookish Comics.” Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 37, no. 4 (2012): 468–476. Pustz, Matthew. Comic Book Culture: Fanboys and True Believers. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1999. Qvortrup, Jens. “Childhood Matters: An Introduction.” In Childhood Matters: Social Theory, Practice, and Politics, edited by Jens Qvortrup, Marjatta Bardy, Giovanni Sgritta and Helmut Wintersberger, 1–24. Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1994. Reynolds, Kimberley. Radical Children’s Literature: Future Visions and Aesthetic Transformations in Juvenile Fiction. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2010. Rosenkranz, Patrick. Rebel Visions: The Underground Comix Revolution. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2008. Sabin, Roger. Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art. London: Phaidon, 1996. Sanders, Joe Sutliff. “Chaperoning Word: Meaning-­Making in Comics and Picture Books.” Children’s Literature 41 (2013): 57–90. Sendak, Maurice. “Cereal Baby Keller.” In Spiegelman and Mouly, Big Fat Little Lit, 90–91. Spiegelman, Art. Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@§*! New York: Pantheon, 2008; orig. pub. 1977. ———. Co-­Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics, and Scraps. Edited by Tom Devlin, Jeet Heer, and Chris Oliveros. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2013. Spiegelman, Art, and Françoise Mouly, eds. Big Fat Little Lit. New York: Puffin, 2006. ———. Little Lit: Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies. New York: Joanna Cotler, 2000. ———. Little Lit: It Was a Dark and Silly Night. New York: Joanna Cotler, 2003.

RAW and Little Lit   147 ———. Little Lit: Strange Stories for Strange Kids. New York: Joanna Cotler, 2001. ———. RAW: Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Commix. New York: Penguin, 1989. ———. Read Yourself RAW. New York: Pantheon, 1987. Spiegelman, Art, and Maurice Sendak. “In the Dumps.” New Yorker, September 27, 1993, 80. Tilley, Carol L. “Seducing the Innocent: Fredric Wertham and the Falsifications that Helped Condemn Comics.” Information and Culture 47, no. 4 (2012): 383–413. Uprichard, Emma. “Children as ‘Being and Becomings’: Children, Childhood, and Temporality.” Children and Society 22, no. 4 (2008): 303–313. Wertham, Fredric. “Such Trivia as Comic Books.” In Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today’s Youth. New York: Rinehart, 1954. Reprinted in The Children’s Culture Reader, edited by Henry Jenkins, 486–492. New York: New York University Press, 1998. Wright, Bradford. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Chapter 8

Lolicon: Adolescent Fetishization in Osamu Tezuka ’ s Ayako James G. Nobis

Lolicon, the sexualization of female adolescents, is a phenomenon that suffuses Japanese culture and media. Nowhere has this cultural fixation been more pronounced than in Japanese manga. Lolicon fetishization, however, was not formed in a vacuum but rather developed within manga specifically as a response to the zeitgeist of postwar Japan. It is because of this that manga pre­sents as a particularly well-­suited lens for looking into the Japanese cultural phenomenon of lolicon fetishization. Though there is no shortage of manga titles from which to choose—lolicon is ubiquitous in manga—it is important to study it like a cultural artifact: with its inception and reception. The former will allow us to understand this phenomenon as a reflection of society when we take into consideration the events that shape and define it by reading it in the context in which it was formed. The focus here rests on the work of the “father” of modern manga, Osamu Tezuka, and in particular his seminal work Ayako. What is most salient about Tezuka’s Ayako is how emblematic it is for understanding how the visual semiotic choices used by Tezuka create a relationship between the characters and the reader, and through this relationship, how they reinforce the phenomenon of lolicon. In examining the reception of this cultural artifact, we need to identify the cultural clues that help establish the narrative involved in the use of lolicon in Japanese culture. To uncover these cultural signifiers—and in an effort to interpret some of the interpersonal relationships formed by the use of lolicon imagery—a forensics tool kit of sorts is used for uncovering the lolicon narrative. In this undertaking, methodology is centered on the analysis of visual classification based on Gunther Kress and Theo van Leeuwen’s Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. Using their framework, I carried out a visual analysis on the 666 found depictions, or visual occurrences, of the title character and leading protagonist, Ayako, found in the 1996 edition of Ayako published by Kadokawa

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Shoten; ultimately this investigation shows lolicon to be a defining feature of this manga. A common perception of manga is that they are basically comic books; however, where manga and comic books differ is their place and prevalence in society. For example, despite a growing reach in recent years, comic books are considered a niche market in the West (Meskin and Cook), whereas manga cross audience age boundaries and act as a type of “meta media” in which “they are read by nearly all ages and classes of people,” and “references to them permeate Japanese intellectual life at the highest levels” (Schodt, 21). Still, it was not until after World War II that the emergence of manga as a socially important medium came into form (Schodt, 42; Power, 26) as Japan’s defeat was felt at every level of society, and people needed pause from this dark reality (Rosenbaum, 41). Manga, therefore, filled the role of entertainer, and small publishers inundated the market with science fiction, enduring characters, and uplifting stories of overcoming hardships. In the midst of this surge in popularity, the young medical student Osamu Tezuka emerged, an artist who would ultimately help reinvent the entire manga market. Tezuka, the son of progressive, upper-­middle-­class parents, lived his life during the Showa era—the period of Emperor Hirohito’s rule (1926–1989). The tumultuous and fluctuating nature of the times, which witnessed massive industrialization and militarization, helped instill within him a repulsion toward war and nationalism—an underlying theme found in the bulk of his titles (Palmer, 173; Whaley, 96). Giving up a career in medicine, Tezuka went into the low-­paid work of creating manga; undeterred by the hardships, he quickly rose to fame. Tezuka used a creative layout that was new to the medium, employing frames to mimic the flow of movies, and sound effects to establish mood. The manga so resembled a movie that readers were often quoted as saying they believed they were watching a movie instead of reading manga (Power, 40). His real, fallible characters also help establish a connection with readers: “Tezuka’s heroes were not two-­dimensional but complex and flawed: sometimes they did the wrong, not right, thing; sometimes they died” (Schodt, 237). During the 1970s and ’80s, Tezuka’s antiwar and antiracist sentiments were particularly evident in the work he produced. It was considered by some to be a dark period in which his work focused on mature historical (rekishi) or contemporary ( gendai) themes, and in which his accounts functioned as ideological satire of the discord prevalent in these times (Ishiko, 133–134). His works acted as reflections of contemporary Japanese identity as they brought into focus the oppression of dissident voices and the discontent with the emerging liberal economics of the postwar period, all of which

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remained hidden within the positive narrative of the Showa era (Whaley, 14; Vollmar, 19). Tezuka’s work during his dark period fully meets the self-­imposed moral requirement that is typical of this later work. His manga during this period are identified as “humanist” and “moralist,” since they “captur[ed] the allure of the dark and the evil while also celebrating the good and the moral” (Power, 103). They are also culturally introspective, and can be seen as a “narrative biopsy” in which each manga is a layer of the Japanese culture (Vollmar, 14). Yet none of Tezuka’s manga examines or criticizes postwar Japan as directly as Ayako. Rob Vollmar points this out when he writes of Ayako’s family, explaining that “the Tenge family becomes a metonymy for the whole of Japan as its various members occupy different archetypes within the transforming culture” (14). First serialized from 1972 to 1973 in the publication Big Comic, Ayako is a dramatic commentary on society in postwar Japan. The story revolves around the life of Ayako, the illegitimate, youngest daughter of the already immoral Tenge family—a family pushed into further wrongdoing by pressure from the redistribution policies put in place by the American occupational government. Ayako’s plight begins when Jiro, her older brother and a spy for the occupying US government, is selected to undercut a budding leftist movement by disposing of their leader. Unfortunately, the young Ayako inadvertently learns about his involvement and unwittingly offers insight into a police investigation on the murder. Ayako’s family, afraid of the repercussions of Jiro’s actions on their family name and authority in their rural community, lock Ayako in a storeroom and keep her there for over twenty years. During her imprisonment, she grows into an attractive young woman with the innocence of a child; her early confinement and eventual freedom become a symbol of postwar Japan. According to the website Tezuka in English, “Tezuka uses Ayako herself as an allegory for Japan’s social woes. On the one hand, she is an innocent, despite her scandalous origins, and her suffering and degradation parallels that of society” (“Ayako [Manga]”). These parallels mirrored Japanese society in the sense that in the postwar period, Japan undertook a large labor-­commodification project by strengthening unions while allowing rampant monopolism and awarding massive government subsidies to the corporate sector. The shift, which was more than just economic, represented a huge move to a consumer culture that swelled to massive proportions until the economic crises of the 1990s. This consumer culture has confined the Japanese spirit, much as Ayako’s physical confinement does, and her innocence can be read as a mirror of Japan’s exchange of the spiritual for the material. It was in

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this societal shift toward the materialism of consumer culture that the lolicon phenomenon found its early footing. The Lolita complex, or lolicon, is the infatuation with and idealization of cuteness in depictions of young girls (Shigematsu), and is a pervasive characteristic of Japanese society today (Naitō; Miller; Takatsuki). Evolving from the zeitgeist of postwar Japan and the heightened importance of consumerism in society, the dominant school of thought in the postwar period was one of carnality. Douglas Slaymaker characterizes this zeitgeist as one of “nikutai bungaku,” or “literature of the flesh,” which was prevalent among the postwar writers who “stressed eroticism and the physical body in [their] use of nikutai (the carnal body) by highlighting the personal and concrete against the abstractions of the wartime seishin (spirit)” (78). The catalyst for this intellectual fashion evolved directly from Japan’s defeat in World War II, specifically, the spiritual demise of Japan resulting from the loss of a national structure based on a divine emperor, who ceded this status after the defeat (Tsurumi, 21). In essence, the desires of the Japanese cultural spirit were subsumed by the carnal needs of the Japanese body. It was also around this time that the surging Japanese economy fostered widespread consumerism in Japan (Iida, 95), which contributed to the “young girl,” or “shōjo,” becoming “a dominant image in the media, representing consumptive pleasure suspended from productive functions” (Galbraith, 86). As Japanese society became more obsessed with consumerism, marketers pushed a “distorted and delusional set of myths about girls’ sexuality” in order to increase profits (Durham, 12). Discussing this time in Japan, John Whittier Treat comments, “Magazines, radio, above all television: in whatever direction one turns, the barely (and thus ambiguously) pubescent woman is there both to promote products and purchase them, to excite the consumer and herself be thrilled by the flurry of goods and services that circulate like toys around her” (361). This carnal atmosphere of postwar Japan moved from the literary world to the marketplace, including manga. During this time, manga was a popular, cheap form of entertainment not specified for any one age group (Schodt; Power). To attract adult readers, creators of manga incorporated sex, violence, and the now-­ubiquitous lolicon into their work (Galbraith, 93). Galbraith observes, “There was little resistance to putting youthful characters into sexual and violent situations, or showing images of such characters to children as well as adults” (93). From this point forward, lolicon became a common fixture on the pages of manga (Shigematsu, 129). In establishing a case for the prevalence of lolicon in Japanese culture, Kress

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and van Leeuwen’s Reading Images is a powerful interpretive tool, especially for examining manga as a genre. Building on the work of the linguist Michael Halliday (for example, his Introduction to Functional Grammar), Kress and van Leeuwen adapted and interpreted his work to “apply to all semiotic modes, and not specific[ally] to speech or writing” (42). They contend that images are pervasive, distinct messages where text can be inessential to potential meaning: “We take the view that language and visual communication can both be used to realize the ‘same’ fundamental systems of meaning that constitute our cultures, but that each does so by means of its own specific forms, does so differently, and independently” (17–18; emphasis added). Given this adaptability to all creative works, Kress and van Leeuwen’s interpretive framework is especially productive in revealing the interactive relations and social strata between interactants. Furthermore, the framework reveals specifically how image cues can help identify these relational and social functions through what Kress and van Leeuwen term “interpersonal functionality.” To perceive the interpersonal function visually, Kress and van Leeuwen first distinguish between two interpersonal systems: interpersonal features in which certain interactions take place between the image maker, the represented image, and the receiver of the sign(s); and the occurrence of modality understood as the use of visual markers, that is, pictorial executions such as color and depth, to advance certain realities and illustrate how the world is or should be represented (114–174). To obtain the first interpersonal meaning within the visual realm, Kress and van Leeuwen formulate four features of spatial positions to help articulate and understand the relationships found in any image act: image act and gaze, social distance and intimacy, involvement and horizontal angle, and power and vertical angle.1 The first meaning feature, image act and gaze, is an interaction in which the “represented participant directly addresses the viewer and establishes an imaginary relation with them” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 89). That is, they visually establish direct contact with the viewer-­reader in the form of a demand, and do so through vectors (gaze) that directly address the viewer. In addition, the represented participants can be shown in the form of an offer, as though the viewer is disengaged from the scene. In this instance, the image “ ‘offers’ the represented participants to the viewer as items of information, objects of contemplation, impersonally, as though they were specimens in a display case” (119). Considering the narrative nature of manga, it is primarily through the “offer” that the image act is understood. Applying this analysis of the offer within Ayako, of the 666 interactive features depicting her character, analysis shows that 94.9 percent of all depictions

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Figure 8.1. Demand image of Ayako. Osamu Tezuka, Ayako, 1:337. © 1973 Tezuka Productions.

of Ayako are offers, and only 5.1 percent are direct demands—gazes that address the reader. That is, the majority of occurrences show her, whether sexualized or not, as the “object of the viewer’s dispassionate scrutiny” (Kress and van Leeuwen 119), instances in which we have a detached relationship with her. When looking at other characters in the story, the same holds true. The only other character with a higher percentage of demand images is Sakuemon, Ayako’s father, at 7.3 percent. But considering the relatively low number of occurrences, and his portrayal as a “lecherous bully” (Vollmar, 14–17), in which face-­to-­face visual confrontation is expected, this number is not surprising. Overall, our role within the story is one of an onlooker permitted to watch, without having much direct interaction. Despite this, demand images, when used, have a specific purpose such as enhancing an emotional effect. By drawing Ayako directly looking at the reader, Tezuka creates an imaginary connection between her and the reader, revealing her emotions and thus helping establish atmosphere and mood— and enhancing the phenomenon of lolicon. An example of this type of demand image can be seen in chapter 12 when a nude Ayako, still imprisoned as a teenager, attempts to seduce her older brother Shiro. In this panel, reproduced above, she stands at an oblique angle, directly gazing at the reader (Tezuka, 1:337). The direct address “acknowledges the viewers explicitly, addressing them with a visual ‘you’” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 117).

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During Ayako’s teenage years, Tezuka uses the demand primarily for instances when emotional impact is greatest, as when Ayako is afraid or sexually expressive. Moreover, the impact of the demand is strengthened when it comes to lolicon. There are fifty sexualized images of Ayako from her teenage years. Of these, four, or 8 percent, show Ayako directly addressing the reader, establishing a connection with him or her. In comparison, there are seventy-­ four sexualized images of Ayako from adulthood, but only two, or 2.7 percent, incorporate the demand feature. Though these moments of direct address are not common, they act to capture the reader’s attention during sexual moments in the narrative. As mentioned, this manga is primarily a voyeuristic narrative because of its reliance on the offer. Tezuka’s use of this device during sexual moments shows the importance placed on this particular discourse within the story. In addition, it is clear from these findings that Tezuka implements the binding device of direct demand in instances of Ayako as a teenager despite more opportunities to incorporate the demand when Ayako is in her mid to late twenties. This emphasis on adolescent sexuality over adult sexuality helps propel the lolicon discourse in this manga. Principally, the relationship this image act creates strengthens the emotional bond between the reader and adolescent Ayako. Furthermore, since the images are sexualized, they impart a sexual tenor to the relationship between the reader and the manga’s protagonist. The second meaning feature is social distance and intimacy. The distance from which the represented participant is depicted within the panel determines the impact of this feature. Concerning Ayako, the implied ability to touch her within this manga allows for an intimate relation with her as well as the potential for the reader to share her experiences. Of the 666 images studied, Ayako is depicted within reach of the viewer 105 more times than when she is shown out of reach. In lolicon terms, close representation of her sexualized depictions work to increase the bond between her and the reader. For example, during a scene of Ayako attempting to seduce another one of her brothers, Tezuka pans into the scene frame by frame to bring the reader closer to the characters’ emotional experience (Tezuka, 2:175). The reader is forced to zero in on Ayako and to bring into focus her facial and body expressions. This results in the reader’s better understanding of her feelings, which in this case are sensual. Principally, this reduced proximity highlights Ayako’s carnal emotions, bringing the sexualized version of her to the forefront of the reader’s attention. As Kress and van Leeuwen suggest, the shorter the distance between participants, the closer their social relationship, and vice versa (124). A reduction of space between the reader and sensual Ayako, then, amplifies the lolicon link of this manga.

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Perhaps because of the nature of storytelling using manga, the other characters in the story are portrayed similarly; they are presented up close much of the time. The atmosphere and feeling of the characters are more easily shown when depictions of characters are represented in proximity, close enough for the reader to gauge the characters’ feelings through visual attributes. In discussing this, Kinko Ito argues that communication in manga relies on “contextual cues such as facial expressions, gestures, eye glances, length and timing of silence, tone of voice, and grunts all of which can be expressed in manga very eloquently” (Ito, 457). Examples of contextual cues from Ayako’s expressions are found throughout the book, as when she shows negative emotion such as misery and fear. In the last chapter, Tezuka shows Ayako grieving the death of her brother Shiro, and the sequence of panels begins with a face shot of Ayako, in which we can see her emotion through her downcast eyes and tears; the next panel shows a close-­up of Ayako’s hand gently touching the top of Shiro’s hand. Finally, the sequence returns to Ayako’s face, her eyes now closed and face full of tears (Tezuka, 2:329). Had Tezuka chosen to depict this scene at a more impersonal distance, much of the emotional power would have been lost through the detachment between the character and reader. Looking at personal distance over three age periods, we find that, despite fewer total occurrences, Ayako is depicted up close as an adolescent considerably more often than when she is a child or adult. In addition, during her adolescent years, of the 114 occurrences of personal distance, 46, or 40.3 percent, are sexualized. This is in contrast to Ayako’s adulthood, when 54 out of 185 depictions, or 29.1 percent, are sexualized. Since a lack of distance can be interpreted as a stronger personal relationship, this difference of distance in sexualized occurrences is significant. Perhaps the most significant example of distance in sexualized images can be seen in the following comparison of the two attempts at sexual violation. The first attempt takes place over five panels in chapter 14. Ayako is in the cellar, where she has been locked away for approximately ten years. The family doctor sneaks down on the pretense of inquiring about her health; but once with Ayako, he attempts to rape her (Tezuka, 2:35–36). This first violation is stopped by Shiro, Ayako’s older brother. During this scene, as well as in the previous and following scenes, all of the depictions of Ayako are drawn up close, as though the reader were in the cellar with the doctor. A second attempted rape scene, also shown over five panels, takes place when she is an adult, in chapter 17. At this point, Ayako is free from her cellar prison and living a somewhat conventional life with a boyfriend and a house. During this rape attempt, Ayako is attacked by one of her older brother’s lackeys, who breaks into her house. Again, she is saved, this time by her boyfriend’s father

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(2:217–218). Tezuka shows this second situation from a public distance, which is “the distance between people who are and are to remain strangers” (Kress and van Leeuwen, 125). The difference between these two scenes can be identified by comparing the nature of the social distance depicted. Tezuka shows the first incident from an intimate perspective, allowing the reader close access to the unfolding horror. In the second incident, Tezuka puts great distance between Ayako and the reader, weakening both the emotional effect and the reader’s connection with the scene. This is a clear example of Tezuka showing a preference for establishing an emotional connection between teenage Ayako and the reader, which bolsters this manga’s connection with the sexualization of young girls in the pervasive lolicon culture. In addition to image act and gaze, as well as social distance and intimacy, modality is crucial to the visual analysis. Modality uses pictorial effects such as depth and color to advance certain realities about the world and to show how the world is or should be represented. Within Ayako, Tezuka uses visual cues, to great effect, for imparting meaning to the reader and especially for reinforcing adolescent sexualization. Tezuka differentiates little between sexualized images of Ayako as a teenager (lolicon images) and images of her as an adult (as opposed to the sharp distinction between sexualized and nonsexualized images), and for the most part does not deviate from the established traditional manga panel archetype of static imagery. But in a few instances he uses visual tricks within the manga to interact with the reader. Though not related to lolicon but mentioned here for comparative reasons, Tezuka often uses visual cues such as those used in film to imply a character’s emotion. For example, over the course of six panels in chapter 4, Jiro realizes that the family maid will not keep secret the wrongs of his past. In the fifth panel, Jiro directly addresses the reader at a personal distance. But in the sixth panel, Tezuka zooms in close and slightly shifts Jiro’s abstract caricature toward a more realistic representation emphasizing the seriousness of his emotions (Tezuka, 1:119). It is this modal shift in realism that works interpersonally for the reader. By altering the modality of this panel, Tezuka allows a clearer window into the feelings and emotions of the character, which enhances the reader’s emotional experience in regard to the character and to the direction of the narrative. This device was also used within the sexualized (lolicon) images of Ayako. But instead of shifting to a more realistic portrayal, Tezuka represents the actual act of sex abstractly. Though there are several instances of Ayako in sexual situations, there are only three instances of Ayako actually engaging in sexual intercourse: two take place while Ayako is a teenager, and one as an

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adult. The fact that two of the three take place when she is a teenager cannot be overlooked. Nevertheless, Tezuka does not always show Ayako and her sexual partner involved in sex, but instead alters the visual cues to a point of abstraction in order to imply that sex is happening. For example, in one incident of Ayako having sex as a teenager, in chapter 12, the background is altered to complete black, and the only context cue is a ladder, which appears to be a cutout, poster-­edged version. Ayako and her partner are blurred into one form; only the illumination from an unspecified source helps distinguish their bodies. Perspective is also indeterminate. The abstract images lose depth entirely and instead appear to be composed as flat, planar compositions built in layers (Tezuka, 1:340). The second example as a teenager, in chapter 13, shows several panels of only the gate to Ayako’s cellar cell floating in space. The other two panels show Ayako and her partner embracing and also floating in space. The background for all panels is again predominately black, with abstract accentuations that solarize the participants or set them aglow (2:4). The final example, found in chapter 17, takes place when Ayako is an adult, and it shows the greatest amount of abstraction. As in the first two examples, the background context is greatly reduced. Additionally, though the image is difficult to discern, it appears as though we have panned out and are watching a sunset or sunrise. The exclamatory text bubble represents the sexual act between Ayako and her partner (2:165). As seen in these descriptions and figures, the sexual scenes and depictions of Ayako vary in levels of abstraction. In the three cases above, the high level of abstraction has significance for the meaning potential of the story in two ways. In one sense, it helps with narration, since the abstraction suggests something metaphysical residing in Ayako’s mind—as though the act of sex is “transporting” or “freeing” her mind from her life in the cellar. The ladder in the first teenage example supports this idea: it is moved to the foreground and sharply contrasted with the black background, which increases its importance. The ladder acts as a symbol of Ayako’s mental escape; it implies she has the ability to “climb” to freedom. The distorted and unhinged gate in the second teenage example also acts to underline this concept, since in reality it was securely in place. Here it has been completely removed, allowing Ayako to “rise” to freedom. The third example, from Ayako’s adult life, does not include any essential visual elements that guide a reader narratively; Ayako, her partner, and their surroundings have been abandoned for what appears to be an image of the horizon. This extreme increase in abstraction brings us to the second way in which abstraction conveys meaning, and this directly connects with the phenomenon of lolicon in this story.

Figure 8.2. (left) First occurrence as a teenager. Osamu Tezuka, Ayako, 1:340. © 1973 Tezuka Productions. Figure 8.3. (right) Second occurrence as a teenager. Osamu Tezuka, Ayako, 2:4. © 1973 Tezuka Productions.

Figure 8. 4. Only occurrence as an adult. Osamu Tezuka, Ayako, 2:165. © 1973 Tezuka Productions.

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In the example from Ayako’s adult life, the shift to abstraction is increased beyond the point of supplying essential visual elements for the narrative— without context from previous panels, the reader would not know what was taking place. Therefore, this extreme abstraction further removes the reader, though not completely, from the idea that Ayako is engaging in sexual intercourse. In contrast, the abstraction in the teenage examples is an exercise in simplification—an act of “stripping down an image to its essential ‘meaning’” (McCloud, 30). Scott McCloud writes, “By de-­emphasizing the appearance of the physical world in favor of the idea of form, the cartoon places itself in the world of concepts” (41; emphasis added). That is, this disassembling of reality, while still visually describing the act within the scene, aids in signifying the mental concept of the image. In the two scenes from Ayako’s teenage years, the concepts of Ayako being sexually active and having sex are significantly intensified for the reader, since depiction rests at the point of the highest use of modality; whereas for the overly abstracted adult example, the reader is distanced from Ayako’s sexual act. That is, Tezuka overabstracts the concept of Ayako having sex, and therefore the illustration goes beyond simplification and ceases to narrate Ayako engaging in sex. This differentiation in degrees of abstraction between Ayako the adolescent and Ayako the adult point to the lolicon phenomenon: her teenage acts of sex, as atypical, are made explicit. This enforces the carnality of the moment while also relaying both a mental escape and a loss of innocence of Ayako. In contrast, the portrayal of Ayako’s adult sexual experience is hidden and obscured from the reader, since it is a typical act between two consenting adults and is thus perhaps mundane and unworthy of portrayal. It is in this that Ayako exposes most clearly the reflection of the Japanese cultural narrative: carnality and materialism embodied in the innocence of adolescence. Considering the entirety of the above interpersonal analysis, it is clear that Tezuka implements interactive features in his depiction of Ayako that help promote the phenomenon of lolicon. Ayako is illustrated directly addressing the reader with her eyes, and there is a greater presence of this address when the depiction is a lolicon image as opposed to a sexualized image from adulthood. The distance that Tezuka places Ayako from the reader also advances the idea of lolicon. He chooses to depict Ayako up close when she is around the age of fifteen considerably more often than when she is an adult. Finally, an increase in abstraction during sex scenes helps intensify this concept, thus building on sexual attraction to Ayako as a teenager. Overall, Ayako’s addressing the reader with direct demand, her relatively close placement to the reader, and the modality of her depictions all work together as interactive features that propel the phenomenon of lolicon in this manga.

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The analysis justifies the argument that Tezuka was responsible for igniting the Lolita complex culture in Japan (Takeda, 177). Since manga represents the phenomena of Japanese society in its depictions and narratives (Ito, 456), and since Tezuka was the most influential manga artist in postwar Japan (Gravett; Schodt; Power), then his role in lolicon’s dispersal is not in contention. Writing about the influence of Tezuka’s work, Natsu Onoda Power states, “Tezuka’s work . . . transformed not only itself but also other art forms” (170), and given this authority, it is fair to assert that Tezuka had great potential for spreading lolicon to his readers. The analysis shows that Tezuka established a strong bond between the reader and Ayako during her teenage years; but one cannot dismiss the limitations of the framework used. For instance, how many of the interactive features that Tezuka uses truly function interpersonally to connect the reader with Ayako, and how much have they simply been used as a genre convention? Kress and van Leeuwen acknowledge this drawback in film and television news reading (120), and the same could be true for the narrative processes of manga. An additional limitation can be described as the small number of analyzed subjects. This chapter looks at the one manga that has direct relevance to the study, since it shows the leading character over three age periods; but Tezuka drew over 500 pieces and over 150,000 pages (Schodt, 250). Therefore, a more inclusive study of his work might buttress the findings here that within the pages of Tezuka’s manga are instances of lolicon—though the opposite is also possible. Nonetheless, the analysis of Ayako establishes a base of quantitative data that shows the meaning systems under interpersonal functionality strengthen the phenomenon of lolicon in this manga. It has also been shown that Tezuka, despite his innovation, was still a product of his time, and so his work carries the identity of the period in which it was created. Ayako communicates the paradigm, or zeitgeist, of carnality mixed with hyperconsumerism-­induced sexualization of young girls through the technical choices in Tezuka’s illustrations. Because of this, lolicon is manifest in his storytelling. Whether this was a conscious decision by Tezuka is unknown, but the findings here point to forethought or, at the least, a subconscious reflection of the anomie of living in Tezuka’s modern Japan. Tezuka carries out the discourse and promulgation of lolicon within Ayako through the sheer number of sexualized images of teenage Ayako, which are compounded by his technical use of the interactive features discussed above. The visual depiction of Ayako can be understood as a lens into the cultural phenomenon of lolicon and into culture itself.

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Note 1. As the third and fourth features of spatial positions (horizontal and vertical angle) were not found to propel the phenomenon of lolicon, only the first two features of spatial positions as they pertain to the research are discussed in this chapter.

Works Cited “Ayako (Manga).” Tezuka in English, 2012, http://tezukainenglish.com/wp/?page_id=170. Durham, M. Gigi. The Lolita Effect: The Media Sexualization of Young Girls and the Five Keys to Fixing It. New York: Overlook, 2009. Galbraith, Patrick W. “Lolicon: The Reality of ‘Virtual Child Pornography’ in Japan.” Image and Narrative 12, no. 1 (2011): 83–114. Gravett, Paul. Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics. London: Laurence King, 2004. Halliday, M. A. K. An Introduction to Functional Grammar. London: Edward Arnold, 1985. Iida, Yumiko. Rethinking Identity in Modern Japan: Nationalism as Aesthetics. New York: Routledge, 2002. Ishiko, Jun. Manga shijin: Tezuka Osamu [Osamu Tezuka: Manga poet]. Tokyo: Shin Nihon Shuppansha, 1991. Ito, Kinko. “A History of Manga in the Context of Japanese Culture and Society.” Journal of Popular Culture 3, no. 38 (2005): 456–475. Kress, Gunther, and Theo van Leeuwen. Reading Images: The Grammar of Visual Design. 2nd ed. London: Routledge, 2006. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Morrow, 1994. Meskin, A., and Cook, R. T., eds. The Art of Comics: A Philosophical Approach. Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2012. Miller, Laura. “Cute Masquerade and the Pimping of Japan.” International Journal of Japanese Sociology 20 (2011): 18–30. Naitō, Chizuko. “Reorganization of Gender and Nationalism: Gender Bashing and Loliconized Japanese Society.” Mechademia 5 (2010): 325–333. Palmer, Ada. “All Life Is Genocide: The Philosophical Pessimism of Osamu Tezuka.” In Mangatopia: Essays on Manga and Anime in the Modern World, edited by Timothy Perper and Martha Cornog. Santa Barbara, CA: Libraries Unlimited, 2011. Power, Natsu Onoda. God of Comics: Osamu Tezuka and the Creation of Post-­World War II Manga. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2009. Rosenbaum, Roman. “Reading Showa History through Manga: Astro Boy as the Avatar of Postwar Japanese Culture.” In Manga and the Representation of Japanese History, edited by Roman Rosenbaum, 40–59. Oxford: Routledge, 2013. Schodt, Frederik. Dreamland Japan: Writing on Modern Manga. Berkeley, CA: Stone Bridge, 1996. Shigematsu, Setsu. “Dimensions of Desire: Sex, Fantasy, and Fetish in Japanese Comics.” In Themes and Issues in Asian Cartooning: Cute, Cheap, Mad, and Sexy, edited by John A. Lent, 127–164. Bowling Green, Ohio: Bowling Green State University Popular Press, 1999. Slaymaker, Douglas. The Body in Postwar Japanese Fiction. New York: Routledge, 2004.

162  James G. Nobis Takatsuki, Yayoi. Rorikon: Nihon no shōjo shikōshatachi to sono sekai [Lolicon: Japan’s shōjo lovers and their world]. Tokyo: Basilico, 2010. Takeda, Tomohiro. Showa 30 nendai no igaina shinjitsu [The unexpected truth of the early Showa era]. Tokyo: Daiwashobo, 2013. Tezuka, Osamu. Ayako. 2 vols. Tokyo: Kadokawa Shoten, 1996. Treat, John Whittier. “Yoshimoto Banana Writes Home: Shōjo Culture and the Nostalgic Subject.” Journal of Japanese Studies 19, no. 2 (1993): 353–387. Tsurumi, Shunsuke. An Intellectual History of Wartime Japan, 1931–1945. New York: Routledge, 2011. Vollmar, Rob. “Dark Side of Manga: Tezuka Osamu’s Dark Period.” World Literature Today 86, no. 2 (2012): 14–19. Whaley, Evan. “Drawing the Self: Race and Identity in the Manga of Tezuka Osamu.” MA thesis, University of British Columbia, 2012.

Chapter 9

Wise beyond Her Years: How Persepolis Introjects the Adult into the Child Clifford Marks

Nonfictional comics, most notably since the publication of Maus in 1986, represent an important and emerging segment of the comics medium. This essay concerns itself generally with the broad category of autobiographical comics, which includes works such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), David B.’s Epileptic (2005), Keiji Nakazawa’s I Saw It (1972, 1982), Gene Yang’s American Born Chinese (2006), G. B. Tran’s Vietnamerica (2010), John Lewis and Andrew Aydin’s March: Book One (2013), and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000, 2004), among others. Within this category there is a subgenre exploring the personal experience of what I call “traumatic historical events,” or what Sidonie Smith calls “crisis comics.” Smith explains one function of these comics: “At the same time rights activists lodge charges against certain kinds of comics, they also exploit the capacities of the genre to affect transnational rights literacy and spur activism. . . . Crisis comics are one of these modes of witness to radical injury and harm” (62). Smith usefully characterizes comics as a medium whose form, while at times abused for propaganda, can powerfully counteract propaganda because of how deeply it engages its readers. The historical crisis category would exclude works like Fun Home and Epileptic; familial, not historical, trauma informs these comics autobiographies. The historical crisis category, inaugurated by Maus, importantly includes Keiji Nakazawa’s childhood experience of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, I Saw It, and the focus of this essay, Persepolis, which transpires amid the Iranian Revolution and the Iran-­Iraq War. Nakazawa and Satrapi grew up in the historical traumas that contextualize and inform their art. Unlike Spiegelman (except for a brief introductory sequence), Satrapi narrates her childhood’s most significant moments through a child’s eyes in her comics memoir. These moments relate her experiences as a young girl surrounded by the Iranian Revolution, when the long-­serving shah was overthrown and replaced by a strict theocracy.1

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One of the great achievements of Persepolis is how it introduces a relatively underdiscussed and misunderstood culture (and the historical events that shape it) to a Western audience that has mostly been persuaded to identify Iranian culture inaccurately with Arab culture (in general) and to understand the significance of the 1979 Iranian Revolution in the context of the American hostage crisis, which, for Iranians, was of far less consequence than the ubiquitous reality of a revolution that, for all its faults and complexities, transferred power from the Western-­installed shah to the theocratic, popularly supported Ayatollah Khomeini. For all the ayatollah’s extremist leanings, his government was at least accepted as being born from native sources, although not all Iranians embraced it as beneficent. Persepolis, narrated ostensibly by the daughter of a Westernized, Marxist-­influenced, upper-­middle-­class family, neatly bridges the gap between Persian-­Iranian, Middle Eastern culture and Western conceptions of narrative and autobiography, since Satrapi emerges as an authentic cultural commentator educated in the Western tradition who maintains a genuine loyalty to her native Iran.2 Satrapi’s complex native identity, in which she embraces familiar Western traits, marks her simultaneously as an authority regarding Iranian culture and as an appropriate conveyor of information to her non-­Iranian European and American audience. As she states in the introduction to Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood: Since [the Islamic revolution], this old and great civilization has mostly been discussed in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. . . . I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists. I also don’t want those Iranians who lost their lives in prisons defending freedom, who died in the war against Iraq, who suffered under various repressive regimes, or who were forced to leave their families and flee their homeland to be forgotten. (ii)

At its outset, Persepolis emerges as a memoir with a purpose: her story, Satrapi implies, resonates not because of her own significance, but because it acts as a counternarrative to popular European and American stereotypes of Iran. Moreover, Iranian subjectivity includes multiple examples of citizens demonstrating arguably universal positive behaviors, such as defending freedom, sacrificing one’s life for one’s country, battling oppression, and yearning to live in one’s country near one’s family. And although Persepolis is the “story of a childhood,” the prose introduction informs the reader that its issues reach deeply and seriously into adult consciousness.

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Satrapi wrote the short introduction (as opposed to drawing it) to mark her memoir as serious adult fare—unlike Maus, which Spiegelman wrote as an experiment to demonstrate how he could create “some long comic book that needed a bookmark” (Spiegelman, Metamaus, 42). Nonetheless, Satrapi marks the reception of Maus as an inspiration for her art: “The idea I had was that comics were for adolescents. But then you read Maus and realize comics are just a medium for expressing yourself and it was a revelation. . . . You see it’s possible to make that” (“The Comic Riffs Interview”). While Maus introduced her to the possibility of serious self-­expression through comics, Satrapi developed her own comics “voice” and used it to transform Spiegelman’s experiment into intentional social commentary, whereas Spiegelman consistently denies a “public good,” political, or educational function for Maus. Thus, arguably, in the history of crisis comics outside Japan, where Nakazawa and Shigeru Mizuki narrated their experiences as an atomic bomb witness-­ survivor and frontline soldier, respectively, Satrapi has emerged as an original comics voice in the Western canon.3 Much important work has been done on Persepolis, particularly on how Satrapi’s narrative valorizes female subjectivity as it destigmatizes the Iranian Other. Many categories of Persepolis criticism exist, including studies that examine the memoir as powerfully legitimizing the female “I” through assertive autobiographical gestures. These studies include Gillian Whitlock’s “Autographics: The Seeing “I” of the Comics,” and Nancy K. Miller’s “Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” among others. Some articles endorse it as a template for how comics uniquely convey meaning, such as Pauline Uchmanowicz’s “Graphic Novel Decoded: Towards a Poetics of Comics.” Congruent with this approach, other significant essays about the memoir’s formalist attributes, such as Michael A. Chaney’s “Terror of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography” and Hilary Chute’s “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis,” astutely reveal patterns that power the autobiographical form. A critical volume edited by Chaney, Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels, and Chute’s Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics contain multiple chapters on Persepolis. Chaney’s volume includes Smith’s important chapter about crisis witnessing; one by Leigh Gilmore, which complements my study; and one by Naghibi, which discusses how Satrapi remediated the novel into an animated film and how that remediation altered the narrative’s meaning. One last category (discussed here) reads Persepolis as exemplary of Iranian diaspora literature; in that vein, Daniel Grassian’s Iranian and Diasporic Literature in the 21st Century: A Critical Study, begins with a chapter on the memoir.

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Only a handful of studies explore how centrally Persepolis deploys the child’s perspective to tell its historically significant story. Pertinently, Manuela Costantino’s “Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History” argues that beneath an apparently simple, childlike text lies a subtle and complex adult story. Costantino’s essay “explores the various cultural and political forces at work in the articulation of the contexts for the production and reception of Persepolis in both France and North America” (429). While Costantino examines culture and politics, this essay explores how the memoir uses the psychological concept of introjection. The child’s voice or position infuses the narrative with subtle but ultimately profound ideas about a culture at war simultaneously with itself and the world. This work complements Costantino’s. For example, Costantino contends that “Persepolis, because it recreates the past through the eyes of a child, lends a human face to history and therefore offers readers a ‘user-­friendly’ point of entry into difficult, complicated, and confusing historical events and cultural intricacies” (432). While I agree that Persepolis operates this way superficially, I argue that the memoir conveys complicated meaning through the mechanism of introjection. This essay argues that a critical consideration of Persepolis importantly involves how the child’s story informs the narrative strategies of the comics text. But to reconstruct the child’s voice, Satrapi must necessarily introject her adult consciousness into the childhood representation of her life experiences.4 Hillary Chute’s insight on comics, history, and memory proves useful here: “How do people understand their lives through narrative design and render the difficult process of memory intelligible? Graphic narrative has echoed and expanded on the formal inventions of fiction. . . . In the graphic narrative, we see an embrace of reproducibility and mass circulation as well as a rigorous, experimental attention to form as a mode of political intervention” (“Comics,” 462). Persepolis not only conveys meaning through introjection, but also uses mechanisms of fiction as it proposes the somewhat radical notion (through a popularizing medium) that many Iranians live their lives in much the same way as Europeans and Americans do, hoping for better lives and for the safety and success of their children. Chute’s notion of political intervention resonates here as well. While Persepolis is not an overt manifesto, it nonetheless contravenes the idea that Iranians are, somehow, impossibly other and dangerous. Instead, the memoir—particularly as it narrates a child’s story—­ invites its readers to see themselves in the characters. Gilmore describes how the memoir conveys meaning to its readers: “Both a chronicle of personal and political turbulence as well as a careful exercise in educating its Western readers, Persepolis aims not only to teach these readers how to think about

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the Middle East broadly and Iran specifically, but also how to feel” (157). Gilmore convincingly documents how Satrapi, by narrating childhood, emotionally connects her adult readers to an otherwise opaque historical circumstance. By making the adult reader empathize with an innocent yet precocious child, Satrapi cleverly puts her late-­twentieth-­century European and American readers into almost unimaginable circumstances. My analysis, while agreeing that the memoir activates its readers’ feelings, focuses on how Persepolis psychologically instigates those feelings through introjection. Sándor Ferenczi, a colleague of Freud’s, coined the term “introjection” in 1909 to denote a psychological condition in which the subject transposes an object—which could be, for example, an idea, a belief, a concept, or another person—from exterior to interior. Introjection complements the Freudian concept of projection, by which the self, as a defense mechanism, unconsciously situates identity in foreign objects. For example, in the parts of Persepolis when young Marji experiments with guiding religious, political, and philosophical principles, projection might transpose her into Allah or Marx; conversely, while embracing concepts like an omnipotent God or Marxism, Marji introjects these concepts’ best qualities, as she somewhat comically identifies her future vocations as being “the last prophet” or a superbly able revolutionary leader. Likewise, narration of many of the novel’s more horrific events—the jailing and torture of relatives and family friends by the Islamic government, Marji’s young acquaintances receiving a “golden key to paradise” for their participation in the Iraq War, or the violent death of a neighbor from Iraqi bombing—features significant detachment: the self pretends that these events are taking place far away.5 To dismiss the grim reality, the self must introject an adult consciousness that imposes fictional distance on these immediate events. Many childhood stories retold from adulthood likely use introjection in some way, but Satrapi prefaces her memoir by directly stating her intent to destigmatize the Iranian Other. Given that key narrative evidence, the adult’s rhetorical presence must operate pervasively throughout the text as an introjectory arbiter that includes and excludes specific autobiographical moments based on how these moments combine to guide a Western reader into a rich understanding of the Iranian culture under textual consideration. The text implies that as a child, Marji used her child’s imagination to distance herself from the horrors that surrounded her. But as an adult, Satrapi the artist consciously deploys introjection to inform her audience that this “childhood story” has far-­reaching geocultural implications. For example, the Baba-­Levy incident (the neighbor’s death referred to above) depicts a child pretending not to see a severed hand while the reader clearly understands the

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grim image and the plot point. The first pages of Persepolis inaugurate introjection when the narrative shifts from an observational to a participatory perspective. Chaney, Chute, and Uchmanowicz extensively analyze this opening sequence, emphasizing different qualities. Uchmanowicz usefully highlights Satrapi’s semiotic invitation: “Narrator Marjane’s pending cultural bifurcation is principally forecast through visual verbal metonyms, foremost the veil (reproduced more than two dozen times) and the raised fist (repeated ten times)” (367), thus showing the reader how an introductory sequence foregrounds the deeper symbolic ramifications of the entire story. Chaney points to how the opening sequence creates a seamlessness between author and subject: “The words of the first panel of Persepolis animate the image as if to say: ‘this girl you see in the panel is not just a fair likeness of the girl I was at 10 in 1980, but this illustration is Me of enunciation, then and now’” (“Terrors,” 27), thereby conflating the author and her ten-­year-­old avatar. Chaney adds, “Because of its word-­picture relationship, autobiographical graphic novels lay claim to an author function that is utterly, yet never merely, the represented protagonist” (27). These helpful theoretical insights inform my argument in the sense that at all times Persepolis depicts contending yet complementary narratives. Comics illustrations represent the handwriting of the author with images and words—the artist many times handwrites the prose, a reality unavailable in traditional narrative nonfiction. Joseph Darda, arguing for an inherent complexity and ethical dimension in comics (the ethics derives from the way comics convey meaning), extensively analyzes how this opening sequence ethically obligates the reader-­observer to participate mindfully in Satrapi’s memoir. He contends that “in order to recommend an ethics of the autographic, there must be an impulse of both selfishness and selflessness” (40). Readers see in Marji’s precariousness their own fragility. The opening frames depict a vulnerable little girl who defiantly and dangerously challenges the new status quo. The second panel shows a class picture with four of Marji’s classmates and the synechdochically present Marji. Panels one and two interrogate each other in that the self-­portrait gets displaced by a class portrait, in which the subtle arrangement of hair styles and facial features constitutes the only differences among these children. At first, the narrative endorses a distancing between adult and childhood selves: “This is me when I was 10 years old” suggests an adult author recalling her life. But the word bubbles jolt the reader from Satrapi’s adult narration into her childhood world. As the page progresses to the playground scene, the narrator says, “We didn’t really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to.” The images of children playing in the schoolyard combined with their dialogue—“Execution in the name of freedom. . . . Ooh! I’m the mon-

Figure 9.1. Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, 3. © 2003 L’Association, Paris, France.

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ster of darkness. . . . Give me my veil back! You’ll have to lick my feet” (3)— instantaneously displace the reader from the present of Satrapi’s narration to the past of her childhood. The words and images reinforce each other in the sense that the reader simultaneously observes frames of adult protest and the playground. Juxtaposing the perspective of a young adult recalling childhood and what seem like actual childhood events, as well as images of protesting adults, implies a deliberate rhetorical maneuver on Satrapi’s part. As readers, we respond more powerfully to a child innocently experiencing life-­changing events, like being forced to wear a veil, than we would to a traditional adult recollection of the past. A child has little control of the adult world around her: ethically, the child’s vulnerability should compel an adult toward protection. Persepolis, at least partially, calls on its readers to accept Iranian children as children, and not merely as pint-­sized versions of the feared and misconceived Other. Structurally, the memoir achieves this effect through its deployment of comics language. The comics form offers rapid cognitive acquisition, and the mental process of reading comics privileges the image over the word. Thus, even if a comics text claims equally to weigh words and images, the mind, unconsciously at least, values images over words.6 Marji’s sketched actions, then, carry more immediate emphasis than Satrapi’s adult narration. Importantly, because Persepolis equally emphasizes words and images—words somewhat representing the realm of the adult, images somewhat representing the realm of the child—the way in which the memoir creates meaning consistently allows for at least a kind of equivalency between the child’s and the adult’s perspectives. These receptive equivalencies, then, substantiate childhood validity. Importantly, the sharia veil requirement leads many Westerners, liberal and conservative alike, to denounce Islam as an antifemale religion that denies women their basic human rights.7 Satrapi displaces this scene chronologically as if to say, “I know the veil deeply disturbs European and American freedom-­ lovers, so here I am at ten years old wearing one.” But Satrapi, in public statements, sees the veil as one more way that any culture objectifies women. In response to a question about the veil from an interviewer who assumes that Satrapi has a pro forma feminist position regarding wearing one, Satrapi states: “[Wearing a veil is] a problem for women no matter the religion or the society. If in Muslim countries they try to cover the woman, in America they try to make them look like a piece of meat” (Solomon, 28). At its outset (3), Persepolis converts the controversial veil into a complicated metonym that can simultaneously pro­ject meanings of strict theocratic dress requirements and children’s playthings (which transforms the veil into a source of pleasure and joy). Arguably, by positioning these meanings oxymoronically, the reader, on

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the one hand, might value the opening for how it depicts the dehumanizing nature of Muslim female dress requirements; on the other hand, the reader might subsume the veil as an ordinary aspect of daily life when it becomes a jump rope or toy. The text does not privilege one meaning over another, thus demonstrating how ordinary “stuff ” can exist when outsiders encounter an extraordinary culture. As Marji’s life evolves from childhood through adolescence, she depicts herself observing more aspects of Iranian culture as it changes under the new religious regime. In something of a contemporary ethnography, she describes the meaning of appearance by juxtaposing a “modern” man and woman with a “fundamentalist” man and woman (75). Here, Satrapi generalizes the dress and grooming habits of “fundamentalist” and “modern” Iranians (divided by gender), and then steers that stereotyping into family- and (eventually) friend-­ based discussions about how to pre­sent one’s self in the new, stricter society. Satrapi directs our attention to how people’s dress and grooming habits signify their commitment to the new regime. The memoir describes these positions for women as “fundamentalist” and “modern,” but for men it describes them as “fundamentalist” and “progressive.” Importantly, the text defines this behavior as “ideological” and not “religious.” These knowing contrasts introject the adult here. While the story has arrived at Marji’s adolescence, it nonetheless offers sophisticated and highly nuanced understandings of large-­ scale societal behavior and its meanings. Satrapi brings her more multifaceted understanding of these societal behaviors into the child’s world, resulting in the page’s final panel, which shows Marji richly exaggerating how many times a day that she prays. While this panel gestures toward adolescence through Marji’s absurd assertion, it also connotes the extreme measures one had to employ in order to function in an overly determined society. These contrasts— wearing the veil in a class picture versus using the veil as a jump rope, comparing representative ideological positions versus “out-­praying” your friends by playfully lying—goes to the heart of how Persepolis performs introjection on nearly every page. Satrapi purposefully mixes the erudite with the lowbrow or amusing in order to maintain her stance as an affected youth in a challenging world. As a comics artist, she can then relate this inherent contradiction by using words and images in the service of complexity. Through her art, Satrapi shows how these events, while happening simultaneously, can reinforce one another. For example, the middle panels of page 75, which begins with the fundamentalist versus modern-­progressive “editorial,” show Marji’s father commenting on how their neighbor had only recently been “wearing a mini-­skirt, showing off her beefy thighs to the whole neighborhood”; but things were much different under the new order: “Now

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Figure 9.2. Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, 75. © 2003 L’Association, Paris, France.

madam is wearing a chador. It suits her better, I guess.” 8 The panel to the left of the “beefy thigh” exchange depicts adolescent Marji proclaiming the justice of Islamic fundamentalism, since men and women face similar restrictions; her hand-­raised image proclaims that men are not allowed to wear neckties or short-­sleeved shirts. The unstated distinction is that men simply could not don certain kinds of apparel, whereas women had to wear a veil. In this observation, the text finds a powerful voice within its adolescent subject that hints at how the new regime may unintentionally empower a kind of prevarication that would certainly work against Islamic law. What is the reported nature of Satrapi’s childhood? She insists that she was “born with religion”; shortly after the opening veil anecdote, she flashes back to her “divine” birth as a way to interrogate the religious fundamentalism that engulfed her country (6). The imagery in panel one is crucial to understanding the character: on one side, she shows herself covered in traditional garb, with a naturalistic design in the background; she clothes her other half with contemporary attire, with images of modernity in the background. This image mimics the yin-­yang concept of Chinese philosophy: what the West would view as oppositional, the East would view as complementary. One might posit that Persian culture has always been caught between East and West. Geographically, Iran sits almost equidistant from China and Eastern Europe. Historically, the Mongols from the East conquered Persia, as did the ancient Macedonians from the West. The Arab invasion of 636 brought Islam to Persia. The complicated history of the twentieth century features Iran in multiple alliances—including an alliance with Nazi Germany during World War II—but the country’s postwar history centered on its oil-­based relationship with Britain, Europe, and the United States. As seen in the novel, Iranian citizens seem routinely caught

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between multiple cultures. Satrapi recognizes this as she repeats the yin-­yang imagistic motif later in the novel (25) when her father educates her about her grandfather’s role in the British-­supported revolution of the 1920s and Marji’s mother visited her father in jail (he had been jailed because of his stated Marxist beliefs). Importantly, this page includes ten small panels, two of them deploying the yin-­yang image as a way to reproduce Marji’s mother and Marji’s confusion and sadness about her grandfather’s incarceration as a political prisoner. This page unveils a somewhat complex doubling as it depicts Marji’s mother as a child who sought and received a piggyback ride from her father (Marji’s grandfather) when he was jailed. After describing torture in which the authorities submerged the grandfather in water for hours, Marji seeks to reenact the experience by taking a bath for hours so that her hands could wrinkle like her grandfather’s. The memoir produces these images at times of revolutionary displacement: in the grandfather’s case, when the British installed the Pahlavi regime; in Marji’s case, when the ayatollah rode the wave of anti-­Pahlavi national sentiment into the formation of an Islamic republic. Satrapi’s visual invocation of Eastern philosophy gestures toward the political and spiritual complexity of these nation-­changing events. In this sense, she introjects her adult self into her childhood by overlaying multifaceted political, philosophical, and spiritual considerations on how one might more straightforwardly narrate a youthful story, by literally drawing a thematic parallel between herself and her mother. Another important religious aspect materializes with Satrapi’s recollection of her first “career choice,” as shown on pages 6–7: she would emerge as the last prophet, following the line of Zarathustra, Moses, David, Jesus, and Mohammed. Importantly, the memoir does not overtly associate Marji with Islam; traditionally, Islam views Mohammed as the last prophet. Rather, the belief that Marji could be the last prophet implies that Islam, Judaism, and Christianity exist as fragmentary spiritual conceptualizations because the millennial promises each Abrahamic religion (Islam and Christianity believing in an apocalyptic battle between good and evil, and Judaism believing in the establishment of a David-­like messiah who will unite the world in peace and Edenic cooperation) have not arrived. While the idea that one would be chosen by God to be the last prophet might seem extremely childish and overly precocious, in the case of Persepolis it materializes as another example of how the memoir covertly critiques the fundamentalist forces insisting on a strict Islamic theocracy for Iran. Islam’s inferred inadequacy in effect validates a quasi-­Enlightenment positioning of reason over faith, although this stance is complicated by Marji’s youthful dalliances with religion and political philosophy. Those positions, in turn, are cleverly critiqued through her envi-

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sioning Marx as God’s doppelganger, thus thematically and subtly rejecting both religion and political philosophy as efficacious totalizing formulas by which one can organize life. As her parents struggle with their complicated political positions in contemporary Iran, Satrapi creates a spiritual avatar who, through commonsense approaches to problems such as the relationships between social classes, and the neglect of the elderly, can offer an alternative to the religion that threatens to lacerate the putative fabric of quotidian life. The memoir shows many of these concepts intertextually, thus again highlighting how introjection transforms a “simple” recollection of childhood pursuits into a sophisticated commentary on religious fundamentalism. On page 8, Satrapi visually relates telling her teacher that her career goal involves becoming the last prophet. The concerned teacher then alerts Marji’s parents about her skewed life goals. Instead of expressing concern, as the teacher anticipated, the parents react indifferently. On this page, Satrapi subverts the usual dichotomy. The top frame, though childlike in its portrayal of God as an encouraging, grandfatherly figure, nonetheless emerges as somewhat serious: God has an important job for Marji. The playful exchange involves her parents and the teacher, whose concern gets undercut by the parents’ ambivalence. As the narrative continues, Satrapi carefully selects the events of her childhood and constructs a different sense of self as she emerges into adolescence: she replaces the precocious child with a pop-­music-­seeking, partying persona who pursues a Western lifestyle in the face of a fundamentalist Islamic regime. Perhaps the most compellingly contrasting page of the memoir occurs during Marji’s adolescence when the reader learns that Iranian boys receive plastic golden keys in exchange for their anticipated martyrdom on the front lines during the Iraq War (102). Here Satrapi visually connects the partying of Tehran’s more sheltered youth with the simultaneous destruction of young lives in the war with Iraq. As an intelligent, educated artist, Satrapi understands her good fortune, shared with her fellow upper-­middle-­class friends. She mentions that her mother made her a punk necklace with chains and nails, and then adds, “I was looking sharp.” The reader may note the verbal and visual irony: visually, Satrapi has arranged the image so that depiction of the party celebrants parallels the movements of the teens getting blown to bits on the battlefield. Verbally, the reader unconsciously connects the sharp edges of shrapnel with Marji’s observation. Again, introjection emerges in the complex interplay among concepts of class, political sacrifice, and personal ignorance. This sophisticated image gestures toward the reality of most wars: people with means who do not support their government’s cause often find ways to avoid service, and the front lines are

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Figure 9.3. Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, 102. © 2003 L’Association, Paris, France.

manned by society’s lower classes. The plastic “golden key to paradise” serves as a powerful ironic symbol here: somehow, wearing this cheap simulacrum of a gold key will ensure an eternity of comfort; but in reality, it only guarantees a violent death. The war becomes horrifyingly more personal for Marji when the Iraqis bomb a neighbor’s home (142). The top frame, stretched across the page, shows Marji and her mother walking hand in hand past the rubble of a de-

Figure 9. 4. Marjane Satrapi, The Complete Persepolis, 142. © 2003 L’Association, Paris, France.

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stroyed building. The next frames depict Marji looking tentatively at some fragment outside the rubble, then covering her mouth, and then covering her eyes; finally there is a frame that is purely black. Satrapi offers the metonymic image of a girl’s severed body part (likely the girl’s wrist and hand) as a concrete, undeniable instance of the reality of war’s destructive nature. In a sense, almost nothing could equal the horrific reality of a friend literally getting blown to bits a few buildings down the street. Satrapi, using comics conventions, shows how the reality of war explodes her teenage self from the cocoon of her parents’ protection (on the previous page, Marji’s mother boasted to her that she prevented broken glass from entering their home because she had taped the windows before the bomb blast) and into the reality of severed body parts and classless vulnerability. As Satrapi’s teenage avatar covers her mouth and eyes, the icon recalls the popular Eastern motif of “hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil.” She heard the explosion, so she cannot cover her ears to blot out the noise; the caption to the fifth panel reads: “No scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and my anger.” Furthermore, the black panel in the lower right-­hand corner of the page offers an open canvas upon which she and the reader can paint any concept imaginable regarding war’s cruelty. Satrapi brilliantly deploys a comics idiom here by obliquely drawing the carnage. Neither Marji nor the reader wants directly to experience war’s horrors; as her mother attempts to guide her away, Satrapi simultaneously pushes the reader away and draws us in through the mechanism of the black panel, just as she does with Marji. Marji’s childhood ends here because she can no longer protect herself, or expect adult protection, from war’s horrors. The following pages show her arguing with her teachers and acting in such a way that her parents can see a future for her only in Europe, which is the foundation for Persepolis, part two, subtitled The Story of a Return. Satrapi subtitled part one The Story of a Childhood. While part two narrates a physical return to her native Iran, part one narrates another kind of return: a return to experiences of childhood that, in their seeming simplicity, covertly enjoin the reader to absorb quite challenging notions of identity, culture, and Western stereotyping. As this essay argues, she suffuses this childhood story with complex images and concepts that unconsciously propel the adult reader into the reality of a seemingly ordinary upper-­middle-­class Iranian family in the midst of a cultural revolution and a war. This memoir succeeds magnificently in familiarizing for its Western readers one person’s life in a culture routinely deemed foreign, antithetical to Western values, and (by political leaders) evil. Moreover, telling this story also tells a story about the Iranian Revolution, the Iran-­Iraq War, the relatability of Iranian citizens, and their perseverance during extraordinary times.

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Persepolis teaches its readers that childhood in Iran, when conditions of revolution and war are absent, can parallel childhood in places like the United States and France. Marjane Satrapi, an expatriate Iranian, uses comics to tell her story about growing up in Iran. But stylistically “simple” or childlike drawings cloak profound and compelling adult themes, occurrences, and circumstances. Throughout The Story of a Childhood, the rich medium of comics infuses adult sensibility into the words, actions, and behaviors of a young girl who, through her story, narrates a tale of survival and perseverance that commands readers’ attention.

Notes 1. Studies of the Iranian Revolution include Wright, The Last Great Revolution; Rieffer-­ Flanagan, Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Politics and Problems in the Islamic Republic; and Berlatsky, Perspectives on Modern World History: The Iranian Revolution. 2. The depiction of how Satrapi negotiates her native and adopted cultures emerges forcefully in Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. 3. See Mizuki for an unsparing firsthand account of the battle for Papua New Guinea, the eastern half of the island of New Guinea. Since the battles for these islands involved more Australian than American forces, US popular culture rarely features stories about these strategically important territories. But Mizuki gruesomely depicts the destruction of a Japanese squadron under the command of sadistic commanders who equate discipline with physical abuse. 4. Satrapi began working on Persepolis in the late 1990s, when she was in her late twenties, then published the comics memoir in four parts in France (2000–2003). Persepolis was translated into English and issued in two parts in 2003 and 2004. 5. Another poorly understood (within US culture) yet vitally significant world-­ historical event is the Iran-­Iraq War (1980–1988)—the United States was publicly allied with Iraq and Saddam Hussein—which contextualizes Persepolis. 6. Different critics and artists, including Scott McCloud in Understanding Comics (1993), Thierry Groensteen in The System of Comics (1999, 2007), and, more recently, Neil Cohn in The Visual Language of Comics (2013), provide theoretical insight into how comics convey meaning. Each discusses word-­image combinations, sequentiality, and, overtly in Cohn’s case, the contrasting mental operations used to process comics language and traditional prose. Some comics, such as Bechdel’s Fun Home, privilege the word over the image; generally, traditional superhero comics privilege the image over the word. Works like Persepolis pre­sent each element equally, thus showing their readers how the word-­image combination truly constitutes a complete language system. This system most closely matches how Groensteen theorizes comics language. 7. One might recall how the George W. Bush administration posited the mistreatment of women (who were forced by the government to wear a burqa, a full-­body covering) as one of the purported reasons for the war in Afghanistan. See McMorris for an extended analysis of this issue. 8. Though not the focus of this essay, this moment points to an important underlying feminist motif in Persepolis. Also of importance is how Satrapi alludes to the neighbor only

Wise beyond Her Years   179 with words. Satrapi’s post-­Persepolis comment—“In America they try to make (women) look like a piece of meat” (Solomon, 28)—resonates powerfully here in conjunction with the Westernized father’s “beefy” comment.

Works Cited B., David. Epileptic. Translated by Kim Thompson. Paris: L’Association, 2005. Bechdel, Alison. Fun Home. New York: Houghton Mifflin, 2006. Berlatsky, Noah. The Iranian Revolution: Perspectives on Modern World History. Farmington Hills, MI: Greenhaven, 2012. Chaney, Michael A., ed. Graphic Subjects: Critical Essays on Autobiography and Graphic Novels. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2011. ———. “Terrors of the Mirror and the Mise en Abyme of Graphic Novel Autobiography.” College Literature 38, no. 3 (Summer 2011): 21–44. Chute, Hilary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 2008): 452–465. ———. Graphic Women: Life Narrative and Contemporary Comics. New York: Columbia University Press, 2010. ———. “The Texture of Retracing in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” WSQ: Women’s Studies Quarterly 36, nos. 1–2 (Spring–­Summer 2008): 92–110. Cohn, Neil. The Visual Language of Comics. London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013. Costantino, Manuela. “Marji: Popular Commix Heroine Breathing Life into the Writing of History.” Canadian Review of American Studies 38, no. 3 (2008): 429–447. Darda, Joseph. “Graphic Ethics: Theorizing the Face in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” College Literature 40, no. 2 (Spring 2013): 32–50. Gilmore, Leigh. “Witnessing Persepolis.” In Chaney, Graphic Subjects, 157–163. Grassian, Daniel. Iranian and Diasporic Literature in the 20th Century: A Critical Study. Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2013. Groensteen, Thierry. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. Lewis, John, and Andrew Aydin. March: Book One. Portland: Top Shelf, 2013. McCloud, Scott. Understanding Comics. New York: HarperCollins, 1993. McMorris, Christine McCarthy. “Grappling with Islam: Bush and the Burqa.” Religion in the News 5, no. 1 (Spring 2002), www.trincoll.edu/depts/csrpl/RINVol5No1/Bush%20 burqa.htm. Miller, Nancy K. “Out of the Family: Generations of Women in Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” Life Writing 4, no. 1 (2007): 13–29. Mizuki, Shigeru. Onward Towards Our Noble Deaths. Translated by Jocelyne Allen. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2011. Naghibi, Nima. “A Story Told in Flashback: Remediating Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis.” In Chaney, Graphic Subjects, 164–177. Naghibi, Nima, and Andrew O’Malley. “Estranging the Familiar: ‘East’ and ‘West’ in Satrapi’s Persepolis. ESC: English Studies in Canada 31, nos. 2–3 (2005): 223–247. Nakazawa, Keiji. I Saw It: The Atomic Bombing of Japan. Seattle: Educomics, 1982. Rieffer-­Flanagan, Barbara. Evolving Iran: An Introduction to Problems and Politics in the Islamic Republic. Washington, DC: Georgetown University Press, 2013.

180  Clifford Marks Satrapi, Marjane. “The Comic Riffs Interview: ‘Persepolis’s Marjane Satrapi Comes Not to Bury American Culture but to (Mostly) Praise It.” By Michael Cavna. Comic Riffs (blog), Washington Post, April 27, 2012. ———. The Complete Persepolis. Translated by Anjali Singh. New York: Pantheon, 2004. Smith, Sidonie. “Human Rights and Comics: Autobiographical Avatars, Crisis Witnessing, and Transnational Rescue Networks” In Chaney, Graphic Subjects, 61–72. Solomon, Deborah. “Revolutionary Spirit.” New York Times Magazine, October 21, 2007, 28. Spiegelman, Art. Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. New York: Pantheon, 1993. ———. Metamaus. New York: Pantheon, 2011. Tran, G. B. Vietnamerica. New York: Villard, 2011. Uchmanowicz, Pauline. “Graphic Novel Decoded: Towards a Poetics of Comics.” International Journal of Comic Art 11, no. 1 (2009): 363–385. Whitlock, Gillian. “Autographics: The Seeing ‘I’ of The Comics.” MFS: Modern Fiction Studies 52, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 965–979. Wright, Robin. The Last Great Revolution: Turmoil and Transformation in Iran. New York: Knopf, 2000. Yang, Gene. American Born Chinese. New York: First Second Books, 2006.

Chapter 10

Vehlmann, or The End of Innocence: Lessons in Cruelty in Seuls and Jolies ténèbres Annick Pellegrin

The stand-­a lone comic book Jolies ténèbres (Beautiful Darkness) and the comic series Seuls (Alone) have much in common. Scripted by Fabien Vehlmann, originally published in French by Dupuis, and released in English for the first time in 2014, they tell stories of children who need to fend for themselves in a world without adults. Moreover, in both works the attractive illustrations are in stark contrast with plots that combine child characters with the themes of death and cruelty. In fact, Vehlmann claims similar sources of inspiration for these two works: the novel Lord of the Flies, by William Golding, and the documentary Récréations, directed by Claire Simon (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “Plongez”). The novel tells the story of schoolboys who are stranded on a deserted island following a plane crash, and the documentary follows the games of preprimary schoolchildren during recess, without any adult intervention or commentary. In both works, the children can be playful but are also often very cruel to one another. Lord of the Flies follows the evolution of children behaving increasingly like bloodthirsty hunters as they seek to survive on their own until they can be rescued. Thus, petty bullying and hunting games turn into brutal acts of murder. In Récréations, too, the young children’s games quickly become violent. In the ninety-­five minutes of this documentary, we see children bullying other children, kicking and pretending to kill them, standing on others, dragging them on the ground, and telling them, “Quand tu pleureras, on arrêtera” (When you cry, we will stop). At the same time, however, we see other children playing seemingly pointless but also harmless games such as collecting twigs or leaping from a ledge, and encouraging those who are scared to do the same. In both Seuls and Jolies ténèbres, we can find examples of harmless games such as collecting pebbles and buttons or bathing in a fountain juxtaposed with cruel games of domination such as using a merry-­

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go-­round to torture a dissident or burying someone alive as punishment for having only one eye. Seuls, drawn by Bruno Gazzotti, currently consists of nine albums (A4-­size hardcover books) that make up two complete cycles.1 The ongoing series, which is prepublished in episodes in the Franco-­Belgian comics weekly Spirou before being released in albums, has gained importance since its creation in 2006: it has received a number of prizes, including one at the prestigious Angoulême festival (Paget); it is becoming a Dupuis bestseller (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, “Vehlmann,” 4); and the shooting of the film adaptation is reported to have started in late February 2016, with an expected release in 2017 (Vehlmann, “Au feu les tabous !,” 77; Dupuis, “Seuls”). The first album opens with a prelude briefly introducing the five children who will become the main characters: Dodji (Dodzi), Leïla, Terry, Yvan (Ivan), and Camille. Aside from an intense heat and an ominous promise that everything will change the next day, there is nothing particularly striking about the city known by the seemingly playful name of Fortville (Campton), where the children live. The story begins in earnest the next morning, when the five children wake up to find that they are alone in Fortville. While looking for their families, the children gradually come to form a tightly knit group as they find one another and organize themselves in order to survive without adults, much like the characters in Lord of the Flies. As they seek to understand their situation, the children face all manner of threats—attacks by escaped circus animals, persecution by the young Nazi admirer Saul, and increasing supernatural occurrences, to name but a few—and at the end of the first cycle, they come to realize that they are dead and in limbo. In the second cycle, the children face new challenges as they seek to come to grips with the fact that they are dead; that the world around them is sinking; that some are preparing for a great battle between good and evil; and that it is believed that one of the children from Fortville is an evil messiah. The second cycle closes with the revelation that the gentle Camille is this evil messiah, who, it is predicted, is “l’astre mort qui guidera les dernières familles et avalera le monde des limbes” (the dead star that will guide the last families and swallow up the world of limbo) (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, Les Terres basses, 46). Avant l’enfant-­minuit (Before the Midnight-­Child), the last installment of the second cycle, was released at the time of the final revisions of this essay. Three more cycles of four to five volumes are expected, which means that the saga should continue for at least another twelve years (Vehlmann, “Au feu les tabous!,” 76). Although every effort has been made to keep the essay as up-­to-­ date as possible, this work focuses on the first two cycles only. As for Jolies ténèbres, the one-­shot was originally published in French in

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2009, and about a month after its release in the United States, Beautiful Darkness, the translation, was a best-­selling hardcover comic book (New York Times, “Hardcover Graphic Books”). Jolies ténèbres is scripted by Vehlmann and Marie Pommepuy and is drawn by Kerascoët, a team of authors made up of Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset. This album is quite particular in Vehlmann’s body of work, since he put himself completely at the service of Pommepuy’s story, helping her bring it forth, somewhat like a midwife (Vehlmann, interview). Aside from creating comic books, Kerascoët has designed window and inner displays for Galeries Lafayette, covers for the Japanese version of Elle magazine, and the packaging of products such as the perfume Flower by Kenzo. According to Cosset, Jolies ténèbres is among Kerascoët’s most noticed work in comics, and certainly the team’s most important and most translated work (Pommepuy and Cosset, 78). Its plot revolves around numerous small beings that emerge from the rotting corpse of a young girl. While Vehlmann has stated that he makes it a point to keep Seuls within the bounds of the city (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, “Rencontre”), Jolies ténèbres is set in the countryside. The main character, Aurore (Aurora), initially devotes all her time to helping the other small beings, finding food and shelter for them and ensuring that everyone gets along, but like the “littluns” of whom no one seems able to keep track and who gradually disappear in Lord of the Flies, the small beings in Jolies ténèbres fall to their death one by one, either from the dangers of being outdoors or from the consequences of their bad decisions. Thus, they are eaten by animals, poisoned by plants, or killed in the course of dangerous play. In one episode, for example, a little ballerina tries to pass herself off as a chick in a nest and dies of a throat hemorrhage after a vigorous feeding. Disappointed with her friends and having been betrayed by her prince charming, Aurore eventually leaves the group and joins the loner Jane, who is living in a mouse hole in a human’s house. When there are only a handful of beings still alive, and after Zélie steals Jane’s bird and—it is suspected—kills her, and then seeks to take control of Aurore, the latter sends Zélie and her retinue to their deaths in the homeowner’s oven. Despite their numerous points in common, Seuls is marketed primarily to children, while Jolies ténèbres is marketed primarily to adults. Since these two works share numerous similarities, why is it, then, that there is such a notable difference in their target audiences? I believe the core difference lies in two factors: first, in the textual reasoning behind the children’s cruelty; and second, in the balance between death, cruelty, and play. Indeed, while Seuls offers comic relief as well as numerous (albeit spurious) explanations of what is happening in Fortville, there is no explanation for the children’s behavior or situation in Jolies ténèbres. Instead, readers are confronted with a cruelty that is all the

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more appalling because the children themselves do not seem to understand the pain they inflict on others. To discuss these points in more detail, it is important to understand how Western societies perceive children and believe they should be treated. In her work on the evolution of fairy tales and their links with the evolution of the conceptualization of childhood, Marina Warner argues that “in the very midst of consecrating innocence, the modern mythology of childhood ascribes to children a specially rampant natural appetite for all kinds of transgressive pleasures, including above all the sado-­masochistic thrills of fear” (40). According to Warner, the interest in positioning children as beings fundamentally different from adults springs from the “Romantic thirst to recover childlikeness,” a state believed to be one of innocence, wisdom, and fantasy (37–38). Ironically, however, as fairy tales became more and more associated with children and were modified to suit that audience exclusively, by removing the sexual references, maintaining the violence, and making the protagonists younger, the resulting stories “marked out bloodthirstiness, fearlessness and even callousness as childish—rather than universally human— characteristics” (39). Over time, it became even more acceptable for children’s stories to be violent and gory because of the belief that they enabled weak and dependent members of society to identify with “small vulnerable creatures” who were nonetheless able to overcome considerable adversity (40). Perhaps for this reason, “bad children . . . surface again and again in some of the most powerful contemporary fiction, like Golding’s classic Lord of the Flies—a book to bury in any time capsule seeking to convey the flavour of this half of the century” (44). In the Franco-­Belgian context, the content of comic stories for young readers has been marked by the aftermath of World War II. Before the war, the comics market in France was dominated by publications originating in the United States (Ory, 73). After the war, the conditions were perfect for this market domination to resume, but discussions regarding the protection of young readers against violence in film and literature started as early as 1945. These discussions led to the passing of a law (on July 16, 1949) regulating the sale of publications for young people (74–75). The law stated that publications for children and adolescents “ne doivent comporter aucune illustration, aucun récit, aucune chronique, aucune rubrique, aucune insertion présentant sous un jour favorable le banditisme, le mensonge, le vol, la paresse, la lâcheté, la haine, la débauche ou tous actes qualifiés crimes [sic] ou délits ou de nature à démoraliser l’enfance ou la jeunesse” (must not feature any illustration, any story, any column, any section, any insertion presenting in a positive light banditry, lying, theft, laziness, cowardice, hatred, debauchery or any acts char-

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acterized [as] crimes or offenses or of a nature that could demoralize children or young people) (Auriol, 7006, art. 2). In addition to the question of the moral protection of young readers, there were several discussions about the inclusion of an article protecting France from economic dumping practices (Ory, 76). Although, in the end, no article required a percentage of French content in children’s publications, the law nonetheless had repercussions on foreign publications (76–80), since they could not be imported into France if they did not satisfy the requirements of the second article (Auriol, 7008, art. 13). How the comics weekly Spirou (published by none other than Dupuis, the publisher of both Seuls and Jolies ténèbres) handled the situation sheds light on the conceptualization of childhood, then and now, in Franco-­Belgian comics. The Belgian magazine was first sold in France in 1946 (Ory, 82–83), and as a foreign publication for children, it was affected by article thirteen; as a Belgian publication, it faced the possibility that a similar law might be passed at home (Faure, 125). Dupuis therefore removed all US comic series from Spirou (Dayez, “Increvable,” 25; Dayez, “Bye bye,” 29) and practiced self-­censorship in order to avoid any difficulties with French authorities (Ory, 82–83; Faure, 126). Elsewhere, I have considered how the passage of this law has shaped the classic Franco-­Belgian comic character Lucky Luke, who cannot kill anyone (Pellegrin). It is, however, a law that has defined more than just the series Lucky Luke and the content of the magazine Spirou: Franco-­Belgian comic production for young readers as a whole was marked for several years by this imperative to protect children’s innocence. This convention has had lasting effects on present-­day production, since several of the comic series created at that time are among the best-­selling Franco-­Belgian classics. They continue to be produced today and cannot now break away from a certain tradition and a certain morality established by this law. In Seuls, as in Jolies ténèbres, the image of children is far removed from that of an idealized period of innocence. In both works, the authors go against the Franco-­Belgian tradition of shielding young readers: the protagonists look death in the face. In the former, it is true that the children do not immediately realize that they are dead, but they nonetheless face the idea of death and the possibility of dying from the very start, since they are continually threatened by forces beyond their control. At first, the reasons to fear are essentially physical: the children are alone and need to find food while protecting themselves from the very direct threat of escaped circus animals, such as the white tiger and the rhinoceroses that charge at them. The direct physical threats continue in the next volume: the children meet the master of knives, a strange masked character whose poncho is lined with knives and who, at first, seems

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to attack them for no reason, but later becomes an ally. The physical violence, however, in fact predates the diegesis, since we know that Dodji had an unhappy childhood: his stepfather, whom, he eventually reveals, he killed, used to beat him, lock him up, and force him to learn poetry by rote. Dodji is not the only child who was abused before his death, since the scars on the back of the secondary character Edwige suggest that she, too, used to be whipped or caned when she was alive. Finally, we find out in the eighth volume that all the children in limbo died “de manière particulièrement tragique” (in a particularly tragic manner) (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, Les Arènes, 8; emphasis in the original). Thus, the authors create a rift between childhood and innocence that exists both in everyday life and after death, and that therefore precludes readers from escaping real life through fantasy. In fact, they break all the rules of children’s literature in the Franco-­Belgian tradition. As Sophie Bogrow sums it up: “Dans Seuls—destiné aux 10–14 ans—, tous les gosses sont morts, un héros tendance néonazi devient l’élu gentil, et le bon se demande s’il n’est pas celui du mal. Des parents râlent, la caravane Gazzotti-­Vehlmann passe” (In Seuls—aimed at ten- to fourteen-­year-­olds—all the kids are dead, a hero with Neo-­Nazi tendencies becomes the good messiah, and the good guy wonders if he isn’t the evil one. Parents whinge, the Gazzotti-­Vehlmann caravan moves on) (Vehlmann, “Au feu les tabous!,” 76). Although physical threats do not necessarily abate as Seuls progresses, psychological threats are increasingly present, and they escalate with the appearance of Saul in the third volume, Le Clan du requin (The Clan of the Shark). Saul seems to be a tortured child, living in the shadow of a strong father, to whom he calls out in his dreams. An admirer of the Third Reich, Saul rules his clan with an iron fist, torturing dissenters such as Dodji, and later starting a veritable mob war and resorting to hazing in order to gain control of Fortville. The biggest psychological source of fear for the children, however, is quite possibly their own uncertain situation: they do not know why they are alone or what supernatural dangers are lurking around the corner. Indeed, in the center of Fortville is the red zone—an area of supernatural disturbance guarded by red-­eyed monkeys that erect mounds of objects covered in red paint to mark its boundaries. No machine functions in this zone, and in its center is a black monolith covered in black crawling insects. This monolith, which appears to be the throne of the evil messiah, seems to swallow up people to turn them into red-­eyed zombies, and the red zone is gradually expanding and sinking. The children from Seuls are also aware of the vague but undeniably present threat from the mysterious fifteen families: they have known since the second album that their deaths are linked with the actions of these families, but it is

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Figure 10.1. Yvan is tied to the throne of pain. Seuls-8: “Les Arènes” © Dupuis, 2013 by Vehlmann & Gazzotti.

not until the eighth album (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, Les Arènes) that they begin to understand who these families are. After being captured by the first seven families, the children are taken to the city of Néosalem. Although the role of the fifteen families in the children’s death is still unclear, it is apparent that these families are ranked by privilege and perceived moral worth, and that they are expecting a great battle between good and evil in Néosalem. While the first families have declared that Saul is the good messiah, the gentle Camille, Saul’s love interest, is later revealed to be the evil messiah. In Néosalem, the children are questioned and pressured to remember the circumstances of their deaths. Finally, they are forced to compete in an arena in order to be assigned to one of the families. The sadistic show made of the physical challenges they must face, as well as the additional difficulties thrown in their way (including fire, electric shocks, and a trône de douleur (throne of pain)—a chair fitted with devices that jab the contestant and draw blood at every mistake), is all the more cruel because of additional psychological factors: the children know that the outcome of the games will determine their rights in this new society and whether they will be able to stay together. Although the children win the challenge, in the last album of the second cycle they face their biggest challenge yet: they find themselves truly alone, separated from one another.

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In Jolies ténèbres, death is omnipresent in the form of the little girl’s slowly rotting corpse in the background (the small beings move away from it only in the last few pages), but most of these beings rarely take notice of the corpse as they go about their business. As for the cruelty of the characters, it is not as calculated or sadistic as it is in Seuls: the children are pure and “innocent” beings in the sense that they are guided by basic needs or whims, without any clear ulterior motive or reflection. Each of them is infused with a particular character trait (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “La Petite Fille,” 49), and as these character traits reach their full expression, the small beings find death. Aurore’s love interest, Hector, for example, behaves in many ways like Prince Charming (49): he embodies courtly love as he visits Aurore for an afternoon tea after a ball and chastely compliments her, and later undertakes a veritable expedition in the forest in order to hunt deer and wild boar. What Aurore does not know is that Hector is charming to everyone until he marries the most princess-­like being of them all: the self-­centered Zélie, who, for instance, convinces the other children to dedicate their time exclusively to sewing the dress that will become her wedding gown instead of gathering food or building shelters. Readers, on the other hand, can see Hector courting several girls in the foreground and in the background throughout the story, including after the wedding. Hector’s own drive to please the ladies and behave chivalrously, coupled with Zélie’s selfish and precious behavior, leads him to his death as he ventures onto a pond to recover one of Zélie’s ribbons and is swallowed by a toad. Similarly, the shy and self-­conscious Timothée (Timothy) finds death when she declares that she is unfit to live because she is missing an eye. Zélie and her retinue immediately agree with her, bury her alive, and forget about her. Yet, while their actions may be harmful, the children are entirely unaware of the pain they inflict on others: they are as prompt to move from one activity to another—be it collecting pebbles and buttons or pulling insects’ legs—as they are to bury their peers alive. It is also striking that Vehlmann and Kerascoët chose to break with tradition in their choice of artwork for Jolies ténèbres. Indeed, while the attractive drawing styles of both Seuls and Jolies ténèbres are fitting for children’s books, Gazzotti’s style is not as markedly associated with children’s literature as Kerascoët’s. The former falls quite squarely in the Franco-­Belgian tradition of cartooning while still being realistic enough for readers to be able to recognize all the objects depicted in the albums and to identify them by their make and model (Vehlmann, “Matinale”). Gazzotti’s artwork therefore serves to root Seuls in the real world while making the cruelty bearable (Vehlmann, “Les Terres basses”; Vehlmann “Rencontre”), whereas Kerascoët’s artwork possibly makes Jolies ténèbres even more unbearable (Vehlmann, “Vehlmann Ex-

Figure 10.2. Playing next to the rotting corpse. Jolies Ténèbres © Dupuis, 2009 by Vehlmann and Kerascoët.

Figure 10.3. Burying Timothée. Seuls-5: “Au cœur du maelström” © Dupuis, 2010 by Vehlmann & Gazzotti.

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plores”). With its combination of tender watercolor tones and characters with doll-­like features that misleadingly evoke the idea of a sweet and innocent childhood, Kerascoët’s drawing style is much more closely associated with children’s books. Acutely aware of this fact, Pommepuy consciously chose not to create children’s books for a long time. Instead, Kerascoët’s comics tend to revolve around topics such as prostitution, murder, death, or hell (Pommepuy and Cosset, 79). To a point, Kerascoët’s graphic style in Jolies ténèbres and the countryside setting, which is a recurring feature of their work (76),2 make for less realistic and therefore less gory artwork, but Jolies ténèbres is profoundly disturbing, since, unlike the more recent versions of fairy tales that Warner speaks of (40), it does not tell the story of vulnerable creatures that overcome formidable adversity, but rather tells the story of children confronted with the cruelty of their peers and senselessly dying. With the sharp contrast between the reassuring impression that Kerascoët’s beautiful watercolor artwork creates and the children’s detachment from their own paradoxically innocent yet utterly cruel behavior, this illusion is brutally taken away from readers as they are presented with “des séquences d’une brutalité extrême” (sequences of extreme brutality) (Roure; Vehlmann, “Fabien Vehlmann”). Cosset admitted that creating and coloring some the pages of Jolies ténèbres was particularly difficult for him and that he sometimes needed to take breaks because he was extremely troubled by the sheer cruelty depicted in the scenes (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “La Petite Fille,” 49). Vehlmann, whose albums often revolve around the question of death, says of his work that it would be unbearable if it did not offer some form of humor to break up the tension (Vehlmann, “L’Île”). For instance, the album L’Île aux cent mille morts (Isle of 100,000 graves) (Vehlmann and Jason) is set, for the most part, on an island where the arts of torture and execution are taught. These methods of torture are rather gory, but thanks to omissions of the scenes of torture and Jason’s very cartoony drawing style, there is an element of humor in the story, which makes the work more palatable (Vehlmann, “L’Île”). When it comes to Seuls, the authors use a similar approach: Gazzotti’s precise but still cartoony drawing style makes it easier to take in the disturbing subject matter of the series (Vehlmann, “Les Terres basses”; Vehlmann, “Rencontre”; Vehlmann, “Seuls”). Up to a point, this is also true of Kerascoët’s artwork, in the sense that the doll-­like appearance of the small beings makes them less real and thereby softens somewhat the impact of their horrific deaths (although it also has the contrary effect of heightening the horror once readers realize what they are witnessing). In Seuls, however, and perhaps in keeping with remnants of a certain conservatism in Spirou and in Franco-­Belgian comics, Gazzotti and Vehlmann usually resort to omission

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Figure 10. 4. Finding Dodji’s corpse. Seuls-5: “Au cœur du maelström.” © Dupuis, 2010 by Vehlmann & Gazzotti.

when it comes to showing corpses, to the point that some readers doubted the reality of Saul’s death at the end of Le Clan du requin (Vehlmann, “Apocalypse ados,” 73; Vehlmann, “Rencontre”). Since it was important for readers trying to grasp the inner workings of this universe to understand that some characters had truly passed away again in this limbo world (and later come back to life, still in limbo), Gazzotti and Vehlmann later resorted to showing Dodji’s corpse after Saul came back from the dead and shot him. This depiction, however, is much less confronting than the images found in Jolies ténèbres, where the stages of putrefaction of the little girl’s body are in full view, whether it is in the foreground or the background. Dodji’s corpse, on the other hand, is never shown in all its detail: we see him in the distance, surrounded by a murder of crows, but the authors do not go beyond a close-­up revealing that his hand has been pecked at and showing us that Dodji’s friends are upset at this sight. Another important aspect of Seuls, especially in comparison with Jolies ténèbres, is the use of comic relief: Vehlmann has explained that in Seuls he makes it a point to tell a frightening story that also includes elements of fun in order to maintain a certain balance between fear and play (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, “Rencontre”). For instance, being alone without their parents can be frightening for the children, who sometimes break down and cry out of fear and despair. This is true as much for Terry, who is the youngest of the five, as for Leïla, who is one of the leaders of the group and relatively grown up. It is also true even for Dodji, who is the other leader of the group and is usually quite resilient. Nonetheless, the absence of adult supervision is also posited as a thrilling taste of freedom. In the first cycle, the children are occasionally able

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to forget their fears and have fun: they bathe in a fountain; drive cars; live in a large hotel, where they fill several rooms with toys or ride a pony indoors; and live in a theme park, where they dress up as pirates. The second cycle of Seuls is generally darker than the first. Even after understanding that they are dead, the children continue to play, although play and fear become increasingly intermingled. For example, in Les Terres basses (The Lowlands), the children find themselves playing a twisted version of tag in the fog, knowing that being caught by their zombified friends would mean being turned into zombies, too. The angry injunction from Boris, one of their zombified friends, “Il faut jouer, maintenant!!” (You must play, now!!) (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, Les Terres basses, 28; emphasis in the original), sums up the ambience of fearful play in this album. Although the early albums of the second cycle grow increasingly dark and fearful, so far it is Les Arènes (The Arenas), for which Vehlmann carried out extensive research on sadistic game shows (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, “Seuls, Tome 8”), that marks a real turning point in depictions of cruelty in the series. While it is likely that readers are still enjoying “the sado-­masochistic thrills of fear” (Warner, 40), it becomes less and less certain that the characters are still having fun. Like Les Terres basses, Les Arènes does not have clear moments of sheer fun and distinct moments of pure terror, but rather constantly combines terror with play. Yet, there is a significant difference between Les Terres basses and Les Arènes: in the former, the children play a fearful game with friends who have lost their will, whereas in the latter, lucid children and some adults turn games into both a spectacle and a form of torture. The children are no longer treated as equals, but are instead entirely submitted to the power and control of these adults and of the system that they have devised. In comparison, when Saul starts a war, he still treats the other children as equals, since he engages with them as he fights. In the second cycle, then, there are fewer moments of respite, and even the games are increasingly tainted with fear, danger, and cruelty; and in the final album of the cycle, the children barely have time to play. Instead, they face danger and physical pain on their own: Dodji is tied up as bait, Leïla is shot in the shoulder, and Camille is stabbed in the chest. In Seuls there is a clear shift in the balance between death, cruelty, and play, with a gradual progression toward cruelty, which eventually taints even the children’s games, but in Jolies ténèbres there is no distinction between play, death, and cruelty from the very beginning. For example, while the children from Seuls, upset at finding Dodji’s corpse being eaten by crows, give him a solemn funeral, in Jolies ténèbres, a funeral is a game like any other. Thus, while Zélie and her friends mumble, pretending to pray, they bury Timothée alive

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and soon forget all about her. It is perhaps even more striking that Timothée herself does not seem to distinguish between play and reality as she agrees not only to play dead, but also in fact to be dead and be buried. Zélie continues to be insensitive to others’ suffering throughout the album. After Hector’s drowning, not only does she ask her retinue to dig up the pencil case in which Timothée was buried and to empty it, claiming that it would be unfair for someone like Timothée to have a nicer burial than Hector, but in addition, neither she nor her retinue are particularly concerned about the scratches inside the said pencil case. While these horrific details confirm to readers that Timothée was left there to die, they provoke no reaction in Zélie, who continues to consider it all a game. It is only once Hector is laid to rest on a bed of flowers inside the pencil case that Zélie gives the cue to start mourning her dead prince. She then proceeds to (over)play the role of the grieving widow. While Zélie offers numerous examples of the mixture of play, death, and cruelty, she is not the only child in Jolies ténèbres who seems to lack empathy. Many of these children do not hesitate to use others, to pull off insects’ legs, or to grossly mistreat their own friends, seemingly out of boredom. The only character to truly change in Jolies ténèbres is Aurore. From a caring, friendly, and generous young girl, she learns to become vengeful and cruel. After the failure of her party with the forest animals and the shock of seeing Zélie and Hector’s wedding, Aurore exacts revenge by poking out the eyes of her friend, the mouse, and cloaked in the mouse’s skin in a fashion that is reminiscent of Donkey Skin’s disguise, she chooses to leave her friends, although she had been very keen to set up a comfortable camp for everyone.3 When Zélie finally comes to take over the place that she shared with Jane, Aurore is unwilling to share. Even more importantly, while the other characters are thoughtlessly cruel, Aurore shows determination in sending Zélie and her retinue to their deaths, and when the oven is lit with Zélie and her friends still in it, we understand that this is the outcome of a carefully thought-­out plan. Aurore carries it out coolly, locking the oven door with determination and looking directly and steadily at the fire when the owner of the house lights it. On the last page, we find out that Aurore considers the man in whose house she lives to be her prince now, and it would thus seem that she considers this to be her happy ending. In short, to survive and find happiness, Aurore not only had to become aware of her own actions and to decide to change them, but also had to become more self-­centered and ruthless. As Kerascoët put it “Cela nous permet d’évoquer l’apprentissage de la cruauté, l’obligation de perdre son innocence pour pouvoir survivre” (This enables us to raise the question of the acquisition of cruelty, the obligation to lose one’s innocence in

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order to be able to survive) (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “Plongez”; emphasis in the original). This is all the more striking because we know that each small being is representative of one character trait (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “La Petite Fille,” 49) and that Aurore shares her name with the dead girl in the forest, as attested by the label on her notebook (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, Jolies ténèbres, 19–20). Thus, it would seem that the little girl might not have died if her dominant character trait had been selfishness or ruthlessness. This approach is in stark contrast with that depicted in Seuls, in which the children, although exposed to a great deal of violence and death, ultimately draw their strength from being united (Gazzotti and Vehlmann, “Seuls, Tome 8”; Gazzotti and Vehlmann, “Rencontre”), and they in fact suffer severe bodily harm when they are separated in Avant l’enfant-­minuit. The elements of death, cruelty, and play, then, can all be found in both Jolies ténèbres and Seuls, but Seuls, in its first cycle at least, offers readers some relief by allowing the five children to explore the exhilarating aspects of freedom from adult supervision. In Jolies ténèbres there is no clear boundary between cruel behavior, death, and play, and ultimately, it is the brutal imposition of one’s will that prevails; it is only after watching her peers burn in the oven that Aurore can be happy. As Benjamin Roure puts it, “jamais bande dessinée n’aura aussi bien mélangé candeur et cruauté, enfance et monde adulte, rêve et cauchemar” (never has bande dessinée intermingled so well candor and cruelty, childhood and adulthood, dreams and nightmares) (Roure). According to Warner, “Grown-­ups want [children] to stay like that for their sakes’ [sic], not the children’s,” in fact “for humanity’s sake on the whole, to prove something against the evidence” (42). Indeed, as she points out, when children play, they only imitate adults, and their actions therefore reflect the society in which they live (38, 44). The constant intermingling of candor and cruelty is one of the reasons why Jolies ténèbres is a book intended for adult readers: not only is it unsettling to see children behaving cruelly for no particular reason other than play, but such depictions are also far removed from the traditional representation of childhood that has been promoted in Franco-­Belgian comics since the introduction of the 1949 law. It is telling that this album was not prepublished in Spirou, Dupuis’s tout public (family) magazine, while all the Seuls albums so far have been. That said, we should bear in mind that the balance between death, cruelty, and play changes in the second cycle of Seuls, from which pure fun gradually disappears. What contributes to distinguish this second cycle as a work still primarily designed for young readers, while Jolies ténèbres is targeted to adults, is the marked contrast in regard to both explanations for and reflections on these dark moments.

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In Jolies ténèbres, the authors provide minimal explanation for the narrative impulse for the story: the reader does not know why the little girl died, why there are small beings that live inside her, and why these characters behave as they do (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “La Petite Fille,” 45; Roure). The children themselves do not seek to make sense of their situation, nor do they appear to be aware of their surroundings, or of the fact that they may be hurting others. They are entirely oblivious of the corpse in the background unless it directly affects them. Instead, they enjoy playing among the maggots crawling all over the young girl’s body, finding the fact that they tickle quite amusing. As Roure puts it, “La mort, la violence et la douleur interviennent sans crier gare, et sont traitées avec un détachement terrifiant” (Death, violence, and pain appear out of the blue, and are treated with a terrifying detachment) (Roure; emphasis in the original). Besides completely breaking with the style of classic Franco-­ Belgian comics, this approach is likely to be unsettling for adult readers, who do not take death so lightly as these small beings do, to see such behavior in children. Yet we might wonder whether very young readers would be able to fully grasp the meaning of the scratches in the pencil case or of the swarms of flies in the dead girl’s mouth. In Seuls, on the other hand, while readers may not always be given ample or even believable explanations, the children seek to understand what is happening to them from the very start (Vehlmann, “Les Terres basses”). First, they are acutely aware of the dangers facing them and of the gravity of what happens to them and their friends. The secondary character Zoé, for example, feels the loss of her friend Boris after he is swallowed by the monolith in the red zone, and she continues to await his return when they need to flee as the red zone expands. Second, some of the children, especially Yvan and Anton, come up with elaborate pseudoscientific theories to try to explain what they are experiencing (Vehlmann, “Seuls”). Whether these theories in fact hold water is, in the end, irrelevant: what matters is that the children ask questions and attempt to understand their situation (Vehlmann, “Les Terres basses”). In addition, despite each album raising more questions than it answers, we can see a form of reasoning in the main characters’ behavior. The presence of so many questions and attempts at answers in Seuls makes the series more accessible than Jolies ténèbres to children and to the general public: it helps readers reflect on the strange and supernatural aspects of the series and get a sense of the children’s reasoning, thus keeping them engaged (Vehlmannn “Les Terres basses”). The difference in the combinations of death, play, cruelty, childhood, and reflection is what ultimately makes these two works so different in their target

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readerships. Jolies ténèbres offers readers no respite: the intermingling of play, death, and cruelty is constant. This, however, is one of the defining characteristics of Jolies ténèbres: “La force de Jolies [t]énèbres tient à ce mystère entretenu, cette situation d’autant plus horrible qu’elle est sans queue ni tête, sans explication, petite histoire morbide et innocente promenée sous nos yeux d’un air négligent, masquant ses propres racines” (The strength of Jolies [t]énèbres stems from this mystery that is maintained, this situation that is all the more horrendous given that it is senseless, without any explanation, a morbid and innocent little story negligently paraded before our eyes, concealing its own origins) (Loleck). Conversely, the fun moments in the first cycle of Seuls allow readers to breathe between dramatic moments, although the subject matter can be as grave as that of Jolies ténèbres. It is noteworthy that though Jolies ténèbres may be marketed specifically to adults, it requires a certain acquired taste, even for that audience (Roure). The authors mention that they have met adult readers who utterly reject Jolies ténèbres, a book that can be hard to define and to take in (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “La Petite Fille,” 45). I believe this is due to the constant and seemingly senseless cruelty found in it, even more so since these acts of cruelty are perpetrated by children and against children—the very beings that adults wish to keep forever innocent, according to Warner. Vehlmann says, “Dans Seuls j’aborde à peu près tous les sujets qu’on pourrait aborder avec des adultes, simplement, j’ai l’impression que j’l’aborde d’une manière qui est plus compréhensible pour les enfants mais les thèmes sont les mêmes” (In Seuls I broach more or less all the topics that one could broach with adults, simply, I feel that I broach them in a manner that is more comprehensible for children but the themes are the same) (Vehlmann, “L’Île”). It is quite clear that this is true when we consider the differences between Seuls and Jolies ténèbres: the themes of the two works are extremely similar. To me, then, the crucial difference between the two works is that Seuls gives readers some comic relief as well as enough reflection on the part of the children for readers to attempt to make sense of the death and cruelty that they encounter in the series, whereas Jolies ténèbres does not offer readers any respite (Vehlmann, “Les Terres basses”; Gazzotti and Vehlmann, “Rencontre”), confronting them instead with an image that, while attractive and sweet-­looking, completely transgresses the ideal of innocence described by Warner and the representation of children in classic Franco-­Belgian comics.

Acknowledgments Sections of this paper were previously published in Transformations 24 (2014), www.transformationsjournal.org.

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Notes 1. A cycle in a comic series is comparable to a season in a television series. 2. Their work for the Galeries Lafayette, titled Jungle d’Éden (Eden Jungle) is a good example of the strong presence of a lush natural background in their work. 3. “Peau d’âne” (“Donkey Skin”) is a traditional fairy tale (recorded by Charles Perrault) that seems to have slipped into oblivion. It tells the story of a princess who makes numerous extravagant requests as excuses to avoid marrying her own father. As the king repeatedly manages to grant her seemingly impossible wishes, the princess eventually requests that her father kill his gold-­coin-­excreting donkey. She uses the skin to hide her identity and flee the kingdom, going by the name Donkey Skin. She eventually finds a suitable match and is later reunited with her father. Vehlmann expects that this tale will become completely unavailable when adults realize what the true subject matter of the tale is, namely, incest (Vehlmann and Kerascoët, “La Petite Fille,” 45).

Works Cited Auriol, Vincent. “Loi n° 49–956 du 16 juillet 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse.” Le Service public de la diffusion du droit, July 19, 1949. www.legifrance.gouv.fr /jopdf/common/jo_pdf.jsp?numJO=0&dateJO=19490719&numTexte=&pageDebut= 07006&pageFin=. Dayez, Hugues. “Bye bye Tarzan!” Spirou, September 21, 2011, 29. ———. “Increvable Red Ryder!” Spirou, October 24, 2012, 25. Dupuis. “Seuls: Début du tournage.” Dupuis (blog). January 27, 2016. http://blog.dupuis .com/actualites/seuls-­debut-­du-­tournage. Faure, Stanislas. “Entre Protectionnisme et Bonne Tenue morale: Les Éditeurs belges et l’Article 13 de la loi sur les publications pour la jeunesse (1949–1967).” In “On tue à chaque page!”: La Loi de 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse, edited by Thierry Crépin and Thierry Groensteen, 117–29. Paris: Éditions du Temps, 1999. Gazzotti and Vehlmann. Les Arènes. Seuls, vol. 8. Marcinelle, Belgium: Dupuis, 2013. ———. “Rencontre Bruno Gazzotti et Fabien Vehlmann.” Utopiales 10, Festival International de Science-­fiction, La Cité, le centre de congrès de Nantes, November 10–14, 2010. www.actusf.com/spip/article-­10261.html. ———. “Seuls, Tome 8: Bruno Gazzotti et Fabien Vehlmann, L’interview.” Interview by Fnac.com, December 20, 2013. http://youtu.be/jxQN_GO9qsI. ———. Les Terres basses. Seuls, vol. 7. Marcinelle, Belgium: Dupuis, 2012. ———. “Vehlmann: ‘Le succès crée une pression mais c’est bénéfique!’ ” Interview by Hugues Dayez. Spirou, August 21, 2013, 4. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. Vacoas, Mauritius: Le Printemps, 2007; orig. pub. 1954. Loleck. “Jolies ténèbres de Kerascoët & Fabien Vehlmann.” Du9: l’Autre Bande dessinée. July 2009. www.du9.org/chronique/jolies-­tenebres. New York Times. “Hardcover Graphic Books.” March 23, 2014. www.nytimes.com/best-­sellers -­books/2014-­03-­23/hardcover-­graphic-­books/list.html. Ory, Pascal. “Mickey Go Home! La Désaméricanisation de la bande dessinée (1945–1950).” In “On tue à chaque page!”: La Loi de 1949 sur les publications destinées à la jeunesse, edited by Thierry Crépin and Thierry Groensteen, 71–86. Paris: Éditions du Temps, 1999.

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Paget, Christophe. “Angoulême 2007: Retour sur un palmarès à l’image de la BD d’au­ jourd’hui.” RFI, January 29, 2007. http://www1.rfi.fr/actufr/articles/085/article_49229 .asp. Pellegrin, Annick. “‘I Knew Killing a Man Would Kill You’: Lucky Luke Shaped by Myth and History.” Transformations 24, “The Other Western,” 2014. www.transformationsjournal .org/issues/24/05.shtml. Pommepuy, Marie, and Sébastien Cosset. “2,5 kilos d’élégance.” Interview by Thierry Wagner. Casemate, October 2014, 76–79. Récréations. Dir. Claire Simon. Les Films d’Ici/Doriane Films, 1999. Roure, Benjamin. “Jolies ténèbres.” BoDoï, March 5, 2009. www.bodoi.info/jolies-­tenebres. Vehlmann. “Apocalypse ados.” Interview by Sophie Bogrow. Casemate, June 2009, 72–73. ———. “Au feu les tabous!” Interview by Sophie Bogrow. Casemate, October 2015, 76–77. ———. “Fabien Vehlmann: Sombre et brillant scénariste de Jolies ténèbres.” Interview by Alexandra S. Choux. BD Gest’, June 24, 2009. www.bdgest.com/news-­401-­BD-­fabien -­vehlmann-­sombre-­et-­brillant-­scenariste-­de-­jolies-­tenebres.html. ———. “L’Île aux 100,000 morts.” Interview by Fnac.com, February 20, 2012. http://youtu .be/9hcvnOs7HXI. ———. Interview by the author via Skype. December 12, 2014. ———. “Matinale pro #2 Fabien Vehlmann.” Interview by BDNETTV. May 16, 2011. http://youtu.be/SZzkODISQms. ———. “Rencontre avec Fabien Vehlmann.” Utopiales 13, La Cité, le centre des congrès de Nantes, November 3, 2013. www.actusf.com/spip/Utopiales-­13-­Conference-­Rencontre ,17139.html. ———. “Seuls mais ensemble!” Utopiales 12, La Cité, le centre de congrès de Nantes, November 10, 2012. www.actusf.com/spip/Utopiales-­12-­Conference-­Seuls-­mais.html. ———. “Les Terres basses.” Interview by Edmond Morrel. Espace Livres, “Les Rencontres d’Edmond Morrel,” June 18, 2012. www.espace-­livres.be/IMG/mp3/ESPR2012_Fabien _Vehlmann_finale_mp3.mp3. ———. “Vehlmann Explores Horrors of Humanity in ‘Beautiful Darkness.’ ” Interview by Jeffrey Renaud. Comic Book Resources, March 12, 2014. www.comicbookresources.com /?page=article&id=51429. Vehlmann and Jason. L’Île aux cent mille morts. Paris: Glénat, 2011. Vehlmann and Kerascoët. Jolies ténèbres. Marcinelle, Belgium: Dupuis, 2009. ———. “La Petite Fille et la Mort.” Interview by Vincent Brunner. Casemate, March 2009, 44–49. ———. “Plongez dans de jolies ténèbres!” Interview by Laurence Le Saux. BoDoï, March 2, 2009. www.bodoi.info/plongez-­dans-­de-­jolies-­tenebres. Warner, Marina. “Little Angels, Little Devils: Keeping Childhood Innocent.” In Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More, 33–48. New York: Vintage, 1995.

Chapter 11

Zeno, Childhood, and The Three Paradoxes C . W. Marshall

Pa u l H o r n s c h e m e i e r ’ s The Three Paradoxes (Fantagraphics, 2007) pre­sents a multilayered exploration of the limits of autobiographical comics. It employs multiple embedded narratives and an insightful application of pre-­ Socratic philosophy, which characterized Greek thought in the sixth and fifth centuries BCE. Each of the embedded stories reflects an aspect of the author’s childhood, but just as memories shift and fade and realign over time, so too the past is altered into a series of idealized visions. The main narrative slows and then stops as the author is caught momentarily in a longer journey and faces an inability to continue with a comics story he is in the process of creating. To overcome these obstacles, Hornschemeier invokes the paradoxes of motion attributed to the pre-­Socratic philosopher Zeno. This chapter explores The Three Paradoxes and its presentation of embedded narratives, which resonate with how childhood is remembered and how it can be presented within the medium of comics. Each of the embedded worlds evokes childhood differently. Since the 1970s, many comics creators have used the medium to pre­sent aspects of their own lives, incorporating different degrees of fictionalization. Beginning in North America with Justin Green’s “Binky Brown” stories (Green) and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (1976–2008), “autobio” (as autobiographical comics are often called) has been robust in its ability to represent the ordinariness of the everyday lives of its creators.1 This chapter is not a discussion of autobio as such, but a few positioning observations are relevant. As a genre, autobio demands a total investment in the representation of the self: the creator selects every element depicted, both words and images, and this combined role yields a sort of paradox that is particular to the comics medium. Since most autobio is produced by single creators serving as both writer and artist, a greater creative coherence emerges than is often found in comics, and this intensifies the creator’s investment in self-­representation. By the nature

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of the medium, everything on the page is designed to moderate a reader’s experience, and the regulation of this reception becomes a tool for the creator. Any narrative entails selection and presentation choices that call details into question, and this violates what Philippe Lejeune calls the “autobiographical pact,” the authorial “promise of sincerity,” which is ultimately mediated by self-­presentation.2 When what is being revealed is some version of the creator’s self, the reflective nature of the genre inevitably turns back on itself, and the result is “fictive but not fictitious” (Hatfield, 124). Paul Hornschemeier’s The Three Paradoxes (2007) purports to be autobiographical. The copyright page offers instructions for the reader, alerting her to the German pronunciation of the name “Juliane” and conceding criticisms raised concerning the veracity of the story by the author’s sisters, and also the following: “Despite statements elsewhere in this volume, there are those who will question this volume’s truth and/or accuracy. To this end the author submits the following expert statement: ‘If you can’t believe what you read in the comic books, what can you believe?’—Bullwinkle J. Moose (The Wailing Whale, episode one)” ([ii]).3 It’s a great gag: the cartoon “expert” reflects on its kindred medium, in the context of what amounts to an academic footnote. The volume concludes with an acknowledgment of thanks to Juliane, and the work is dedicated to his sisters, reaffirming the work’s claims for biographical authenticity. The Three Paradoxes pre­sents a number of interwoven stories, each of which reflects an aspect of this tension through the presentation of childhood. In the primary story, the main character (Paul) is visiting his parents, taking photographs to send to a woman (Juliane) he has yet to meet. The stillness of the photographic image parallels the immobility of the comics panel. In Paul’s case, the panel is still both by its nature and because he is unable to advance his story: “Is this even going anywhere?” he asks himself (and his reader) when we first meet him ([3], panel 5). The frozen moment depicted in photographs or in a comics panel conveys the impression of movement to the viewer. Though the panel is a static image, part of the nature of comics is to pre­sent and control the illusion of movement. Will Eisner’s succinct description of “Framing Time” begins with an evocation of Einstein’s theory of special relativity: “Time is not absolute but relative to the position of the observer . . . The panel . . . makes that postulate a reality for the comic book reader” (28).4 It is therefore not without precedent that Hornschemeier evokes Zeno of Elea, the pre-­Socratic philosopher whose paradoxes of motion point toward the notion of infinite regression. A single-­page flashback, “On the Way Here” ([7]; see figure 11.1) interrupts Paul and his dad walking at night (in the narrative present) as the adult

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son describes his photography to his father. In nine panels, the only sound represented is the repeated click of his camera. There is a single speech balloon (panel 7), but the words spoken are cut off by the panel edge, unavailable to the character (within the diegetic frame, Paul can see the officer speaking, but does not know what is said) and so to the reader as well. Paul’s flashback re­cords only his thoughts, which begin, “Why are we moving so slowly?” ([7], panel 1). He is evidently thinking about the traffic, which has slowed because of a roadside accident, but he is also reflecting on the page itself: “On the Way Here” interrupts what is already a slow, deceptively ordinary conversation. Though Hornschemeier’s artistic line is usually very simple and clean, the expression on the face of a man whom Paul passes (panel 8) is rendered with more detail, his harrowed expression remaining uninterpreted within the embedded memory. We presume he is a victim of the accident, but we know nothing beyond the details of his shadowed and lined face. I find the panel of the unnamed man hauntingly compelling, and the reaction from Paul in the final panel suggests his guilt at the invasion of privacy his photograph of the man (and its reproduction within this comic) has caused. By looking directly out from the panel, the unnamed accident victim appears to turn his head to the camera. That is him looking at Paul, and at the reader. It is also the only panel on the page that might pre­sent what it is that Paul (the character, as an extension of the author remembering and re-­ creating) actually saw: no sound effects or speech balloons (the apparatus of a comics panel), and no external (third-­person) depictions of the author accompany the image. In this panel, the victim becomes reified, and the extra precision of the shading invites an association between the panel and the photograph Paul has taken. This association is reinforced when Paul takes a picture of his father in a similar, mirrored pose a few pages later ([21], panel 4). “Why are we moving so slowly?” the reader asks, since time seems frozen, the narrative slowed by the traffic experienced and now reexperienced by the author during his journey home. Within the context of a self-­presentational narrative, the child’s fond presentation of his father resonates with the anonymous earlier man, who is now invested with a fuller life: he too may have had a family, and so forth. This anticipates the reflexive nature of the embedded narratives to follow. Following the interruption offered by “On the Way Here,” the primary narrative resumes with Paul telling his dad, “Most of the pictures I took on the road turned out blurry” ([8], panel 1). This is, self-­evidently, a lie: the detail and crisp lines in the photograph-­panel of the crash victim suggest that at least one photo came out fine (or, alternatively, that the image was etched in Paul’s mind vividly, and that this memory stands in counterpoint to the blurry photograph). Paul’s lie

Figure 11.1. “On the Way Here.” The Three Paradoxes, [7]. © 2007 Paul Hornschemeier.

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avoids the authorial discomfort arising from the nature of autobiographical confession, first deferring it onto another, and then denying it exists. Is all movement, then, an illusion? In comics, it has to be, though the reader creates the effect of movement imaginatively through the process of reading.5 It is this illusion of movement that brings The Three Paradoxes to pre-­Socratic philosophy. Zeno of Elea, who lived in the fifth century BCE, is known today for his paradoxes of motion. Zeno’s work does not survive; it has been filtered through a number of sources that could be considered hostile. He is a character in Plato’s dialogue Parmenides (127d6–128d6) and what we know of his work comes from this (fictionalized, but also biographical) source and the responses to his work in later antiquity (particularly in Aristotle’s Physics and Simplicius’s commentary on that work).6 Parmenides argued that “All is One” (whatever that meant), and Zeno defended this claim with a treatise that apparently presented forty supporting arguments: “My intention is to demonstrate,” Plato has his Zeno say of those who oppose his fellow Eleatic, Parmenides, “that their assumption of plurality, when followed through far enough, is even more absurd than the assumption of unity” (128d). Aristotle summarizes four of these arguments (which have become known as the Dichotomy, the Achilles, the Arrow, and the Stadium), each of which is designed to show the impossibility of motion.7 Three of these paradoxes are familiar.8 The Dichotomy states that in order to complete any distance, an object must first cross half the distance, then half of what remains, and so on, so that the complete distance cannot ever be completed; the object arches asymptotically toward a destination but never reaches it (Aristotle, Physics, 239b.11). The Achilles uses a similar thought puzzle to show how swift-­footed Achilles will inevitably remain behind a tortoise that begins a race ahead of him (Simplicius, On Aristotle’s Physics, 1014.10). Both of these ignore the infinite divisibility of time, but their imaginative effect is compelling, and formulating a clear intellectual answer to them is not as straightforward as it should be. A third paradox, the Arrow, denies the possibility of any movement at all: at any given moment, an arrow is occupying a space equal to its length. That is the definition of being at rest. Therefore an arrow shot from a bow cannot move, since at any given moment it is at rest. In that moment, like one captured in a photograph or in a comics panel, we have a demonstration of the impossibility of movement (Aristotle, Physics, 239b.30). The fourth paradox, the Stadium, points to the subjective experience of motion, and to the subjective experience of time undergone by two objects traveling relative to each other (Aristotle, Physics, 239b.33). The precise details of the paradox are not clear, but the associations with relativity and the subjective experience of time are germane. Indeed, when presented

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in The Three Paradoxes, Parmenides counsels Zeno, “This last paradox, the Stadium? It’s not the strongest . . . we can always write the fourth down later” ([53], panel 8). If we object that each new argument in Zeno’s treatise is really just a slight variation of the one preceding it, I argue that we fall into Zeno’s trap. By its very design, the meta-­argument of Zeno’s treatise (“All is One”) requires that all forty of Zeno’s arguments themselves reduce to a singularity. Even Hornschemeier’s reduction of the forty to the four that have survived allows this point to be made forcefully. Too many paradoxes still remain, and they become iterations of themselves. The different expressions of the paradox of the divisibility of the One reinforce the sense of Parmenidean indivisibility. The humor inherent in Zeno’s response is underappreciated by philosophers and classicists, and Zeno deserves more credit than scholars on the pre-­ Socratics generally accord him. Hornschemeier does not expect his readers to know specifics about Zeno.9 Yet the use of Zeno is hardly accidental, and his filial devotion to Parmenides resonates with the father-­son relationship in the frame narrative. It is only when we import a notion of closure to how we read comics (a psychological habit, to inform a textual-­creative practice) that we come to a sense of the illusion of movement. A still image suggests movement only when the viewer looks beyond the moment preserved, either by imagining what is about to come or by seeing a blur—evidence that what is now still appeared to move then. Zeno is presented within The Three Paradoxes in one of five embedded narratives, each of which is given a distinct visual style. “On the Way Here” maintains continuity with the frame narrative but demonstrates that the author is explicitly shaping the presentation of the narrative for literary effect, pairing his father with the unknown roadside victim. The experienced reader of comics knows and expects this process, but the manipulation of frames and their interconnectedness is crucial if they are going to cohere as a single, larger narrative. “Paul and the Magic Pencil” pre­sents excerpts in progress from the comic the character Paul is drawing. The blue-­pencil, rough illustration, shown in its pre-­inked state with the white background of the artist’s board, suggests a raw, unfinished world in which Paul is presenting himself in an idealized wish-­fulfillment fantasy ([1]–­[2], and later throughout the story, whenever Paul imagines his artistic project). Blue pencils are used in traditional (nondigital) comics creation because the color does not appear in certain reproduction techniques. It was something editors could use freely, but it could also be used for pre-­inked roughs. As a symbol, the blue pencil evokes “what lies beneath”—something that might be more honest, but that is not observed by the outside world. It also suggests imaginative power. Just as the blue-­pencil

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Figure 11.2. Thok thok thok. The Three Paradoxes, [14], panels 1–5. © 2007 Paul Hornschemeier.

world evokes the formative stage of comics, so too there are associations with Harold and the Purple Crayon, Crockett Johnson’s 1955 children’s book about a young boy whose drawings come to life. Harold’s imagination can take him anywhere, whereas Paul is stuck in editorial rewrites. Language is limiting here, since there exist deep connections between Hornschemeier (the creator of The Three Paradoxes), Paul (his protagonist), and “Paul” (the protagonist’s imagined and imaginary embedded self)—all is one. “Paul” and his pencil are unable to advance, and the example of the younger Harold affirms the unbridled, idealized innocence and creativity of childhood as something that might not be recoverable for Paul. Paul’s self-­representation is not explicitly autobiographical, but it does show the boy “Paul” encountering the Wise Guy in the Sky (another father figure, surely), questioning him, and eventually stabbing him with his pencil ([14], panels 1–5; see figure 11.2). The blue-­pencil world is framed by two panels of a silent Paul with thought bubbles emerging from his head. How much time is represented in these panels? The reader cannot say, but the interruption in the conversation between Paul and his

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father, and the extension of the moment over several panels, means that Paul’s thoughts prevent narrative advancement. At times, the blue-­pencil world represents merely the contents of the character’s drawing board. The continuity between thought and artistic output, both of which are framed in an identical technique, suggests, with an idealistic childlike innocence, the possibility of pure representation within the comics medium: the perfect continuity between thought and art, between intention and depiction. The blue-­pencil world is one of fantasy, where anything can happen. In contrast to the mundane emptiness of real life depicted in the frame narrative, Hornschemeier disavows the connection between imagination and the real world (between “Paul” and Paul) at the same time that he asserts the ability to represent imagination exactly. The imaginative world exists out of time and lacks any means of corroborating its authenticity. Only the inclusion of the narrative suggests that these were Paul’s thoughts at the time, and the temporal placing of thought and memory exists in tension with the need for narrative coherence and literary effect. We don’t expect these thoughts to be authentic, even if the author pre­sents them as such, and their extreme nature provides a relief from the immobility of the frame narrative. “Paul and the Magic Pencil” would seem to affirm the authenticity of the frame narrative because it is so ordinary in comparison. Zeno’s paradoxes share the tensions exhibited by self-­presentation in comics: Hornschemeier is making a claim to become a subject deserving of wider popular interest, and he consequently selects and orders events to help achieve that goal; while, at one level, the embedded narrative denies its relevance to the frame narrative, at another it argues for the frame narrative’s greater authenticity. Because the blue-­pencil world points to a fully realized future in which the comic is completed and the blue lines are no longer visible, there exists an anticipation of what is to come: not a future, but a future perfect, what will have been. The physical makeup of the book recognizes this tension. The Three Paradoxes in its originally published form was a small, well-­made hardback with a dust jacket. It is, decidedly, a “grown-­up” format, lacking the markers of childhood that might be thought to exist in the traditional comics structure and medium (a short length, flimsy pages, and advertisements for other offerings). The dust jacket combines two of the artistic styles seen within, juxtaposing them so that the border between panels and any hint of linear narrative is obscured. Thematically, this works well for a comic obsessed with forward narrative momentum. Beneath the dust jacket, the front cover pre­sents the same image in a blue pencil: the book’s cover is blanketed by the dust jacket, erasing the earlier rough form. The blue-­pencil world exists as both antecedent

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and subtext, and the exterior of the book lays bare the concern for narrative and iteration described within its covers. The blue-­pencil world also shapes the acknowledgments and copyright page. The extranarrative elements of the physical book embody the key themes of the narrative inside. It is a challenge to disentangle them, and the representation of the character Paul’s world within the book bleeds into the real world of Hornschemeier.10 All is one. The next embedded story, “Summer School,” flashes back to Paul’s youth ([16]–[19], [24]–[25], [28]–[31], [58]–[61]). It is a story of prejudice, with a mix of reminiscence and confession; in it, a childhood lie escalates into a beating from a supposed bully. The nostalgia of youth is represented by simple lines and a restricted color palette: the lines evoke the Bazooka Joe comics that came as gum wrappers between 1953 and 2012 (Newman). The stipples of the early Zip-­A-­Tone four-­color production process are consonant with a simplified worldview, in which boys’ actions typically have no lasting impact. Though lived experience necessarily elevates the importance of one’s own actions in one’s memory, childhood can often feel consequence-­free when compared to adulthood. Hornschemeier challenges that view. Since memories blur with imagined events and are not always fully distinguishable, what actually occurred in one’s past seems less important than long-­term effects (or perceived long-­term effects). At the same time, however, childhood memories continue to shape the adult we become, and it is never possible to fully shed the legacy of one’s past actions and fantasies. The Three Paradoxes pre­sents both views, without judgment, forcing the reader to reflect in the same way that Paul does. Later, when Paul reminds his father of the story on their walk, the father’s memory of his son’s childhood is presented with the same technique, providing the father’s most salient reminiscence as he lectures his son for having falsely accused a bully. The reader is not given any dialogue in Paul’s father’s memory, presumably because it lies outside Paul’s immediate experience, but the continuity of style and the shared red and yellow colors again point to a congruence between the depiction of the earlier world that Hornschemeier has given the reader directly and the one that he gives the reader through his father’s recollection. There is no doubt that we are being shown Paul’s dad feeling the same emotions that he did when the event occurred. Prompted by Paul’s question “Do you remember when I got beat up here?” ([61], panel 3), Hornschemeier pre­sents a row of four panels. The first shows his dad, silent and stern (4). The next three are the memory (5–7), in the Zip-­A-­Tone style, the final image presenting a younger version of his dad, again silent and stern.11 The emotion shown on Paul’s dad’s face in panel 7 is the interpretation of the expression that was presented to Paul (and is reproduced for the

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reader) in the row’s first panel—except his eyes are softened, since the recollected memory lacks the pain of the original event. The three embedded stories discussed so far all directly relate to the primary narrative: Hornschemeier’s self-­presentation uses aspects of the comics process to represent his youth and his Nietzschean deicidal fantasies, and he can self-­present the recent past with vivid, haunting detail. Two others appear to be less personal. “The Scar” is a fourteen-­page exploration of how Matt W., a convenience store clerk, received a scar across his windpipe as a child ([34]-­ [47]). The story is imagined by Paul (within the context of the narrative, it is not something he can know), and so, like “Paul and the Magic Pencil,” it occurs outside the world of the comic’s primary narrative; no time passes as the reader experiences the story. “The Scar” shows Matt getting hit by a car soon after he cheats in a make-­believe game with his twin brother. The repetition of the depiction of childhood from the “Summer School” story, twinning it, marks its artificiality, and the extension of Paul’s own imagination is reinforced when Matt’s brother reads him a comic book in the hospital. The repetition of a car accident from “On the Way Here” transposes the concerns of an adult victim to that of a child. The increased realism of the art, as if printed on paper yellowing with age and of poorer stock, suggests that Paul the comics artist regularly and understandably thinks of others’ lives as material for comics. The narrative is destabilized because of its framed context: since it is given a title, it is filtered through Paul, and since it lies outside his experience, its historicity is undermined. Maybe Hornschemeier did see a clerk with a scar, and maybe he imagined this story at the time, rather than inventing it later. But readers of the comic are in no position to evaluate the self-­presentation, and our skeptical nature when faced with autobiographical claims (even if they are supported by Bullwinkle) may cause us to hesitate. Of all the narratives in The Three Paradoxes, “The Scar” possesses the most textural warmth. Colors are richer and not washed out. The two boys are playing with sticks as guns, and Matt’s brother’s stick in the scene’s first panel seems to float horizontally, immobile and fixed in time like Zeno’s Arrow. Matt has been hit by an absent projectile—both boys abide by the consensual rules of such childhood games—but since Matt had his “shields up” ([34], panel 3), he remains unscathed.12 The reader knows that this is part of an embedded narrative that is only being imputed to the convenience store clerk. Thus, any emotions or choices made belong not to Matt but to Paul himself, since “The Scar” constitutes another fictionalizing narrative within The Three Paradoxes. Following the car accident, Matt’s brother has to run for help. Hornschemeier extends the moment over several panels: it is a long distance, and it takes

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time. Or does it? The medium of comics prevents our making such a confident statement, because what the reader sees are static moments, in which no actual movement is possible. Again like Zeno’s Arrow, at any moment things depicted in a panel appear to be at rest.13 As Matt’s brother runs, the moment is frozen; and it is frozen in the next panel too. If the reader is to provide the perception of movement from one panel to another, it is something that can happen only in the reader’s imagination. Actual movement remains impossible. Or it is the Dichotomy (which is the same thing after all, isn’t it?), in which to get to help, Matt’s brother must first cross half the distance, and then half of what remains. Or it is the Stadium, in which the brother’s experience of time as he runs stretches out indefinitely, or as he remembers having run, or as Paul has him remember having run, or as Hornschemeier presents his autobiographical counter-­self Paul have him remember having run. All is One. But it is not the Achilles, since the car actually did hit Matt, who was unable to remain that little bit ahead of the faster-­moving object. Though his shields were up, he was hit anyway: “adult” realities literally collide with childhood fantasy. Finally, if the representation of sound within the comic is an indicator of time passing, then the fact that Matt W. is unable to speak makes him, as a character, unable to introduce the element of time to a panel within Hornschemeier’s narrative: because of the scar, he is uncannily unable to move. That inability resonates with the one fact that Paul knows about the clerk: he is in a minimum-­wage job offering little if any opportunity to advance. Being a convenience store clerk also symbolizes an inability to move, one felt particularly acutely by young adults first entering the workforce. The most overtly fictional of the worlds presented in The Three Paradoxes is also the most harrowing: a tale of childhood trauma in which one of a pair of twins is violently wounded. The language of twinning creates a doppelganger for Paul as well, so the reader cannot be disentangled from the story, which is further framed through a flashback. The presentation of childhood trauma ties to that in an earlier work by Hornschemeier, Mother, Come Home (2003). Both stories urge the reader to consider how we remember childhood and how we share these memories. Mother, Come Home pre­sents another attempt to reconcile a child’s relationship to his parents, and it, too, is presented with a fictionalizing authorial voice. Though it does not purport to be autobiographical, the entire work is presented as an “Introduction” by Thomas Tennant, even if no actual work is being introduced. Tennant is a fictional construct, but the deception is effective enough for him to be listed as an author on the relevant Amazon webpage.14 Hornschemeier’s fraudulent presentation (or is it merely a nom de plume?) depicts an individual looking back on how he and his father dealt with the

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death of his mother when he was a young boy.15 Self-­consciously poignant, its presentation of childhood revels in the innocence of youth. Wearing a lion mask, his mother’s last gift, provides the character Thomas with the talismanic courage to persevere. The boy engineers what in his mind is a dramatic nighttime rescue of his father from a mental institution, even if what the reader sees, though the virtue of details included in Tennant’s retrospective presentation, is only a childlike framework imposed on his father’s controlled and deliberate actions. Hornschemeier is able to preserve the most affecting moments of fatherhood. Father and son share a pillow as they both sleep on the floor one night, comforting each other in mourning. The most painful memories of my own youth involve the dreadful pain of mortification, and exactly this feeling is evoked when Thomas accidentally reveals to his uncle more than he intends to about his father’s condition. Hornschemeier invites readers to identify with memories of their own childhoods, summoning the humiliating anxieties caused by shame, embarrassment, and failure. In The Three Paradoxes, the final embedded story presses this tension further ([50]–­[56]). A ten-­cent 1950s-­era comic purportedly published by a company called “Elea,” battered and creased with age, shows “Zeno and his Friends” set in fifth-­century Athens ([50]). The style seems to evoke some Gold Key comics from the 1960s and 1970s, such as Bullwinkle and Rocky,16 which was based on the television cartoon series Rocky and His Friends, but the inclusion of the price more clearly evokes the scandals associated with the “ten-­cent plague” of the 1950s, when the medium of comics was associated most strongly with their corruptive influence on the youth (Hajdu). For Hornschemeier, all this is locked in the past, in a world where comics were purchased not in specialty stores but in convenience stores such as that seen in “The Scar.” Decades blur together as time stands still. Diachronic movement becomes impossible. The playful innocence of the embedded Zeno comic draws on the fond reminiscences of childhood and a golden age while presenting a story about Greek homoerotic desire in a context surrounding Socrates, who will eventually be killed by the state for, among other things, corrupting youth (Apology 24b). Fifth-­century philosophy and 1950s comics appear to share this implied threat of endangering children. It is an aggressive juxtaposition, the implications of which emerge the more it is considered. The apparently rough page edges that Hornschemeier introduces show a comic that has been read many times, shared among friends as its corrosive influence spreads. It is an earlier era of comics, separate from the boarded-­and-­bagged world of speculative investment that emerged in the 1980s. It is also an era of scaremongering about the alleged insidious influence of comics, at a time when an essentialized (and

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Figure 11.3. “Zeno and his Friends.” The Three Paradoxes, [54], panels 1–4. © 2007 Paul Hornschemeier.

simplified) notion of childhood was purportedly a victim to the corrupting power of the visual image. The comics evoked are sanitized and supposedly inoffensive. The Athenian setting of the narrative also has been sanitized and essentialized: white-­columned temples are the only architectural feature of the simplified Greek background.17 Zeno and Parmenides, both balding and white bearded, prepare to pre­sent the paradoxes to the assembled philosophers in the agora. It is Zeno’s debut, and the morose philosopher is anxious. After Zeno pre­sents his three paradoxes, the youngest of the assembled philosophers—the only one whose hair has not yet grayed and is still unbearded—offers his opinion: “Man, no offense, but are you guys retarded?” ([54], panel 3; see figure 11.3). This is Socrates, and his offensive, aggressive dismissal of Zeno’s paradoxes is presented with the same intellectual thuggery evident in some of the earlier Platonic dialogues, such as Euthyphro and Ion. At the end of the six-­page tale, Protagoras, the grand old man of pre-­Socratic philosophy, takes Zeno aside and counsels him that however suggestive the arguments against movement (and therefore against change and plurality) might seem intellectually, life as we experience it continues to move around us: “Zeno, I think young Socrates’ sword unpolished, but it strikes true enough. . . . Your paradoxes honor your lover’s monism, but still he ages . . . The gods go on working despite your efforts”

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([56], panels 2, 3, 7). The need for paternal approval, bullying, and a childlike inability to articulate one’s ideas all recur for the struggling Greek philosopher, who becomes another instantiation of Paul’s inability to proceed. Zeno is left alone, troubled, with a nest of emotions that the reader attributes to Paul in the frame narrative, who is still walking with his dad. Questions asked in one diegetic frame are seen to be applicable to another: Is this even going anywhere? Why are we moving so slowly? Paul’s attempts to capture stillness with his camera become blurry, just as they do for Matt’s brother in “The Scar” when he is running home. His thoughts about Zeno are dismissed by his father with Socratic bluntness: “I’ve just never bought those paradoxes . . . They just seem to get you thinking the wrong way, and you’re stuck in a loop . . . Besides, we’re walking, aren’t we?” ([49], panels 3, 5). Paul’s lingering doubts (“Right. . . . Well. I guess that’s why they still bother me,” panel 5) show that a commonsense sidestepping of the problem cannot suffice, certainly not for someone whose introspection has led them to write The Three Paradoxes. Other echoes between these stories resonate, beyond the repeated evocations of the world of earlier comics and the special appearance of the background of the page. “Zeno” and “Summer School” engage with preteen bullying explicitly, and that invites readings of “Paul and the Magic Pencil,” which might otherwise be thought secondary, since Paul’s suppressed violence is given free rein against the paternal Wise Guy in the Sky, whose unwillingness to answer direct questions can now be seen also as Socratic. Ultimately, all the stories deepen the primary narrative, which is about failed attempts at capturing stillness, passive inactivity, and a life in transition into adulthood. Every embedded narrative betrays itself as part of Paul’s self-­ presentation: “They just seem to get you thinking the wrong way, and you’re stuck in a loop” ([49], panel 5).18 Hornschemeier’s stories pull apart the artificiality of his autobiographical project, but do so in a way that recognizes a deep artistic design behind self-­exposure, the creative role of the imagination, and the paradoxical self-­aggrandizement inherent in choosing to pre­sent a modest narrative.19 Hornschemeier’s self-­presentation is problematic: it stalls itself, rejecting a continuous, Heraclitean flow, and folding into a recursive trap for the imagination, like Zeno’s paradoxes.20 In a prose narrative, self-­presentation can be accomplished with a single letter, I: its regular capitalization in English may point toward an implicit sense of self-­aggrandizement, but its simplicity allows the autobiographer to pass by the question quickly. It becomes a conventional usage against which other choices (such as when Xenophon and Julius Caesar use the third person to describe their own actions in their war commentaries)

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appear as marked. Comics are different because there is no easy “I” to elide the fact that one is talking about oneself: even when the pronoun is used, it must be accompanied by visual self-­presentation. At each stage, the artist needs to draw him- or herself, panel after panel. Depending on the artist’s practice, this might be done over several stages: blue-­penciled roughs followed by lines, inks, and colors for each panel in which the author self-­presents. When all these stages are completed by the sole creator, the intense introspection reverts recursively, and it is easy to peer over the edge into solipsistic inactivity. As Paul goes for a walk while visiting his dad, retracing previous childhood journeys and always returning to the same point, Hornschemeier recognizes the narrative risks he is taking. He possesses enough confidence to draw his own hairline (for example), time and again, through pencils, inks, and colors. The walk is one that father and son have taken before, and it is filled with memories and imagined futures, none of which actually take them out of time, though they can seem to do so. It comes at a time when Paul is moving into young adulthood, and that point on the line, as it were, dilates and occupies all the other points, both past and future. Yet by returning to the home in which he grew up, he seems to repudiate this advance, as if by reclaiming a moment of childhood he arrests the inevitable forward movement of his life. Again, the subjective experience of time is manipulated: elements of nostalgia exist in tension with the wistful anticipation of the future as the same road is walked again and again. While Paul may get stuck, drawing his childhood (and drawing in it) is one way to affirm his movement through life, a movement that may have slowed but can never truly stand still, despite the philosophical efforts of Zeno. This is a stop on the road: Paul is traveling to a new future, to meet Juliane for the first time, and his photography promises a stillness in a world of movement and accident. Juliane will one day be shown the photo of Paul’s dad and the photo of the man in the accident seen in “On the Way Here.” The reader sees both in The Three Paradoxes and looks at the mute survivor of the accident and thinks of Matt W., equally voiceless now, and of Paul’s dad. Socrates blurs into the bully that terrorized the young Paul, but also into the violent, repressed self of “Paul” with the blue pencil, shaped by the somber dismissal of paradox by Paul’s dad. The final images of The Three Paradoxes offer a last embodiment of the moving-­but-­not-­moving world described by Zeno. As he drives away from his parents’ house to return to Chicago, where he will meet Juliane, Paul practices the things he will say, words that will be the same when he repeats them in five days as they are now. The last page shows Paul’s car avoiding a deer that has been hit and killed in the road (a third automobile incident that lies outside of Paul’s immediate experience): Paul’s car is in the right lane, his car is in

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Figure 11. 4. Paradox of motion. The Three Paradoxes, [71], panels 1–3. © 2007 Paul Hornschemeier

the oncoming lane, and his car is back in the right lane again ([71], panels 1–3; see figure 11.4). Though the reader does not see it, Paul’s car has moved. The most basic practice in reading narratives of sequential art creates this effect. Whether or not we use McCloud’s term “closure” to explain the transition between panels, we perceive movement where, in fact, there is none.21 In this moment, as Paul puts himself into potential danger by facing oncoming traffic, he achieves something the last car that passed—the one that hit the deer—did not. In a small way, this is his victory. The photographic metaphor he will offer to Juliane—“You’re a little less blurry in person” (panel 5)— grants to the reader the author’s sense of satisfaction with that moment in his life. We share it with him before the anticipated encounter with Juliane, even though we do so while looking back through the author’s own recollection and representation of the event as he leaves his childhood behind. We forgive him for practicing his future dialogue because we do it ourselves, imagining in blue pencil what we want to say in crisp clean lines. Hornschemeier’s struggles to articulate this experience have caught him in a net created by the medium of comics. Yet just as we continue to read, moving from one immobile panel to the next, so too Paul’s life continues. Zeno’s paradoxes do not describe reality, and in the end Paul is able to leave his father and the nexus of childhood memories, driving himself out of the story.

Acknowledgments This research was supported by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

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Notes 1. See the study by Hatfield (108–151), which discusses Pekar (108–117) and Green (131–139). 2. Lejeune, Le Pacte, is an important starting point for thinking about autobiography. He describes the pact between the author and the reader, which offers a “promise of sincerity.” Lejeune later recognizes that there is always mediation in self-­presentation and that an autobiographer only claims to speak the truth about himself (Les Brouillons, 125). The studies by Mercier and Miller (215–241) consider the relationship between autobiography and French comics (bandes dessinées, or BDs). 3. Because The Three Paradoxes is unpaginated, I give references to specific locations in square brackets, [thus]. 4. McCloud discusses the use of the gutter and the modulation of time as sequenced panels create narrative (60–117). Groensteen’s spatio-­topical system aims to describe the same nebulous relationships. 5. It is considered in the most elementary approaches to comics narrative: “Closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous unified reality” (McCloud, 67). 6. A convenient starting point is Waterfield’s translation of the ancient sources for Zeno (69–81). 7. Matson argues that these are properly seen as arguments against plurality, but the distinction need not concern us; motion implies pluralities, and an argument against motion can be seen as advocating Parmenidean unity. 8. For a general and philosophical overview, see the works by both McLaughlin and Huggett. Important specialist studies include those by Cajori, Ushenko, Black, Booth, Lee (“Are Zeno’s Paradoxes” and Zeno), Bostock, McKie, Rosetti, Faris, Salmon, and Davey. 9. Whatever might be known generally is, I expect, filtered largely through a cultural memory of Zeno’s prominence in Hofstadter. 10. Because they relate to the book’s physicality and its wider marketing, not all these features exist in all versions of the work, and the features of the creative content of the book’s exterior may not reside with Hornschemeier, even if they point to an understanding and representation of the work’s themes. 11. Panel 7 on [61] pre­sents the head of Paul’s dad in the same position as in panel 4, and though there are changes (tie, no jacket, different glasses, dark hair, and no cap), the continuity between the two, on either side of the row of panels, is evident. Panel 7 also recapitulates panel 2 on [25], which was Paul’s version of the same moment. 12. This comment would seem to situate the game in the 1970s, with the shields being the force fields protecting space vessels in the TV series Star Trek (1966–1969) or the film Star Wars (1977). 13. The presence of speech balloons can interrupt this: their existence creates duration for the reader, inviting consideration of the panel as a generalizing representation of a period of time rather than as a single moment. 14. See www.amazon.com/Mother-­Come-­Home-­Paul-­Hornschemeier/dp/1560979739. 15. When asked explicitly about Mother, Come Home in an interview with Gary Groth, Hornschemeier admitted that the story possesses elements of autobiography. The unedited interview confirms it: “There are definitely elements, as I think, probably with any story there’s elements of autobiography and more overt biography about my father and his father.”

216  C . W. Marshall In the published interview, his words seem to anticipate the similar doublings in The Three Paradoxes: “More than anything, it’s really the story of the father, because the child is just this ghost drifting through, trying to affect things, but ultimately, because he’s seven years old, not being able to grab a hold of anything and really affect it.” 16. Bullwinkle #1–­#25 (November 1962–­February 1980, Dell/Gold Key), published with the title Bullwinkle and Rocky from issue 3 (April 1972); see www.mycomicshop.com /search?TID=234041. 17. Nisbet summarizes the problem in relation to the film Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure (1989): “Audiences assume Greece is boring (or ‘intellectual’, which amounts to the same thing . . .). Greece is also morally dubious (again, see ‘intellectual’)—but without the enticing eye-­candy of Roman vices” (7). 18. Compare Diotima’s deeply embedded speech in Plato, Symposium, 210a–212b, which may be thought most closely to reflect Plato’s own views. 19. Hornschemeier is explicit about the autobiographical content in his interview with Groth: “It’s just flat-­out autobiographical. The main character is Paul, me. I mean, there are some strange scenes where the cartoon [that] I’m drawing is actually—there’s a scene where I’m talking on the phone and it’s a real conversation that I had with a girl that I was supposed to meet in the near future in the book, and the actual person who’s talking on the phone in the story is the cartoon character . . . There’s a lot of zooming into and out of and blurring of various realities, hopefully not just for the sake of being a formal experiment.” 20. Again, the interview with Groth stresses the recursive nature of this narrative, how life imitates art: “It’s going well, but honestly, it’s [sighs] my God, it’s a huge, huge, problem because it’s just going really slow at this point. I’ve unfortunately had several projects that have been going on and on and on that are really interfering with it, because I have to pay rent, apparently.” 21. Note how the effect would be different with only the first and third panels: would the reader assume that the car had swerved to miss the deer?

Works Cited Aristotle. Physics. Translated by W. D. Ross. In The Complete Works of Aristotle, edited by J. Barnes. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1984. Black, M. “Achilles and the Tortoise.” Analysis 11 (1950): 91–101. Booth, N. B. “Zeno’s Paradoxes.” Journal of Hellenic Studies 77 (1957): 187–201. Bostock, D. “Aristotle, Zeno, and the Potential Infinite.” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 73 (1972): 37–51. Cajori, F. “The Purpose of Zeno’s Arguments on Motion.” Isis 3 (1920): 7–20. Davey, K. “Aristotle, Zeno, and the Stadium Paradox.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 24 (2007): 127–146. Eisner, W. Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practice of the World’s Most Popular Art Form. Expanded ed. Tamarac, Fla.: Poorhouse, 1985. Faris, J. A. The Paradoxes of Zeno. Aldershot, UK: Avebury, 1996. Green, J. Justin Green’s Binky Brown Sampler. San Francisco: Last Gasp, 1995. Groensteen, T. The System of Comics. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007.

Zeno, Childhood, and The Three Paradoxes   217 Hajdu, D. The Ten-­Cent Plague: The Great Comic-­Book Scare and How It Changed America. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009. Hatfield, C. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Hofstadter, D. R. Gödel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid. London: Basic Books, 1979. Hornschemeier, P. “Interview with Paul Hornschemeier.” By Gary Groth. Mome 1 (Summer 2005), edited by Gary Groth and Eric Reynolds. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2005. The unedited interview is available here: http://web.archive.org/web/20060321201359/http:// www.fantagraphics.com/anthol/mome1_hornschemeier.pdf. ———. Mother, Come Home. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2009. ———. The Three Paradoxes. Seattle: Fantagraphics, 2007. Huggett, N. “Zeno’s Paradoxes.” Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, substantively revised October 15, 2010. http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2010/entries/paradox-­zeno. Johnson, C. Harold and the Purple Crayon. New York: HarperCollins, 1955. Lee, H. D. P. “Are Zeno’s Paradoxes Based on a Mistake?” Mind 74 (1965): 563–570. ———, ed. Zeno of Elea. Amsterdam: Adof Hakkert, 1967. Lejeune, P. Les Brouillons de soi. Paris: Seuil, 1998. ———. Le Pacte autobiographique. Paris: Seuil, 1975. Matson, W. “The Zeno of Plato and Tannery Vindicated.” La parola del passato 43 (1988): 312–336. McCloud, S. Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. Northampton, Mass.: Kitchen Sink, 1993. McKie, J. R. “The Persuasiveness of Zeno’s Paradoxes.” Philosophical and Phenomenological Research 47 (1986–1987): 631–639. McLaughlin, W. I. “Resolving Zeno’s Paradoxes.” Scientific American, November 1994, 84–89. Mercier, J. P. “Autobiographie et bande dessinée.” Cahiers RITM [Recherches Interdisciplinaires sur les Textes Modernes] 20 (1999): 157–165. Miller, A. Reading Bande Dessinée: Critical Approaches to French-­L anguage Comic Strip. Chicago: Intellect, 2007. Newman, A. A. “Change Comes to Playground Funny Papers.” New York Times, November 30, 2012. www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/business/media/bazooka-­gum-­overhauls-­brand -­and-­loses-­comic-­strips.html. Nisbet, G. Ancient Greece in Film and Popular Culture. 2nd ed. Exeter, UK: Bristol Phoenix, 2008. Plato. Parmenides. Translated by M. L. Gill and P. Ryan. In Plato: Complete Works, edited by J. M. Cooper. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1997. Rosetti, L. “The Rhetoric of Zeno’s Paradoxes.” Philosophy and Rhetoric 21 (1988): 145–152. Salmon, W. C. Zeno’s Paradoxes. 2nd ed. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2001. Simplicius. On Aristotle’s Physics 6. Translated by D. Konstan. London: Duckworth, 1989. Ushenko, A. “Zeno’s Paradoxes.” Mind 55 (1946): 151–165. Waterfield, R. The First Philosophers. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000.

Chapter 12

Dancing with Demons: Consciousness and Identity in the Comic s of Lynda Barry Tamryn Bennett

From the syndicated strips of Ernie Pook’s Comeek (1977–2008) to more recent collections such as What It Is (2008) and Picture This (2010), Lynda Barry’s comics are known for their capacity to create palpable portals into childhood experiences, both her own and those of others. Drawing on personal and borrowed trauma, Barry battles childhood demons with ink, imagination, sass, and compassion to create comics fairy tales that explore forgotten and neglected experiences of childhood. The works reflect her own fragile experiences, as Barry states: “There are certain children who are told they are too sensitive, and there are certain adults who believe sensitivity is a problem that can be fixed in the way that crooked teeth can be fixed and made straight. And when these two come together you get a fairytale, a kind of story with hopelessness in it” (What It Is, 39). Her own intimate experience of “hopelessness” is what makes Barry’s reconstruction of childhood so visceral. As Tom Valeo suggests, she acts “as a go-­between, a medium, putting us in contact with long-­dead childhood experiences” (1). Whether masked as Marlys Mullen, the pig-­tailed protagonist of the long-­running Ernie Pook’s Comeek, or as the “Near-­Sighted Monkey” of later collections, her illustrations of vulnerable children paired with reflective captions provide rich insight into the multilayered psychological and social construction of childhood. Barry’s unique ability to straddle the realms of childhood and adulthood is epitomized in One! Hundred! Demons! (OHD, 2002) and What It Is, in which she collages her own childhood ephemera and experiences to make comics that are simultaneously memoir, social commentary, and creativity book. Through a series of praxical painting activities, Barry summons childhood memories and monsters to construct, console, and converse with her “plural-­selves” (Albright, 21). She not only conjures her own demons to better understand how childhood experiences shape adult behaviors, but also encourages her audience to pick up a paintbrush and do the same. Accordingly, this chapter

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examines Barry’s praxical process of creating comics to shine new light on representations of trauma, consciousness, and identity in childhood. Both OHD and What It Is harvest childhood materials and painfully awkward memories to create multidimensional comics that give rise to the neologism “autobifictionalography,” a term that Barry coined to describe the alchemy of creative methods used to make these collections. Barry’s “autobifictionalography” defies categorization as a comics genre or a category in a bookstore. While associations are often made with her early punk aesthetic and with underground creators such as Robert Crumb, Julie Doucet, Debbie Drechsler, and Arial Schrag, Barry’s eclectic and multiform comics remain in a class of their own (Kirtley). From her experimentation with the exhibition-­ cum-­coloring-­book Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! (1984) to the praxical writing and painting activities that bookend OHD and What It Is, Barry’s work continually redefines itself, along with the boundaries of comics. Her depictions of childhood trauma and adolescent awkwardness share confessional coming-­of-­age themes with graphic memoirs like Alison Bechdel’s Fun House (2006) and Craig Thompson’s Blankets (2003), yet what distinguishes Barry’s comics is a carefully crafted childlike style that renders the rough edges, bruises, and glittering first times in brilliant detail. As Jeanne Cooper observes of Barry’s inimitable approach: “[It] finds its source in childhood: scrawls, stick figures, doodlings. Dialogue in the cartoons is barely punctuated and brazenly misspelled” (1). The authenticity of Barry’s childlike scuffiness is intensified in OHD and What It Is through the use of collaged ephemera that literally glues the comics together. Both collections feature full-­page spreads of scapbook materials including childhood photographs, handwritten notes, report cards, feathers, lace, stamps, and newspaper clippings. These collages can be seen in the introductory pages of each episode of OHD and as punctuating the biographical narratives of What It Is. According to Susan Kirtley, Barry enmeshes real and remembered fragments of childhood to “render the world in this way” and to underscore “the bumpy, jarring experience of childhood” (42). Similarly, Emma Tinker suggests: “[Barry’s] deliberate rejection of a masculine, adult, professional aesthetic is accompanied by a commitment to the representation of children’s experience. She consciously adopts a messy childish technique, with scribbled lines, distorted limbs and wiggly panel edges” (123). The colorful scrapbook-­style collections signal a departure from her black-­and-­white syndicated strips toward larger formats, double-­page spreads, and more self-­reflective and extended narratives. In its combination of scrapbook assemblage, interactive exercises, and a deliberately naïve way of drawing, Barry’s “childish” style is instantly identifiable in a comics landscape often inked in clean black-­and-­white lines.

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Materializing Monsters In addition to Barry’s experimental aesthetic and use of multiple media, what sets her construction of childhood apart is the use of praxis to manifest memories. Part comic, part handbook, both OHD and What It Is are bookended by practical instructions. These instructions invite audiences to add ink and water in order to map their childhoods and conjure their own demons. An understanding of these praxical invocations can be enhanced by looking at Hannah Arendt’s theory of action. The Aristotelian concept of praxis was translated by Arendt to argue that human action is central to the formulation of identity. For Arendt, praxis involves the interplay of private and public actions stemming from the plurality of the human condition. The interior world of experience and memory coexist with the social and political world. According to Arendt, “The political realm rises directly out of acting together, the ‘sharing of words and deeds’” (198). In other words, through social interaction and active participation, we construct selves, concepts, and identities. In childhood, identity construction can occur via play, imagination, and social interaction. In adulthood, the activity of remembering childhood experiences reconstructs self-­narratives and personal histories. In using praxical activities to recall and represent childhood trauma, Barry’s comics manifest memories and demons in order to expand social representations of childhood trauma. These praxical activities not only allow Barry to materialize memories and battle childhood monsters, but also inform her creation of an interactive creativity book that encourages her readers to confront their own pasts. Originally published online, OHD collects Barry’s autobifictionalographic strips and glues them together with glittering collages and instructions for the Zen painting activity she first used to summon her inner demons. In the opening pages of the collection, an adult Barry is pictured, paintbrush in hand, at her work desk. Opposite Barry is a smiling demon that explains, “She was at the library when she first read about a painting exercise called ‘One Hundred Demons!’ The example she saw was a hand-­scroll painted by a Zen monk named Hakuin Ekaku, in sixteenth-­century Japan . . . She checked out some books, followed the instructions, and the demons began to come. They were not the demons she expected” (OHD, 8–10). Rather than manifesting multiheaded monsters, the painting activities summoned memories of head lice, the smells of neighbor’s houses, racism, and the loss of wonder as childhood morphed into adolescence. Barry’s praxical invocations reveal and reconstruct childhood experiences, both innocent (street games) and distressing (high school bullying). By combining these experiences with scrapbook memorabilia, her comics invite participatory perspectives on the impact of childhood

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trauma and imagination in constructing identity. As Kirtley suggests, Barry’s praxical process “serves not just to tell stories of childhood, but also to invoke the feeling of being a child through the intersection of content, artistic style, narration, and dialogue” (43). By recasting memories, Barry’s comics challenge the social construction of childhood as a sacred and safe space fostered by familial, community, and cultural ideals (Fivush and Buckner). In their use of praxical “play,” her comics question distanced adult reflections and concepts such as resilience: “I wasn’t alone in my knowledge. Nearly every kid in my neigborhood knew too much too soon . . . I cringe when people talk about the resiliency of children. It’s a hope adults have about the nature of a child’s inner life, that it’s simple, that what can be forgotten can no longer affect us. But what is forgetting?” (OHD, 66). Barry’s questions and invocations periscope into the inner life of children, a place that more chronological approaches to reconstruction of childhood gloss over. This is seen in Barry’s detailed recollections of games she used to play, such as imagining that pictures of cats on the wall could move, or finding the flowers needed to make magic potions (What It Is). For Barry, these acts of play are critical to conveying and understanding childhood experiences: “There can be an amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves, or looked like we were playing by ourselves. I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back” (What It Is, 51; emphasis in the original). Such detailed insights not only expose the importance of play in Barry’s construction of childhood, but also invite audiences to physically assemble and understand their own self-­narratives and constructions of childhood.

Constructing Childhood and Other Neighborhoods Childhood has been variously defined as a biological, social, cultural, political, and invented state. These theories include Robyn Fivush and Janine Buckner’s concept of identity as socially, culturally, and historically constructed beginning in childhood, as well as Daniel Albright’s notion of childhood reflected through multiple lenses of the “remembered self ” (21). Fivush and Buckner argue, “We each author our own life story; in constructing and recounting our past, we are simultaneously constructing and reconstructing our selves” (149). From the time we are children, our identities are reconstructed and retold via remembered autobiographical narratives. These self-­narratives are subject to multiple social, cultural, and psychological forces. As Albright explains, “There is not just one single ‘remembered self,’ permanently established by some fixed set of memory traces” (vii). Instead, our self-­narratives are recalled

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via fragments and reconstructed at a distance, which clouds their accuracy. According to Albright, the fragility of the remembered self stems from “(1) the brokenness of memory, (2) the difficulty of affirming that all memories pertain to the same self; and (3) the impossibility of pretending that a subject is an object. All three of these attacks tend to dissolve the self, to expose it as fictitious, artificial, quaintly contrived” (21–22). Barry acknowledges the broken nature of the remembered self by representing childhood as a series of fragmented experiences and episodes rather than as a continuous and chronological narrative. The remembered self becomes the plural-­self. In representing the remembered self, Albright suggests that plural-­selves compete and complement each other in the creation of self-­narratives (28). Embracing the plurality of the “remembered self,” Barry revisits and recasts childhood memories from multiple angles simultaneously: child, adult, observer, and artist. In collecting and conversing with these fragile, fragmented selves throughout OHD and What It Is, Barry edges toward understanding and reconciliation with her plural-­selves and the pain of growing up. Despite plurality rallying against a unified self, Kirtley suggests: “In bringing [OHD] together, including strips, collages and tutorials, Barry also manages to create an exceptional vision of ‘Lynda Barry.’ This image surely remains a fictionalized, heteroglossic self-­representation, yet this created identity gives the impression of distinctiveness and coherence as well as probity” (159). By acknowledging the fragmented nature and plural perspectives of childhood, Barry’s comics transcend the pretense of closure and continual self-­narrative. Further examples of a fragmented “remembered self ” can be found in “Lost Worlds,” the second strip of OHD, in which Barry manifests memories to examine seemingly forgotten instances of childhood. Beginning with the image of a neighborhood kickball game, she depicts a series of childhood experiences that expose a gradual loss of innocence and confidence. Early panels show Barry singing, dancing, waving at planes, and playing freely in the street, unaware of the self-­consciousness soon to descend. By the fifteenth panel of “Lost Worlds,” Barry is sitting alone in the gutter—the red-­haired, buck-­ toothed, freckle-­faced outcast of her neighborhood. According to Kirtley, this representation as a loner shows “how the figure of ‘Lynda Barry’ was constructed by and in opposition to these discourse communities” (148). Remembering and representing herself as an outcast from the kickball team and her neighborhood, Barry reflects on the sociocultural construction of identity in childhood. Through peer comparisons, Barry positions herself as awkward and ugly in order to illustrate the impact of social conditioning in shaping

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self-­narratives. Moreover, these self-­deprecating narratives and representations serve to demonstrate the subjectivity of the remembered self. Emphasizing the fragility of the remembered self, Barry puts an image of herself at age eight or nine waving at planes above the story of the kickball game. This image is captioned: “I believed the people in the airplanes passing over could see us and thought we looked cool. This was long before I grew up and found out that you can’t see very much from an airplane window. Big things, yes, but the little things are lost” (OHD, 32–33). This is both a comment on her naïve childhood actions and an admission that “at a certain distance” memories become fragile, since adults are prone to forgetting (33). While Barry acknowledges that with time and distance even “the unforgettable becomes the forgotten” (34), she argues that by praxically conjuring fragmented childhood memories, it is possible to recover the “lost worlds” of childhood in rich detail: “The ant hills on the sidewalk cracks, the grasshopper that fell in the storm drain, the ball too deep in the stickbushes to ever be recovered, a morning spent waiting” (34). This repeated reconstruction of memories illustrates the ways in which consciousness and identity are shaped by seemingly forgotten childhood experiences. Through praxical reflection, Barry’s adult self reconciles the fragmentation of memory, asking, “Who knows what moments make us who we are? Some of them? All of them? The ones we never really thought of as anything special?” (36). The multiple dimensions of “Lost Worlds” convey Barry’s nostalgia for childhood innocence in the final panels: “How many kickball games did I play? And what I would give to have just one more ups. What would I give to see them all again. Chuckie, roll the ball this way. Chuckie, roll me a good one” (36).

Metatextual Trauma Rather than a single remembered self, Barry reconstructs multiple selves that intersect with and reflect one another (Albright, 21). In both OHD and What It Is, a bespectacled Barry is repeatedly depicted inking and reconstructing her childhood experiences on yellow legal paper. By interacting with her plural-­ selves, Barry exposes the ways in which traumatic instances influence self-­ narratives, particularly a recurring shame involving dancing. In summoning a demon in the story “Dancing,” Barry explores the development of self-­ consciousness in childhood. Having grown up in a house with a record player in the kitchen, she depicts dancing as an everyday act, one enjoyed by her uncle’s dancing friends and her “teenage hula dancing cousins who bought their 45s and did entire dances that transfixed me totally” (OHD, 41). These

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explanations caption panels where Barry, her family, and kids on the street “shake it,” hula, and “funky chicken” without a hint of embarrassment. Inspired by her cousins, Barry signs up for hula classes, but when she invites the “girl who could dance in a way that made us all stand still” to enter a dance contest with her, something internal shifts (42). Innocent hula aspirations are crushed as the new girl on the block tells Barry, “You jump around all stupid, waving your arms like you got mental problems with your face all looking like the cover of a Mad magazine” (44). Although the factual accuracy of the new girl’s dialogue is questionable, what follows is an account of how this comment affected Barry’s self-­confidence: “Up until then I never thought about the way I danced. I had no idea I was considered to be something of a spaz. This news was a heavy blow. All of a sudden, dancing got hard. Even hula dancing felt weird to me. I still went to class but I started dancing in the back row. I noticed the music sounded less wonderful and that my teacher looked less beautiful, and more insane. Even my dancing relatives started looking crazy to me, and I realised it was weird to have a record player in the kitchen” (44–45). The new girl’s comments are the catalyst for Barry’s self-­consciousness and identification as “something of a spaz” (OHD, 45). Before these revelations, Barry was blissfully unaware that her self-­expression was considered strange. After she hears them, her enjoyment of taking hula classes and watching her dancing relatives diminishes, and Barry becomes an insecure figure, “mortified” by family swing sessions and her fear of looking like a “spaz.” The impact of social interaction on Barry’s self-­consciousness is echoed in What It Is, in which she recounts: “I also stopped dancing around—or dancing in any way. This wasn’t a decision. I couldn’t dance in front of people if I wanted to. My body just froze-­up. My only feeling was embarrassment. I quit my hula dancing lessons” (90). Repeated retellings of this childhood event exemplify the potential of plural-­selves to creatively express and overcome trauma through a spectrum of perspectives. In the final four panels of “Dancing,” Barry’s reflection on the new girl’s comments show she doesn’t “blame that girl for knocking me out of my groove” (OHD, 47). Instead, Barry reconciles this event via universal concepts of childhood development, suggesting, “I was about to start junior high school. It was going to happen anyway. But it was a long time before I got [the groove] back” (47). Barry’s representations expose the role of peer interactions in social construction of self-­ consciousness and negative identity. Barry’s dialogue with plural-­selves conceives of time and memory as multidimensional, forgoing the linearity often assumed in the narrative analysis of comics. As Kirtley asserts, “Multifarious Lyndas are juxtaposed against one

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another, crossing the boundaries of time and location to question identity” (168). By juxtaposing adult revelations with childhood experiences, Barry constructs “meta-­moments in which she pictures herself shaping and creating the project that is Demons, drawing attention to the conspicuously crafted nature of autobifictionalography” (160). The potential for Barry’s plural-­selves is further magnified by the visual-­verbal dependence of comics. As Charles Hatfield argues, “The interaction of word and picture—that basic tension between codes—allows for the ongoing intertextual or metatextual commentary, a possibility that threatens the very idea of a unified self ” (127). This plurality is supported by Hillary Chute’s assertion that “comics contain ‘double-­vision’ in their structural hybridity, their double (but nonsynthesized) narratives of words and images” (459). Experimentation with dual identities has long been a part of comics creation, as seen in the history of alter egos and intergalactic travel in genres like superhero comics; what differentiates Barry’s invocation of plural-­selves is her consistent focus on the shattering of self through experiences of childhood trauma. Layered over time and through lenses of trauma, the notion of a unified self becomes unstable because of the fractured forgetting that characterizes adult recall of childhood. This fragility results in psychoanalytic, poststructural, and literary skepticism regarding the remembered self, which Barry attempts to counter through intensive praxis, childhood photographs, and ephemera evidencing her memories. In the opening collage of “Resilience,” a young Barry is pictured staring out the window at the limbo land of “can’t remember can’t forget” (OHD, 62). Upside-­down demons surround a photograph of a young Barry; masking tape covers her eyes. “Resilience” enters a realm of childhood experience darker than that of “Lost Worlds,” as Barry explains, “When I was little, bad things had gone on, things too awful to remember but impossible to forget” (65). The result of this trauma is a foggy, fractured, and fragile remembered self. Reconstructing memories of her first kiss, school dance parties, and the desperation of trying to be a part of the in crowd, Barry layers a spectrum of awkward experiences to expose the ways in which childhood trauma feeds adolescent insecurities. Through this fragmented mosaic, Barry represents childhood and identity as a collection of instances and acts, some forgotten and some recalled. She also begins to question what experiences constitute the end of childhood innocence: “When did I become a teenager? Was it when I started shop-­lifting? Dropped acid laid on me by strange hippies in the park? Hitch-­hiked in halter tops? Got drunk on wine stolen from a synagogue? I was 13 when I did these things” (71). While the unreliability of the remembered self can result in skepticism regarding self-­narratives, especially childhood narratives, Barry critiques the

Figure 12.1. Lynda Barry, “Resilience,” One! Hundred! Demons!, Sasquatch Books, 2002. © 2002 Lynda Barry. {B}

Figure 12.2. Lynda Barry, “Resilience,” One! Hundred! Demons!, Sasquatch Books, 2002. © 2002 Lynda Barry. {B}

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adult idea of forgetting and silencing trauma (Neisser and Fivush, 88). In what is perhaps the most cryptic caption in One! Hundred! Demons!, Barry exposes the “dark ghosts” of self-­doubt and rejection that make “having an identity impossible” (70). These reflective lines caption an image of a buck-­toothed Barry walking alone as her so-­called friends leave her behind. The next panel shows a young Barry crying herself to sleep as an older Barry explains that “dark ghosts” are the shadows and tremors of childhood trauma, which some adults believe can be dimmed by “forgetting” with distance and age. She argues: “Remembering not to remember fractures you . . . This ability to exist in pieces is what some adults call resilience. And I suppose in some way it is a kind of resilience, a horrible resilience that makes adults believe children forget trauma” (70). Far from being a forgetting of childhood trauma, “Resilience” exposes how these shattering instances shape adult behaviors and self-­narratives. The image of existing in pieces is repeated throughout One! Hundred! Demons!, not only in Barry’s metatextual conversations, but also in her attempt to collect memories to understand fragmented plural-­selves as part of a whole. This quest to glue together broken pieces of self is acknowledged in the final panels of “Resilience,” in which Barry is depicted drunk, alone, and crying in the bushes at two in the morning: “I caught up with the home-­ec girl’s way of being, doing things that made me feel exhilaratingly whole. I know this may be hard to understand, this compulsion to repeat the situations that harmed you . . . the time when shattering into pieces became a way of life” (71–72). Although Barry shies away from depicting explicit details of “shattering” experiences, fracturing and forgetting is linked to the trauma of early sexual experiences. This is seen in the final panel: Barry is pictured as a small child holding a doll, and an older man asks, “Hey there, sweetheart. Do you and your dolly want to go for a ride?” (72). The man is depicted from the waist down, emphasizing the fracturing and trauma associated with the experience. The memory of the man is cut in half, demonstrating the fragmented nature of memory, especially in instances of trauma. By collecting these traumatic and fractured instances, Barry attempts to glue the shattered self back together. Despite the vividness of Barry’s recall, it must be noted that both the fracturing of memory and the condensed nature of comics influence her construction of childhood. According to Kirtley, “Barry alleges an undeniable although unreliable authority in telling her story through these multiple selves, playing with the creator’s vision of herself and with the visions others have of her” (159). While her depiction of plural selves and childhood demons can be seen as selective and fantastical imaginings, Barry’s incorporation of childhood photographs and artifacts adds multiple dimensions to the reconstruc-

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tion of childhood and identity. Using multiple media, origami, stamps, and found objects, Barry’s comics materialize the symbolic demons and monsters that shaped her childhood. Kirtley argues that these assemblages enable Barry “to depict simultaneous selves in conversation through picture, word, and ephemera and forces the reader to make sense of these dialogues” (174). Similarly, Cooper suggests that “by retrieving the everday discards of conversation and experience, and mixing in remnants of her personal life, Barry has created a found art of children’s souls, one that can veer from harrowingly poignant to wildly funny and never go off course” (1). Though her comics are consistently praised for their acurate portrayal of children’s dialogue and scruffy drawing styles, Barry admits to favoring fragmented realities and symbolic intensity over a chronolocigally accurate account of events: “I’d say like 15 to 25 percent of the comic strips may have actually happened to me. As you go through a story, you need to periodically ground yourself in something that you know is true. The thing that’s autobiographical about my work is that I picture it; I see it happening on the streets where I grew up” (Barry, “The Lynda Barry Interview,” 1). This admission is another example of plurality in Barry’s comics. By using shared childhood experiences and overheard conversations, Barry again demonstrates the metatextual possibilities of interacting with multiple real, borrowed, and imagined selves in the construction of identity and consciousness. By combining personal childhood ephemera with found materials and multidimensional narratives, Barry creates plural-­selves that converse with one another through time and space, across childhood and adulthood. As Kirtley observes, these metatextual reflections reinforce “Barry’s insistence on the fractured identity of girlhood” (154). Unlike conventional and chronological memoirs, One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is do not always follow a linear chronology. Instead Barry’s comics conceive of time, space, and self as multidimensional and metatextual. This approach is championed by Barry in the “Writing the Unthinkable” workshops that she facilitates to share her praxical methods of creation.

Comic s as Creative Therapy In sharing this metatextual patchwork of selves and praxical painting exercises, Barry not only establishes a new genre of comics, but also lays foundations for comics as creative therapy in overcoming childhood trauma. Through conversations with remembered plural-­selves, Barry begins to build pictures of herself that contend with the trauma of having drunken parents and of being continually cast as an awkward outsider because of her “bad teeth and clothes” (OHD, 69). By contrasting images of her insecure child

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self with adult reflections, Barry’s metatextual interactions expose the ways in which traumatic episodes shape childhood. According to Tinker, “One Hundred Demons encapsulates the appalling tension of early trauma, the condition of being both present and absent, trapped in childhood and forced into adulthood” (128). Beyond the bright colors and humor, Barry’s comics expose the dark shadows of self-­doubt originating in a difficult childhood. Her childhood nemeses aren’t just the usual bullies but also the invisible monsters of loneliness, heartache, and humiliation—the demons that crush dreams and aspirations. By praxically conjuring and collaging memories of hula-­dancing humiliation, drunken parents, and death, Barry explores the impact of childhood trauma on consciousness and fractured identity. Barry’s practice of re-­creating and reflecting on childhood experiences involves psychoanalytic theories of art therapy, which uses creative processes to help people express, examine, and heal trauma. According to Cathy Malchiodi, art therapy combines psychotherapeutic methodologies with psychological, somatic, and interpersonal aspects of creative self-­expression. Aligned with Malchiodi’s expressive and interactive techniques, One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is encourage a praxical approach to reconstructing childhood trauma, suggesting it is profitable to examine trauma from multiple perspectives and through plural-­selves. As Kirtley observes: “In compiling these strips from her life, remembering that which she could not bear to recall and rendering the pieces of self that endured such identity-­shattering trauma, [Barry] attempts to reassemble a fractured psyche, creating a self—not a homogenous, unified self, but a heteroglossic one, composed of many voices speaking to one another across space and time” (166). Barry’s praxical documentation of the process critiques the problematic adult perception of “resilience” and “forgetting” as coping mechanisms for childhood trauma. While Drake and Winner’s (2012) studies provide contrary evidence for the benefits of distraction in trauma therapy, Barry’s comics pose questions that conjure vivid experiences and memories to reconstruct and reexamine the root of the trauma. Demon by demon, Barry’s traumas are remembered, reconstructed, and reconciled. In “Lost and Found,” the final strip of One! Hundred! Demons!, Barry reveals how creating comics has helped her battle the demon of self-­doubt. The comic, which recalls her love of reading the classifieds, shows Barry imagining the stories behind lost-­and-­found notices: “Each quarter-­inch ad was like a chapter in a book. I’d imagine the whole story: The freaked-­out people, the freaked-­out animals, and me, always coming to the rescue and never accepting the reward” (209). Through play and imagination, Barry is transformed from the outcast kid to the hero. She explains how making comics enabled her to

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finally find her place and peace of mind: “My trouble ended when I started making comic-­strips” (215). Reflecting on being the creator of hundreds of comic strips, Barry concludes, “I’m sure that the nine-­year-­old version of me who made up all ‘classified stories’ would think that this one had a very happy ending” (216). These collected selves (real, imagined, and remembered) provide unparalleled windows into childhood experiences, consciousness, and development of identity. In creating comics that collage her fractured selves, Barry reconciles with the hopelessness of her own childhood.

Questioning Consciousness and Identity in What It Is What It Is continues Barry’s praxical quest to remember and piece together fragmented childhood memories and plural-­selves. Stylistically, the comic expands on the colorful and collaged foundations of One! Hundred! Demons!, incorporating handwritten notes and children’s schoolwork taken from the collection of an elementary school teacher, Doris Mitchell. By inking, coloring, cutting, and collaging fragments, Barry represents childhood through a collection of intense instances, acts, and experiences that shape plural-­selves. Yet where Demons! attempts a kind of closure or a move toward wholeness, What It Is mines the depths of the subconscious and the sociocultural construction of childhood. The collection begins with pages of collaged notes and questions: “Where is the image world? What is the past? Where is your imagination? What is an experience?” These questions and handwritten notes punctuate a fragmentary account of Barry’s childhood. Her fairy tale begins with the memory of a game in which she made images and toys come to life. This kind of play helped Barry cope with her home life: “My parents were not reading people. They worked, shouted, drank, slapped, belted and were broke. They had affairs and secret lives my two brothers and I had no part in, and if they could have turned back time to the days before we were born, I believe they would have. But there we were” (26). Through these recollections, Barry begins to question what shapes our identity, why we forget certain things, and why play is critical to the construction and reconstruction of childhood. After a supermarket giveaway, four books make their way into Barry’s house. These books show her something quasi-­magical: “Paper and ink have conjuring abilities of their own. Arrangements of lines and shapes of letters and words on a series of pages make a world we can dwell and travel in” (38). Through the praxical acts of play and imagination, Barry demonstrates the ways in which childhood is constructed, recollected, and reassembled. In an example of entangling fairy tales with her childhood experiences, Barry inks herself in the role of Heidi, traveling up the mountain and despairing for her

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imaginary future (38). Exposing her child self ’s capacity for engagement and belief in these imaginary worlds, Barry writes, “I remember it like it happened to me. I suppose you could say that it did” (38). Heidi’s story becomes a part of Barry’s own self-­narrative, revealing how childhood experiences, both real and imagined, are layered in the development of consciousness and identity. For Barry, fantasy worlds are not created in order to escape reality, but rather to cope with a sometimes difficult world. Her comics continually demonstrate the transformative capacity and importance of imaginary worlds for children. Barry argues: “Playing and fun are not the same thing, though when we grow up we may forget that, and find ourselves mixing up playing with happiness. There can be a kind of amnesia about the seriousness of playing, especially when we played by ourselves . . . or looked like we were playing by ourselves. I believe a kid who is playing is not alone. There is something brought alive during play, and this something, when played with, seems to play back” (What It Is 51). The ability to re-­create the intensity of play and to bring emotional memories to life is central to the success of What It Is. As in One! Hundred! Demons!, Barry’s intense construction of simultaneous selves involve praxical incarnations. These creative invocations of childhood experiences enable her to bend time and space to converse with younger selves. In doing so, she gives voice to childhood experiences otherwise silenced, and encourages her audience to participate in the same process. This practice of revisiting and conversing with inner selves is common in art therapy (Malchiodi). By engaging in praxical play, Barry’s comics not only represent her childhood, but also actively reassemble pieces of self shattered by trauma. After recasting herself as an eight-­year-­old, Barry battles mythical demons and dark ghosts of childhood. In recounting her fear of the Gorgon, Barry explains how she overcomes her anxiety through play and imagination. Although terrifying, the Gorgon teaches Barry valuable coping mechanisms: “Did the Gorgon help me love my mother? I think she helped me very much. We never need certain monsters more than when we are children. And a furious woman with terrifying eyes and snakes for hair was the perfect monster for me” (What It Is, 66). By reconstructing childhood experiences, Barry understands the monster as a symbol of her mother, as well as the importance of play, courage, and imagination in reconciling childhood trauma and fractured relations with her family. For this reason, What It Is shares praxical instructions to aid the recovery of memories and creative self-­expression as a means of making the fractured self whole. By continually asking, “What is self-­consciousness? What is reflection? What is an image?” Barry borrows a praxical process learned from her teacher Marilyn Frasca, to whom What It Is is dedicated. Barry invokes images—cat pictures that kept her company, drawings that she made in school—as essen-

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tial components in the reconstruction of memory, consciousness, and identity in childhood. These images not only are her imaginary friends, but also help transform Barry from a “fragmented imitator” into, arguably, one of the most innovative and original comics creators exploring consciousness and childhood (116). In the final section of What It Is, Barry expands the painting activities of One! Hundred! Demons! into a praxical “Creativity Book” (137–188). Two full-­page spreads welcome her audience to “Writing the Unthinkable,” where a “magic cephalopod” acts as tour guide (138). Barry explains that the creativity book “contains some of the exercises we use in the class to help us find images and follow them as they take form,” and she introduces a series of writing activities designed to conjure memory and generate creative material (138). These activities orbit childhood memory, referring specifically to Stuart Dybek’s study Childhood and Other Neighborhoods (159). Echoing Dybek, Barry represents “childhood as a place rather than a time. A place that already exists like an unplayed-­with play set, needing only one thing to set all things in motion” (159). For Barry, these neighborhoods of images, “neighborhoods of things we have hated, things we have broken, things we have lost,” are the sparks that bring childhood memories and imagination to life (160). Through a series of praxical exercises, Barry invites her audience to remember forgotten childhood experiences as starting points for narratives, both autobiographical and fictional. These activities include instructions such as “Set your timer for 4 minutes and write down the names of the 20 classmates that come to you from early school days” and “Write the first 10 images that come to you as a list” (160, 177). It is through these practical incarnations that Barry summons childhood memories in order to examine the construction and reconstruction of consciousness and identity. True to Barry’s experimental style and attempts to represent the simultaneity of experience, What It Is doesn’t attempt to offer narrative closure, nor does it paint a chronological and complete representation of childhood. Instead, Barry’s praxical process of making comics continues to pre­sent pathways for psychological and social constructions of childhood, both her own and those of her audience. Ultimately, the comics of Lynda Barry represent childhood as a social construction of intense instances and experiences that shape plural-­selves. While the splintering of selves, both real and imagined, may be unavoidable, Barry’s praxical comics glue together a galaxy of fragmented experiences and fractured childhood memories to move toward a sense of the self as whole. As this analysis of One! Hundred! Demons! and What It Is demonstrates, by invoking and confronting childhood monsters and trauma, Barry exposes possibilities for comics not only to represent childhood, but also to actively reconstruct it.

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In this way, Barry’s praxical comics counter the hopelessness of childhood experiences. And while her endings are not always as neat as those in fairy tales, they champion a hope of reconciliation and understanding for those brave enough to question and confront childhood demons.

Works Cited Albright, Daniel. “Literary and Psychological Models of the Self.” In The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-­Narrative, edited by Ulric Neisser and Robyn Fivush, 19–40. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 2nd ed. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998; orig. pub. 1958. Barry, Lynda. The! Greatest! Of! Marlys! Seattle: Sasquatch, 2000. ———. “The Lynda Barry Interview.” By Thom Powers. Comics Journal, no. 132, November 1989. www.tcj.com/the-­lynda-­barry-­interview. ———. Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Seattle: Real Comet, 1984. ———. One! Hundred! Demons! Seattle: Sasquatch, 2002. ———. Picture This: The Near-­Sighted Monkey Book. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2010. ———. What It Is. Montreal: Drawn and Quarterly, 2008. Chute, Hillary. “Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative.” PMLA 123, no. 2 (March 2008): 452–465. Cooper, Jeanne. “Her Imperfect Life: Cartoonist–­Playwright Lynda Barry Turns Adolescent Angst into Art.” Washington Post, February 7, 1993. Drake, Jennifer, and Winner, Ellen. “Confronting Sadness through Art-­Making: Distraction Is More Beneficial than Venting.” Psychology of Aesthetics, Creativity, and the Arts 6, no. 3 (2012): 255–261. Available at www.jenniferedrake.com/uploads/7/0/5/5/7055907 /drake_winner_2012_paca.pdf. Fivush, Robyn, and Janine P. Buckner. “Creating Gender and Identity through Autobiographical Narratives.” In Fivush and Haden, Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self, 149–168. Fivush, Robyn, and Haden, Catherine, eds. Autobiographical Memory and the Construction of a Narrative Self: Developmental and Cultural Perspectives. Mahwah, NJ: Erlbaum, 2003. Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Kirtley, Susan E. Lynda Barry: Girlhood through the Looking Glass. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2012. Malchiodi, Cathy. Creative Interventions with Traumatized Children. New York: Guilford, 2008. Neisser, Ulric, and Robyn Fivush. The Remembering Self: Construction and Accuracy in the Self-­Narrative. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. Tinker, Emma. “Identity and Form in Alternative Comics, 1967–2007.” Thesis, University College: London, 2008. http://eprints.ucl.ac.uk/17599/1/17599.pdf. Valeo, Tom. “Lynda Barry’s Vision of Childhood.” Chicago Reader, May 25, 1989. www.chi cagoreader.com/chicago/lynda-­barrys-­vision-­of-­childhood/Content?oid=873916.

Chapter 13

The Grotesque Child: Animal-­Human Hybridity in Sweet Tooth Mark Heimermann

Theorizing the Grotesque Child In his book Childhood, Chris Jenks observes, “The child is familiar to us and yet strange, he or she inhabits our world and yet seems to answer to another, he or she is essentially of ourselves and yet appears to display a systematically different order of being” (3). Jenks’s description of the child emphasizes his or her liminal nature as a creature existing between worlds. The liminality inherent in Jenks’s description is strikingly similar to definitions of the grotesque. For example, Leonard Cassuto writes, “The grotesque is born of the violation of basic categories. It occurs when an image cannot be easily classified even on the most fundamental level: when it is both one thing and another, and thus neither one” (6). Cassuto’s definition of the grotesque is similar to Jenks’s definition of childhood in its emphasis on the problems of simple categorization. Consider the Minotaur: a grotesque figure straddling multiple worlds. Both its animal and its human characteristics are familiar, but not when presented together in the jarring figure of the animal-­human hybrid. Startling juxtapositions that defy orderly classification are ubiquitous among the grotesque. Scholars of the grotesque emphasize the juxtaposition or fusion of the fa‑ miliar with strange or oppositional elements, or the transformation of familiar elements into something strange (Cassuto, 6; Edwards and Graulund, 3; Gysin, 28; Harpham, 9). The grotesque’s unsettling juxtapositions and combinations are often lauded for their disruptive and subversive qualities because they have the potential to force viewers and readers to reexamine the ways in which they order the world (Cassuto, 8; Edwards and Graulund, 3; Gysin, 28; Harpham, 12). It is the conceptualization of children as grotesque, as creatures belonging to multiple worlds but fully belonging to none, that this chapter employs in

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an attempt to better understand contemporary constructions of childhood. But Jenks’s description of the child, and its similarity to definitions of the grotesque, does not challenge our ability to classify children because of startling juxtapositions or fusions. It relies on the liminal nature of childhood. No longer infants but not yet adolescents, children are not driven by the same motivations as adults. Contributing to the strangeness of children is the sanitation by nostalgia of some adults’ memories of their childhoods. In addition, a rapidly changing technological landscape has altered the ways in which many children spend their free time. Furthermore, although children have had products like comic books marketed directly to them since at least the 1930s (Wright, xvi), marketers during the 1990s invented the term “age compression” to describe the marketing of some products created for adults, like lip gloss, directly to children (Lassonde, 53). This practice encourages children to exert commercial agency in new ways and blurs the line between child and adult as children are encouraged to consume products originally designed for adults. Simultaneously, adults often strive to appear younger because of the obsession with youth that pervades Western culture. There are two dominant conceptualizations of childhood in Western thought: the child as innocent and the child as chaotic and even evil. These strands of thought exist side by side, even though some may value one conception over the other or reject them both outright. Shirley Pressler notes that the innocent child found in Romantic conceptions of childhood, such as Rousseau’s, is considered to be in need of protection (19). James Kincaid observes that Romantic conceptions of innocence were initially used as a metaphor. The Romantic poets and philosophers constructing the innocent child imbued it with traits that were a reaction against the Enlightenment: “spontaneity, imaginative quickness, and a closeness to God.” Kincaid also argues that the Romantic child is most important for its negative attributes: it is “free of adult corruptions” and “not yet burdened with the weight of responsibility, mortality, and sexuality” (14–15; emphasis in the original). Thus, the innocent child is defined by its lack of experience. This is why it is in need of protection. It must be sheltered because exposure to the world chips away at the veneer of innocence. This is also why Western society categorizes a child who begins puberty as an adolescent: he or she can no longer be considered unburdened by sexuality. A more puritanical view of childhood constructs the child as chaotic or evil (Pressler, 19). This type of child, which is associated in the Western tradition with original sin, is likely to embrace its animalistic or inherently evil side if not regulated by adult oversight. But this oversight, rather than protecting the child from the larger world, is about protecting the larger world

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from the child. The puritanical view is Hobbesian. Children must be shaped and controlled so that they learn to suppress their natural tendencies to engage in the types of behavior that civilized society abhors. A good literary example of this is found in William Golding’s Lord of the Flies. In the novel, children are stranded on an island without any adults. The institutions that shape them, such as school, are absent. The lack of structure and regulation leads to the bulk of the children reverting to uncivilized savagery, which involves brutality and murder. It is this behavior that must be suppressed in the chaotic or evil child. The coexistence of two contradictory constructions of childhood in Western culture over an extended period of time may be productively considered grotesque. Two oppositional ideologies existing in tandem across time and space, yet curiously joined in the public consciousness. Take, for example, Marina Warner’s essay “Little Angels, Little Monsters: Keeping Childhood Innocent,” in which she explores childhood innocence in contemporary Western culture. The title gets at the oppositional nature of Western conceptions. “Little Angels” embodies the innocence and elevated status of Romantic conceptions, while “Little Monsters” embodies children’s unruly nature and the fearful discourse of the Puritans. Warner asserts: “The nostalgic worship of childhood innocence . . . is more marked today than it ever has been” (45). Nonetheless: “In the very midst of consecrating innocence, the modern mythology of childhood ascribes to children a specially rampant natural appetite for all kinds of transgressive pleasures, including above all the sadomasochistic thrills of fear. And these child heroes—and heroines—now enjoy a monopoly on all kinds of unruly passions which adults later have to learn to control in themselves” (52). The presence of these “unruly passions” during a period of intense belief in the innocence of children embodies the conjoining of Romantic and puritanical strands of thought in a single model. In this conception, children need to be sheltered not solely from the larger, potentially corrupting world, but also from their own desires. The reason for these thrill-­seeking qualities, for Warner, can be found in the reasons that society constructs childhood. It is not constructed for children, but for adults: “Grown-­ups want them [children] to stay like that [innocent] for their sakes, not the children’s, and they want children to be simple enough to believe in fairies too, again, for humanity’s sake on the whole, to prove something against the evidence” (Warner, 54). Warner believes that society seeks to maintain childhood innocence because a society without childhood innocence reflects a failure on the part of adults in shaping the world. The chaotic, thrill-­seeking nature that Warner identifies in conceptions of childhood, which seems to be at odds with the innocent child, is

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another compensation for adults, who are supposed to control such desires. For Warner, contemporary understandings of childhood’s innocence and unruly nature can coexist in the same strand of thought because they both provide something for adults. The dual construction of childhood is not always noticeable in an individual child, but it exists culturally. Warner writes, “Although the cultural and social investment in childhood innocence is constantly tested by experience, and assailed by doubts, it’s still continued to grow” (58). But so does its dark opposite: “Bad children—a symptom of modernity—surface again and again in some of the most powerful contemporary fiction” (57). Thus, these constructions coexist even when they challenge each other. Kathryn Bond Stockton recognizes this as one of the chief paradoxes of childhood studies: “Just as children are deemed more vulnerable by their guardians in the 1990s (and thus are deemed more in need of protections, many in the form of laws), they are constructed as more problematic, as presenting adults with more and newer problems, even dangers to face” (37). Even though conceptions of childhood challenge each other, society still allows for both. Therefore, contradictory constructions exist simultaneously: a child with two heads, angel and demon—a grotesque child. Conceptions of childhood become unsettled, and the ability to classify childhood accurately is troubled because the combination undermines each disparate element. Aspects of the opposed conceptions may be closely related. For example, the imagination of the Romantic child is valued, while the chaotic nature of the puritanical child is feared. But imagination and chaos may not be that far removed from each other. Imagination may wreak havoc on established structures or ideas. Yet the larger groupings under which these attributes are associated, innocence and evil, especially as pertaining to original sin, are relatively incompatible. These varied conceptions have become intertwined in culture over time. It is important to acknowledge that constructions of childhood, like the day-­to-­day realities of childhood, are often informed by social class. For example, upper-­class children are often sheltered longer than middle- or lower-­ class children. Upper-­class children have less need to work, and in earlier time periods were more likely to be educated. Lower-­class children, on the other hand, often have to begin work at a younger age and are more likely to be exposed to the difficulties and unfairness of the world sooner. Steven Mintz provides a thorough accounting of these distinctions in his comprehensive text Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Mintz’s book is especially interested in how children have functioned as active, social agents throughout US history, and he often discusses the realities of childhood in relation to social class. Mintz notes that the expansion of capitalism in the mid-­nineteenth cen-

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tury allowed many urban middle-­class families, whose wealth was increasing, “to provide an extended, protected childhood,” whereas this was not possible for working-­class families, whose children were “indispensible economic resources” (134). But though the realities of childhood vary by class, and many other factors, the constructions of childhood this chapter details cross class lines. For instance, working-­class parents are certainly just as interested in protecting the innocence of their children as affluent parents.

Part Animal , Part Human: The Grotesque Child in Sweet Tooth The premise that childhood can productively be considered grotesque, as can the coexistence of disparate strands of thinking regarding childhood in Western discourses, informs this chapter’s understanding of the comic book Sweet Tooth, a serialized comic that followed a monthly publication schedule from 2009 to 2013 and has been compiled in six volumes of trade paperback collections. The comic was written and mostly drawn by Jeff Lemire, although occasionally other artists contributed.1 Sweet Tooth takes place in a postapocalyptic United States approximately seven years after a plague began decimating the human population. The only people immune to the plague are children born after its onset. These children are inexplicably born as animal-­human hybrids. The titular character, Gus (nicknamed Sweet Tooth), is a mostly human-­ looking hybrid with antlers and deerlike ears. Some hybrids appear predominantly human, some animal, but all blur the line between the categories of animal and human, unsettling readers’ ability to easily classify them. The little available scholarship on Sweet Tooth takes hybridity as a central concern of the comic. Katherine Kelp-­Stebbins employs a posthumanist lens when discussing Sweet Tooth. She argues that the series participates in a renegotiation of what it means to be human by destabilizing traditional hierarchies, such as word-­image and human-­animal relationships. This destabilization is due to the hybridity of the comic form and the comic’s narrative. This renegotiation allows for a reimagining of what it means to be posthuman. Kelp-­Stebbins notes that the hybridity of Sweet Tooth functions on multiple levels. For example, the comic is about hybrid bodies in a hybrid form (word-­image). It is published by Vertigo, which is an imprint of another publisher, DC. It exists simultaneously as individual issues, an ongoing series, and graphic novel collections, and appeals to a diverse audience. And despite Jeff Lemire’s primary authorship as writer and artist, other artists had a hand in the comic’s creation (338–339). Kelp-­Stebbins notes: “The boundaries between nature and culture, human and animal, man and god, and mind and

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body are sketchy and seamy . . . Expectations about the diegetic world are frustrated or overturned so that the knowledge of the world it pre­sents is always only speculative” (339). The speculation to which Kelp-­Stebbins refers is the result of the indeterminacy of the narrative. Because boundaries in the narrative are “sketchy and seamy,” it becomes difficult to clearly order and classify the “diegetic world.” The liminality between elements that one might consider separate (nature-­culture, human-­animal, and so forth) is analogous to the grotesque, which “violate[s] the laws of nature”; the implications can be dizzying: “Clear-­cut taxonomies, definitions and classifications break down and, as a result, there is a built-­in narrative tension between the ludicrous and the fearful, the absurd and the terrifying” (Edwards and Graulund, 4). This chapter understands the hybridity of the children in Sweet Tooth as grotesque while arguing that the grotesque provides a metaphor for the commodification and objectification of children. Sweet Tooth takes the exploitation of children to an extreme: at a military and scientific compound, experiments are performed on hybrids in the hope of finding a cure for the plague, which harms only adults. Children are commonly understood as social assets. The willingness to sacrifice children, to view children as unique commodities to be exploited to benefit those with power, can be understood as neoliberalism run amok. Neoliberalism, by extending market logic into all aspects of life, including social arenas (Foucault, 243; Harvey, 3), commodifies people in new ways. In Sweet Tooth, the commodification of children goes beyond merely assigning them a monetary value. It involves adults using children as scientific commodities to try and extend their own lives at the cost of future generations. The pressures that neoliberalism places on children as it turns them into commodities are ultimately theorized in Sweet Tooth via the grotesque, manifested in the representational hybridity of the child characters as part animal, part human. This “making” of the hybrid is effectuated through the commodification process itself, in which children are made to function as objects. Yet as Leonard Cassuto notes, humans’ tendency to anthropomorphize makes it impossible to fully objectify a person. Thus, those being objectified take on a hybrid status, part human, part thing, and exist in “an ontological netherworld” (16). Cassuto refers to this process as “‘attempted objectification,’ a process in which a person is made to enter into the liminal space between human and thing, a grotesque space where the person’s essential humanness is questioned but not altogether denied” (16). The “liminal space between human and thing” is what turns the objectified into a grotesquerie. A human who is not objectified remains fully human. A human who is completely objectified becomes an object. But the never-­ending “cross between a human” and

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something else is grotesque (Chao, 45). In the case of Sweet Tooth, this means that despite people’s attempts, the hybrids can never fully be denied their humanity, even as they are kept separate and distinct from other humans. But it also means that many no longer consider the children fully human, which provides the estrangement necessary to harm them. The hybrid boy Gus cannot be easily classified because he seems to be a cross between animal and human worlds. Furthermore, he often looks older than his age. He is around seven years old, but the long, sometimes angular line work of Lemire ages Gus, emphasizing how some adults refuse to see Gus as a child. This refusal is partially because Gus is part animal, but it is also because, in the society in which Gus lives, adults will always be cognizant of his value as a commodity. While Lemire’s use of long lines when drawing faces is not unique to Sweet Tooth, this style works particularly well here—Gus’s older appearance is reflective of the harsh world in which he lives, where hunters trade the bodies, both living and dead, of hybrid children for resources, and adults battle one another. Gus’s hybridity is both multifaceted and grotesque: he is simultaneously animal-­human and child-­adult, the embodiment of forms considered exclusionary. The implications of this grotesque hybridity go beyond the theoretical in this text, creating provocative tensions that speak to larger social questions and concerns about childhood. In one panel, for example, Gus and five other hybrid children are caged and waiting to be experimented on by adults. In a panel that takes up three-­quarters of the page, a hybrid responds to Gus’s question about what happens after someone comes and takes a hybrid away. She replies, “Then what? Then nothing. . . . When they come and get you . . . you don’t never come back” (Lemire, 2:21). The captive hybrids are all positioned to face the newcomer, Gus, but at such an angle that they all appear to be staring directly at the reader, challenging the reader to confront the imprisonment of the hybrids and the disappearance of both the missing hybrid children and their own childhoods. The caging of children is perverse, of course; the caging of animals may also be perverse, but is acceptable in contemporary US society. Therefore, there is a clash between what a society may or may not condone, which becomes complicated by the hybrid nature of the children. This nature may also inspire ambivalent reactions. The comic forces us to sympathize with the children, yet it also provides a perverse rationale for their exploitation by marking them as Other. This psychological separation, which provides the estrangement necessary for some to overlook their exploitation, is evocative of the way that many contemporary transnational corporations exploit child labor for monetary gain by counting on their consumers’ physical and emotional distance from the child laborers. This other-

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Figure 13.1. Jeff Lemire, Sweet Tooth, 2:21. © 2010 Jeff Lemire.

ness also pervades the hybrids’ thinking. When Gus tries to introduce himself to the rest of the hybrids, Wendy, the pig girl, calls the other hybrids “ignorants” (2:19) because they cannot effectively communicate. This positioning of these child characters as incapable of language seems to raise the question of when it may be acceptable to commodify a body. The United States has an abject history when it comes to experimenting on those who lack the power to speak for themselves, whether literally or metaphorically. Mike Stobbe details some of this history in an Associated Press article published just before the convening of a 2011 biomedical ethics commission. In his abbreviated history, Stobbe notes that experimentation on US prisoners increased dramatically in the 1940s and 1950s as the pharmaceutical

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and health care industries grew, before backlash in the 1970s over the use of powerless populations led to the decline of such experiments. These experiments were often driven by economic considerations: “In 1973, pharmaceutical industry officials acknowledged they were using prisoners for testing because they were cheaper than chimpanzees.” This statement is emblematic of the way in which economic factors can pervade one’s thinking about the social realm. People are positioned in relation to animals based on economic value. This comparison of prisoners with animals also coincides with the hybridity of the children in Sweet Tooth and is indicative of the dehumanizing nature of commodification. Examples of the types of experiments conducted on humans kept separate from mainstream society are horrific. At a mental hospital in Guatemala in 1946–1948, a group of US scientists “infected prisoners and patients . . . with syphilis . . . to test whether penicillin could prevent some sexually transmitted diseases” (Stobbe). In 1963–1966, administrators of a study at the Willowbrook State School on Staten Island infected intellectually disabled children with hepatitis to test a potential cure. As US regulations tightened, companies took their tests overseas. This trend continues today. In 2010, “between 40 and 65 percent of clinical studies of federally regulated medical products were done in other countries in 2008, and that proportion probably has grown.” Ethical issues remain. In a Pfizer-­conducted study in Nigeria, “children with meningitis” were given the drug Trovan, “although there were doubts about its effectiveness for that disease.” The deaths of eleven children were blamed on the drug, and Pfizer settled with the government without admitting wrongdoing. It is worth noting that people administering these tests may feel the benefits outweigh the risks. Saul Krugman, who was involved in the Willowbrook hepatitis study, defends what was done. He notes they obtained permission from parents and that most of the child subjects would have contracted the virus anyway in the course of their stay. He also observes that infected children were kept separate from the general population and thus were able to avoid contracting other viruses present there. He writes, “The fact that the children were mentally retarded was relevant only to the extent that society placed them in an institution where hepatitis was prevalent. The primary objective of our studies was to protect the children and employees while acquiring new knowledge in the process” (160). Even if one takes Krugman at face value, this statement underscores the fact that the tests were performed on vulnerable populations. Had the children not been vulnerable already, they would never have been considered possible test subjects. Furthermore, it is apparent that not everyone shared a concern for the test subjects. Faculty members in the

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dermatology department of the University of Pennsylvania Medical School, including Dr. Albert Kligman, had a “cavalier attitude toward using institutionalized groups as research subjects” and would sometimes joke about them (Hornblum, 35). Kligman was the force behind experiments on prisoners in Holmesburg Prison from the 1950s to the 1970s. Upon entering the prison for the first time, he recalls: “All I saw before me were acres of skin. It was like a farmer seeing a fertile field for the first time” (quoted in Hornblum, 37). The emphasis on the people’s skin, rather than their personhood, and the comparison to farming, in which soil is worked, sometimes violently, to feed and support people situates the prisoners as objects and resources to be used for the sake of others. Sweet Tooth leaves little doubt that the exploitation of the hybrids is morally reprehensible, but their exploitation forces readers to think about their complicity in the exploitation of others, as well as the history of such mistreatment in the United States. People want to reject exploitation, but people also accept or ignore it. It is no coincidence that the caged hybrids all face the reader, as well as Gus, as if also challenging the reader to question his or her own complicity in what is transpiring. Of course the reader has no power over the narrative; at the same time, however, the reader’s enjoyment is predicated on the narrative exploitation of the hybrids. Even if the reader wants to see the hybrids escape their exploitation, the hybrids first must be exploited in order to provide the eventual satisfaction of their escape. The experimentation on hybrids is a perverse continuation of society’s tendency to experiment not just on animals, but also on humans who are treated like animals because of certain conditions, disorders, or situations. The hybrids in Sweet Tooth are not represented as inherently innocent; in fact, some are quite dangerous. But the hybrids are innocent of causing the plague, and therefore do not deserve to be sacrificed in a potentially futile attempt to save the adults. This is in part why the direct address is so powerful; it implores the reader to consider whether he or she would be willing to stand up for children who lack a voice and often have no say regarding how society views them. There are other moments where the reader is directly addressed, as when Gus is being questioned by Doctor Singh, the man who runs the experiments. Singh asserts, “We are the only semblance of order left in this world. And I know it’s hard to understand . . . but the things we do here . . . we are humanity’s last hope.” Gus rejects Singh’s rationalization: “You cut up animal kids. . . . I saw it! You think you’re doing good, but you’re just a sinner . . . the worst sinner” (Lemire, 2:65). In the panel containing Gus’s response, he directly faces the reader and points his finger in accusation. He has a tag on his ear, which catalogues him as an object of experimentation and study. From a

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compositional standpoint, Gus is addressing Singh. But to the extent that the series critiques contemporary structures of exploitation, this exchange also challenges readers’ complicity in processes of objectification. Singh does not give up rationalizing his behavior. After the previous exchange, he explains to Gus that he has done horrible things, but that “we must keep trying” because “soon we’ll be gone . . . all of us.” Gus responds, “Not me. . . . Not us animal kids” (2:66). But Singh had already excluded Gus from his vision of collective humanity, not because he is unaware that Gus will live on, but rather because Singh does not consider him fully human. Processes of objectification attempt to turn people into commodities and deny them their humanity (Cassuto, xiii). For many people, their consciences will not allow them to engage in harming others or to condone such harm unless the exploited are either dehumanized or placed out of sight. This distancing can be seen in current economic contexts. Corporatism’s most striking contribution has been to separate those who run businesses from their employees, which makes it easier to lay off workers, since upper management does not consistently encounter them. The animal elements of the children in Sweet Tooth provide the separation necessary for adults to harm them. These elements do not produce complete estrangement, but enough that people who wish to overlook the humanity of the hybrids can do so. This estrangement allows the scientists to cut up the hybrids for study. One image of what goes on in the compound shows a horse-­child hybrid lying on an operating table (Lemire, 2:44). Its chest cavity is ripped open and blood has sprayed everywhere. This panel would be shocking if the test subject was all-­animal, but adding human elements, including the humanlike body and the positioning of the hybrid on his back, makes these images even more obscene. The panel is especially disturbing because of the blood splattered across the floor and wall and the mutilated body left out in the open. These elements reveal the butchery attendant upon the artifice of the tiled room and dissection table: an artifice meant to add an air of legitimacy to the experimentation taking place on the hybrids. The tension between adults seeing children as inhuman, as objects of study and experimentation, is made possible by a process of objectification that is aided by the grotesque representations of the hybrids, but it is also related to how society exploits children, and others, in contemporary society. Treating humans as objects is itself a grotesque hybridization that benefits the economic elite at the expense of lower classes. But the objectification of people, in reality and in fiction, is never completely realized. The series highlights this unfinished process as it illustrates the specific moment of recognition that one character has regarding the humanity of the

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Figure 13.2. Jeff Lemire, Sweet Tooth, 2:44. © 2010 Jeff Lemire.

hybrids. A man named Jepperd tracks Gus to his home. He convinces Gus to go with him to an animal sanctuary, then instead takes him to the compound where the experiments are taking place and trades him for the body of his dead wife, who died giving birth to a hybrid in the same compound: a trade that treats Gus, too, as a commodity. But Jepperd experiences regret, stages a breakout, and then becomes Gus’s protector, eventually sacrificing himself so that Gus can live. But at the moment when Jepperd is a hunter of hybrids, he observes, “I ain’t never seen a deer-­one before” (Lemire, 1:36). This emphasizes Gus’s animal aspect while refusing to recognize the human aspect. He says “one” rather than “child” or “kid” or even “hybrid.” This phrasing positions Gus as Other. It reflects the estrangement necessary for Jepperd to harm him. In the first, large panel, which occupies the top two-­thirds of the page, Jepperd holds Gus by the antler in one hand and a gun in the other. The next panel is small and thin, focused on Jepperd’s eyes. Like the panel, they are narrow, and the suspicion he feels is evident in their glare. The next panel, of the same size and basic composition, cuts to Gus’s eyes, which are wide with fear. Despite the longer ears, Gus looks just as human as Jepperd does, especially because in this narrow framing, his antlers are no longer visible. The fourth and final panel returns again to Jepperd’s eyes, which are now wide. Jepperd might be feeling empathy, sadness, or belated recognition of Gus’s humanity. It is unclear exactly why, but Jepperd’s demeanor softens. In the next page he says, “Relax kid. . . . I ain’t gonna hurt you” (1:37). Of course, Jepperd later takes advantage of Gus, but at this moment Jepperd’s physical dominance of Gus ends. Over the course of their journey, Jepperd bonds with Gus, which sets the stage for Jepperd’s rescue attempt. That bond

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begins here, with Jepperd seeing Gus’s humanity through his expressive eyes and recognizing him as a “kid” rather than a “deer-­one.” Looking solely at a hybrid’s animal aspects may allow some to delude themselves into thinking that hybrids lack humanity, but when confronted with Gus’s humanity, Jepperd cannot ignore it. This sequence is especially interesting because it comes after a similar one. After burying his father, Gus encounters a buck. The first panel is a large establishing image of Gus and the buck, and the entire page has a composition similar to that of the encounter between Gus and Jepperd: a large panel that takes up most of the page and depicts an initial confrontation, followed by narrow panels emphasizing the eyes of the characters. In the large panel, the buck seems to be creeping exceptionally close to Gus, who has just buried his dead father (Lemire, 1:23). It could be slowly approaching, leg raised in careful consideration of its next step. It could be confidently striding toward Gus, as if Gus were another buck to be challenged for invading his territory. Either way, the buck is approaching incredibly close, something bucks do not generally do around humans. The antlers, of course, tie these two creatures together, but it is the emphasis on the eyes that truly connects them. Gus’s expression is hard to trace. It could be sadness at his father’s burial or apprehension regarding the approaching buck. The buck seems focused. Despite these differences, the eyes of Gus and of the buck are strikingly similar in appearance, as are their surrounding features, such as the angle of their noses and slope of their ears. The placement of these panels beneath the image of the buck potentially advancing on Gus creates a pause allowing for recognition to take place. As opposed to the potential for movement in the top image, implied by the buck’s upraised hoof, the narrow panels emphasizing their eyes lack any implied movement. The lack of movement provides the space for the two beings to consider each other. It is interesting that the eyes detailed in the previously discussed series of panels convey the shared humanity of Jepperd and Gus, despite Gus’s hybridity, while the eyes here emphasize shared animality. Despite their differences, these scenes are both about potential connections, even if for the briefest of moments. In fact, even though the latter example involves Gus’s identification with the deer, the bottom panel makes the buck appear more human, too, thus reinforcing the connection between different forms of alterity. Showing Gus looking like a buck and the buck looking like a human is one way to emphasize the fluid nature of how one understands both difference and similarity. Sadly, that fluidity gets the buck killed when hunters trying to capture Gus accidentally target the buck instead. What these narrative images allow for is the possibility of recognizing different forms of

Figure 13.3. Jeff Lemire, Sweet Tooth, 1:36. © 2009, 2010 Jeff Lemire; © 2010 DC Comics.

Figure 13. 4. Jeff Lemire, Sweet Tooth, 1:23. © 2009, 2010 Jeff Lemire; © 2010 DC Comics.

The Grotesque Child   249

being based on similarities rather than differences. This does not mean that overcoming objectification is easy, whether the objectification involves commodification or not, but it does allow for possibilities of resistance to objectification, since it encourages people to recognize themselves in each other, and in the Other. Sweet Tooth’s subsequent volumes follow Gus and his allies as they escape from the compound and then seek the origins of the hybrids by following clues to Alaska. The final issue of the series jumps ahead in years to show a community of multiple generations of hybrids. It ends with the understanding that humans, whether friendly or violent, will all eventually die and be replaced by the hybrids. But it is the beginning of the series that foregrounds the objectification of the hybrids at the hands of some adults, as well as the possibility of overcoming this objectification through recognition of the hybrids’ humanity. The animal-­human hybrids of Sweet Tooth exist along a spectrum of alterity that challenges one’s ability to determine what it means to be human. By highlighting humanity in the midst of dehumanizing characterizations, Sweet Tooth challenges processes of dehumanization. The children are grotesque, yet remain children; and while their grotesque natures may repulse adult characters, for readers the grotesque elements compel consideration of their altered states. This consideration is especially important because the grotesque is easiest to identify in relation to specific images or beings, whether fictional or not. Yet the processes that produce these bodies, grotesque processes of commodification and objectification, are, as in the comic, often invisible. The value of Sweet Tooth’s hybrid bodies is to make visible these processes via the grotesque.

Note 1. Contributing artists, including colorists and letterers, include Pat Brosseau, Matt Kindt, Emi Lenox, Carlos M. Mangual, Nate Powell, and José Villarrubia.

Works Cited Cassuto, Leonard. The Inhuman Race: The Racial Grotesque in American Literature and Culture. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. Chao, Shun-­Liang. Rethinking the Concept of the Grotesque: Crashaw, Baudelaire, Magritte. London: Legenda, 2010. Edwards, Justin, and Rune Graulund. The Grotesque. New York: Routledge, 2013. Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979. Edited by Michel Senellart. Translated by Graham Burchell. New York: Palgrave MacMillan, 2008. Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. New York: Perigee, 1954.

250  Mark Heimermann Gysin, Fritz. The Grotesque in American Negro Fiction: Jean Toomer, Richard Wright, and Ralph Ellison. Bern: Francke, 1975. Harpham, Geoffrey Galt. On the Grotesque: Strategies of Contradiction in Art and Literature. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1982. Harvey, David. A Brief History of Neoliberalism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Hornblum, Allen M. Acres of Skin: Human Experiments at Holmesburg Prison. New York: Routledge, 1998. Jenks, Chris. Childhood. New York: Routledge, 1996. Kelp-­Stebbins, Katherine. “Hybrid Heroes and Graphic Posthumanity: Comics as a Media Technology for Critical Posthumanism.” Studies in Comics 3, no. 2 (2012): 331–348. Kincaid, James Russell. Erotic Innocence: The Culture of Child Molesting. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998. Krugman, Saul. “The Willowbrook Hepatitis Studies Revisited: Ethical Aspects.” Reviews of Infectious Diseases 8, no. 1 (1986): 157–162. Lassonde, Stephen. “Ten Is the New Fourteen: Age Compression and ‘Real’ Childhood.” In Reinventing Childhood after World War II, edited by Paula S. Fass and Michael Grossberg, 51–67. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2012. Lemire, Jeff. Sweet Tooth. Vol. 1, Out of the Deep Woods. New York: DC Comics, 2010. ———. Sweet Tooth. Vol. 2, In Captivity. New York: DC Comics, 2010. Mintz, Steven. Huck’s Raft: A History of American Childhood. Cambridge, MA: Belknap, 2004. Pressler, Shirley J. “Construction of Childhood: The Building Blocks.” In Key Issues in Childhood and Youth Studies, edited by Derek Kassem, Lisa Murphy, and Elizabeth Taylor, 14–26. New York: Routledge, 2010. Stobbe, Mike. “Past Medical Testing on Humans Revealed.” Associated Press, February 27, 2011. Stockton, Kathryn Bond. The Queer Child, or Growing Sideways in the Twentieth Century. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009. Warner, Marina. “Little Angels, Little Monsters: Keeping Childhood Innocent.” In Six Myths of Our Time: Little Angels, Little Monsters, Beautiful Beasts, and More, 43–62. New York: Vintage, 1994. Wright, Bradford W. Comic Book Nation: The Transformation of Youth Culture in America. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001.

Contributors

Tamryn Bennett is a multidisciplinary artist. She has exhibited experimental projects in Sydney, Melbourne, Switzerland, and Mexico. Her collection phospene is published by Rabbit Poet Series (2016). Other poems and essays have appeared in Five Bells, Nth Degree, Cordite, The Drunken Boat, ImageTexT and Image [&] Narrative. Her doctorate investigated “comics poetry” and its applications to experimental comics. Ian Blechschmidt wrote his chapter while a graduate student in Northwestern University’s Communication Studies Department, where he researched underground comix and their audiences. Christopher J. Hayton is a part-­time adjunct instructor and course mentor in Florida State University’s College of Social Work, in addition to his primary job as a licensed clinical social worker in the mental health field. He has a background in natural sciences and archaeology, and worked for twenty-­five years as a schoolteacher before switching careers to social work. Christopher’s comics studies research takes a sociocultural approach to the analysis of midto late-­twentieth-­century comic books as pedagogical artifacts that reflect societal attitudes and norms prevailing at the time of their publication. Janardana D. Hayton holds an MA in media and communication studies from Florida State University and is an independent scholar with a background in critical race theory, gender studies, and feminism. He presented at the University of Florida’s annual Conference on Comics and Graphic Novels in 2015, and takes an intersectional feminist approach to comic studies. Mark Heimermann holds a PhD in English from the University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee. His work on childhood has been published in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics, The Child in Post-­Apocalyptic Cinema, and Misfits: Children with a Twist. He served on the executive committee of the International Comic Arts Forum from 2010 to 2016. Ralf Kauranen is a sociologist whose research to a large extent has dealt with the comics medium in Finnish society. He has written on the 1950s Finnish debate on comics and childhood as well as on the transnational connections and the multilingualism of the contemporary field of Finnish comics. He is a founding member of NNCORE—Nordic Network for Comics Research—and a former editor of the Scandinavian Journal of Comic Art. Clifford Marks is an associate professor of English at the University of Wyoming, where he teaches and writes about comics and graphic novels. C. W. Marshall teaches Classics at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver. In addition to his work on ancient theatre, he has coedited with George Kovacs two volumes published by Oxford University Press: Classics and Comics (2011) and Son of Classics and

252  Contributors Comics (2016). He was Academic Director of the International Comic Arts Forum from 2010 to 2016. James Nobis is a language instructor with experience in teaching both high school and university language arts, and with additional expertise in the areas of multimodality and Japanese translation. He is a full-­time faculty member at the University of Phoenix. Annick Pellegrin holds a PhD in French and in Spanish and Latin American Studies from the University of Sydney. She is a lecturer at the University of Mauritius, where she teaches a yearlong course on Franco-­Belgian comics as well as Spanish. She is the author of “Nothing New under the Western Sun: The (Necessity and Inevitability of the) Conquest of the Americas in U.K.R.O.N.I.A. / Les Brigades du temps and Helldorado” (International Journal of Comic Art) and of “An Unspeakable Filiation: Spirou and the Three Unicorns” (The Comics of Hergé: When Lines Are Not So Clear, edited by Joe Sutliff Sanders). She sits on the board of Studies in Comics and is a columns and articles editor for the Comics Forum. Lara Saguisag is an assistant professor of English at the College of Staten Island–­City University of New York. She is completing a book project that examines constructions of childhood and citizenship in Progressive-­era comic strips. Brittany Tullis is an assistant professor of Spanish and women and gender studies at St. Ambrose University, where she teaches classes on Hispanic and international feminist comics. Her work has been published in Hispanic Issues On Line and the International Journal of Comic Art. She currently serves as Academic Director of the International Comic Arts Forum. Qiana Whitted is an associate professor of English and African American studies at the University of South Carolina. Her publications include the edited collection Comics and the U.S. South as well as essays on comics, race, and history in The Blacker the Ink: Constructions of Black Identity in Comics and Sequential Art, Essays on Teaching with Graphic Narratives, and the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics. Pamela Robertson Wojcik is a professor in the Department of Film, TV and Theatre at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Fantasies of Neglect: Imaging the Urban Child in American Film and Fiction, The Apartment Plot: Urban Living in American Film and Popular Culture, 1945 to 1975, and Guilty Pleasures: Feminist Camp from Mae West to Madonna; she is the editor of New Constellations: Movie Stars of the 1960s, Movie Acting: The Film Reader, and, with Arthur Knight, Soundtrack Available: Essays on Film and Popular Music.

Index

Page numbers in italics indicate illustrations. Abernathy, Ralph, 87 abjection, blackness as, 71, 72, 83, 86, 88 Abouet, Marguerite, ix, 6 adolescence in comics, 5, 71; in Persepolis, 171, 174; in RAW, 130, 138; sexualized, in Ayako, 154, 155–160; in the work of Lynda Barry, 220, 225. See also teen­agers in comics Adventures of Jesus, The (Sturgeon), 123– 124n2 Adventures of Rabbit and Bear Paws, The (Noori), 4 Adventures of Venus, The (Hernandez), xi Afghanistan, 178n7 African American characters in comics, ix, 8; Ebony White in The Spirit, 57; and Emmett Till’s murder, 70–89; insulting and stereotypical depictions of, in early comics, 54, 57; in Our Gang Comics, 57; Tiny in Little Audrey and the promotion of integration and egalitarianism, 48–54, 56–66 African American comics, xi, 70–91 African American folktales, 84 Afro-futurist comics, xii Agachados, Los (Ríus), ix Ahmed, Naseer, 5 Akissi (Abouet), 6 Alaniz, José, 2–3 Albright, Daniel, 221–222 Aldama, Frederick, 4–5 Aldaraca, Bridget, 93, 105n1 Ali, Muhammad, 89n3 Alienated War-Baby Reports (Beck), 123– 124n2 Al-Mutawa, Naif, viii American Born Chinese (Yang), viii, 163 American Splendor (Pekar), 199 Anderson, Ho Che, 87 “angel in the house,” 93–106

animals in comics, 41; “funny animal” comics, 132, 135 Annie (Huston, 1982), 16 Apel, Dora, 78 Appleton, Clyde R., 89n3 Archie comics, xi, 115, 131 Arendt, Hannah, 220 Argentina, ix, 92–107 Aristotle, 203, 220 Arnold, Mark, 51, 66 Arriola, Gus, xi Asante, Molefi, 89n3 Asian American comics, viii, xi–xii Asian characters in comics, ix Asian comics: Chinese, ix; Filipino, vii, ix; Indian, 5; Korean, ix. See also Asian American comics; Asian characters in comics; manga Asterix (Goscinny), ix Attucks, Crispus, 75 Ault, Donald, 1 “autobifictionalography.” See Barry, Lynda “autobio.” See autobiographical comics and graphic novels autobiographical comics and graphic novels, 10, 81, 165, 168, 199–216, 218– 233 Aya (Abouet), ix, 6, 11 Ayako (Tezuka), 9, 148, 150, 152–160, 153, 158 Aydin, Andrew, 78, 163; comic by, 79 B., David, 163 Baby Huey, 56 Bailey, Beth, 110, 116 Baldo (Cantú and Castellano), xi Baldwin, James, 89n3 Baldwin, Kate, 111 bandes dessinées, vii, ix, x, 7, 194, 214n2 Baraka, Amiri, 86

254  Index

Baritz, Loren, 111 Barry, Lynda, viii, 10, 137, 218–233; comic by, 226 Batman, xi, 11, 132 Bayou (Love), 83–88, 85, 89n6 Beaty, Bart, 2 Bechdel, Alison, 2, 140, 163, 178n6, 219 Beck, Jerry, 49 Belgium, 7. See also Franco-Belgian comics Bennett, Tamryn, 10 Bernal, Gabriel Vargas, ix Bernstein, Robin, 86 Bey, Elihu “Adofo,” 89n5 Big Comic, 150 Big Fat Little Lit, 128 Bijou Funnies, 108 Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure, 216n17 “Binky Brown” stories (Green), 199 Blankets (Thompson), 219 Blechschmidt, Ian, 9 “Bludgeon Funnies!” (Williams), 121– 122 Bogrow, Sophie, 186 Bond, Julian, 89n3 Bone (Smith), xii Borges, Jorge Luis, viii Brace, Charles Loring, 15 Bradley, Mamie Till, 74, 75, 77, 80, 81 Brooks, Gwendolyn, 89n3 Brosseau, Pat, 249 Brown v. Board of Education, 48, 77, 78, 80 Bryant, Carolyn, 74, 75, 76, 80, 88–89n2, 89n5 Bryant, Roy, 74, 77, 81, 86, 88–89n2 Buckner, Janine, 221 Building Stories (Ware), 140 Bullwinkle: character, 200, 208; comics (Bullwinkle and Rocky), 210; TV series (Rocky and His Friends), 210 bullying, 199, 207, 212, 213, 220 Bunny, 56 Burns, Charles, 128, 137, 139; comic by, 139 Burrito (Saldaña), x Busch, Wilhelm, vii, 7 Bush, George W., 178n7 Buzzy, 56

Campbell, Bebe Moore, 89n3 Caniff, Milt, vii Cantú, Hector, xi Captain America, 132 Carrier, David, 2 Casper the Friendly Ghost, 56, 135 Cassuto, Leonard, 234, 239 Cebolinha (de Sousa), ix Cedar Grove Press, xii censorship of comics, 130, 131, 133–134; and the Comics Code, 54–55, 113–114, 138; in France, 185. See also Comics Code “Cereal Baby Keller” (Sendak), 142–143, 143 Chamuco, viii Chaney, Michael A., 165, 168 Charrito de Oro, El, x Chicago Defender, 75, 81 childhood: and “age compression” in the marketing of products, 235; and the American obsession with sexual “deviance” and gender norms, 110–123; changing role of, during World War II in Finland, 31; competence, 38–45; constructionist approaches to, 34; contradictory constructions of (innocent vs. evil/chaotic), 235–238; creativity of, 205; definitions of, and the construction of identity, 221–223; evoked through embedded worlds in The Three Paradoxes, 199, 200, 205–210, 212–214; ignorance, 36–38, 40; and the importance of play, 221; memories of, and how they shape adulthood, 207, 209, 210, 213, 214; memories of, evoked through praxis in Lynda Barry’s work, 218–233; and the 1950s nuclear suburban family, 48; as perceived and treated in Western societies, 184–185; as a product of its context, 109–110; realities of, in relation to social class, 237–238; shifting perceptions of, in the late nineteenth/ early twentieth centuries, 14; trauma, 8, 10, 11, 72, 78, 130, 209, 218–233. See also child labor; innocence, childhood childhood studies, 6, 10, 237

Index   255

child labor, 14, 31, 38, 240 children: as competent, 30, 38, 41–42, 43–44; as evil/chaotic, 235–238; as grotesque, 9–10, 234–240, 244, 249; as innocent (see innocence, childhood); as sexualized, 9, 41 Children of Palomar, The (Hernandez), xi children’s literature, 131, 186, 188. See also fairy tales; picture books China, 92, 172 Christianity, 173 Chute, Hillary, 2, 137, 165, 166, 168, 225 civil rights era/movement, 65, 66, 70, 71, 78, 80, 82 class in comics: in Finnish comics during war, 41, 43; in Iran in Persepolis, 164, 174–175; and the melting pot in Little Orphan Annie, 20, 25, 26; middle, in an integrated society in Little Audrey, 49–50, 52, 57, 65; middle, in Mafalda, 97; norms of, lampooned in Zap Comix, 108, 119–120, 124n4 Cleaver, Eldrige, 89n3 Clowes, Daniel, 128, 143 Cohn, Neil, 178n6 Cold War, 113, 123 Cold War in comics, 9, 92, 109, 110, 122 comic books, viii; emergence of, 7; traditional format of, 129. See also censorship of comics; Comics Code Comic-Con, 1 comicheft, 7 comics: for adult readers (including graphic novels), 4, 140; anxiety about negative effects of, on children, 1, 11n2, 54–55, 113–114, 134–135, 140–141, 211; the illusion of movement in, 200, 203, 204, 209; as a pedagogical tool, xi, 140–141, 142; for young readers, 128–145. See also comic books; comic strips, newspaper; and specific comics by title Comics Code, xi, 11n2, 51, 54–55, 56, 113– 114, 116, 117, 134–135, 138; and postCode comics, 65, 135, 136, 138, 145n2 Comics Journal, 129 Comics Magazine Association of America, 55, 113, 134

comics studies, 10, 128; conventions, 1–2; growth of, as a dynamic interdisciplinary field, 1–2, 6; legitimacy of, 140; scholarship, 2–3; university presses publishing in, 1 comic strips, newspaper, 7, 131; syndicated, 16, 218, 219 coming-of-age narratives in comics, ix, xi, 5, 81, 219 “comix.” See underground “comix” commodification. See child labor; consumerism/consumer culture communism, 111, 112, 113 consumerism/consumer culture, 110–111; and the black market in World War II, 33, 36, 39, 43; and commercialization in comic books, 134, 142; and the commodification of people, 9–10, 239–242, 244, 245, 249; in Japan, 150–151, 159, 160; and the “new girl,” 13; youth-­ oriented, 133 Cook, Daniel Thomas, 3 Cook, Robert, 111 Cooper, Jeanne, 219, 228 Cosset, Sébastien, 182. See also Kerascoët Costantino, Manuela, 166 Costello, Brannon, 3 crime comics, 55, 113, 132, 134, 135, 140 Crime SuspenStories, 135 crisis comics, 163, 165 Crothers, Scatman, 89n3 Crumb, Robert, 108, 115, 116, 120, 122, 136, 219; comics by, 115, 118 Cruse, Howard, 81, 82, 83; comic by, 82 Darda, Joseph, 168 Dark Knight Returns, The (Miller), 140 Dark Laughter (Harrington), 76–77 Darkroom: A Memoir in Black and White (Weaver), 80–81, 87 Dart, Harry Grant, 141 Davis, Rob, viii DC Comics, 57, 58, 140; Vertigo imprint of, 140, 238 Deitch, Kim, 136 de León, Fray Luis, 93 Dell comics, 51, 57, 58, 113–114, 116, 132

256  Index

DeLuca, Kevin Michael, 71, 88 Denmark, 31 Dennis the Menace, 135 Deogratias: A Tale of Rwanda (Stassen), ix de Sousa, Mauricio, ix Diary of a Reluctant Dreamer (Ledesma), x Dickens, Charles, 16–17 Dirk, Rudolph, vii Dirks, Tim, 117 Disney Company, 132; characters, 108, 110, 117; Song of the South, 84 divorce, 20, 95, 96 dominicales, los (Mexican Sunday strips), viii Donald Duck, xi, 117, 132 Doucet, Julie, 219 Douglass, Frederick, 75 Doury, Pascal, 138; comic by, 138 downward comparison, 53, 54 Drake, Jennifer, 229 Drechsler, Debbie, 219 drug use in comics, 108, 136 Duane, Anna Mae, 135 Dupuis, 181, 182, 185, 194 Dybek, Stuart, 232 Dylan, Bob, 89n3 Eastman, Kevin, 136 EC Comics, 55, 113, 132 Eco, Umberto, 1 education: and childhood studies, 6; and comics as pedagogical tools, 141, 145n1, 165; importance of, to the alternative model of femininity for the next generation, 93, 103, 104 Eisenstein, Sergei, 17 Eisner, Will, ix, 1, 2, 57, 200 Ekaku, Hakuin, 220 Elliott, Robert, 75 embedded narratives, 199, 201, 205–208, 210, 212 Entertaining Comics. See EC Comics Epileptic (David B.), 163 Erkelenz, Holger, 33, 35, 37, 39, 40, 41 Ernie Pook’s Comeek (Barry), 218 Escobar, José, 7 Espinosa, Frank, x Esquire, 112

European comics: Belgian, vii, ix, 7; Brit‑ ish, vii, viii; Finnish, 8, 30–47; French, ix; German, vii, ix, 7; Italian, viii, ix; Spanish, 5, 7. See also bandes dessinées; fumetti; historietas evil. See children: as evil/chaotic experimentation on humans, in United States, 241–243 Explorigator, The (Dart), 141 Fabulous Furry Freak Brother, The, 108 fairy tales, 143, 184, 190, 197n3, 218, 230, 233. See also Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies Falconer, Ian, 128 “fallen woman” figure, 16, 19–22, 27 Familia Burrón, La (Bernal), ix family life in comics: instability of, in Little Orphan Annie, 21–26; questioning of the midcentury nuclear suburban model in Mafalda and Zap Comix, 94–96, 110–114. See also fatherhood in comics; motherhood in comics fatherhood in comics: and Daddy Warbucks in Little Orphan Annie, 22–23; and the father-son relationship in The Three Paradoxes, 201, 204, 205, 207, 209– 210, 213, 214, 215–216n15; in Finnish comics during wartime, 31, 37; and masculinity in Zap Comix, 111, 112, 121 Father Knows Best, 96, 112 Feelings, Tom, 70, 71, 72, 74, 75, 76, 77, 78, 86; comic by, 73 Feiffer, Jules, 144–145; comic by, 144 female characters in comics: challenging conventional views and stereotypical representations, viii, 26–27; and domestic femininity in Mafalda, 93–105; equal treatment of, in Little Audrey, 48, 52; Little Orphan Annie, the “new girl,” and the “girl problem,” 13–16; and patriarchal gender roles, 9; and subjectivity in Persepolis, 165, 168, 170, 172. See also gender in comics; motherhood in comics femininity, 121; idealized, 9, 93, 95–96, 100, 102, 103, 104, 124n10; objectified, 80; and stereotypical interpersonal skills,

Index   257 112. See also female characters in comics; gender in comics feminism: in Argentina, 95–96; and civil rights, 64–65, 66; in comics, 124n10; in Little Audrey, 59, 62, 64; and motherhood, 22; in Persepolis, 178–179n8; second wave, 65, 123; and the voice of feminist critique in Mafalda, 97–105 feminist comics, 124nn10–11 Ferenczi, Sándor, 167 Fiction House, 57 Fielder, Tim, xii Finland, 8, 30–47 Folklore and Fairy Tale Funnies (Mouly and Spiegelman), 128 France, ix, 141, 166, 178, 178n4, 184, 185. See also Franco-Belgian comics Franco, Francisco, vii Franco-Belgian comics, 182, 184, 185, 186, 188, 190, 194, 195, 196 Frasca, Marilyn, 231 “Freak Out Funnies Presents Those Cute Little Bearzy Wearzies” (Crumb), 115– 116 Freddie Stories, The (Barry), viii Freud, Sigmund, 167 fumetti, viii, 7 Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic (Bechdel), 140, 163, 178n6, 219 Gabilliet, Jean-Paul, 2 Gaiman, Neil, 128 Gaines, William, 132 Galbraith, Patrick, 151 García, Santiago, 2 Gazzotti, Bruno, 181, 186, 188, 190–191; art by, 187, 191 gender in comics, 8, 9, 81; critiquing the “angel in the house” in Mafalda, 93– 105; critiquing the performance of, in Zap Comix, 109, 110; in Finnish comics during wartime, 37, 42; roles reinforced in Little Audrey (while paradoxically promoting racial diversity), 49–50, 52– 53, 145n2. See also female characters in comics German Expressionism, viii–ix Germany, vii, 7, 30

Gibson, Mel, 3 Gilbert, Sandra, 93 Gilmore, Leigh, 165, 166–167 Giménez, Carlos, 5 “girl problem,” 14–16 girls in comics. See female characters in comics God Nose (Jaxon), 123–124n2 Goff, Phillip Atiba, 75 Golding, William, 181, 184, 236 Gonzalez, Jason (“J. Gonzo”), x González, Raúl, x Gordo (Arriola), xi Goscinny, René, ix Graphic Canon, The (Kick), xii graphic novels, 2, 3, 5, 71, 137, 140, 238. See also specific graphic novels Grassian, Daniel, 165 Gray, Harold, 7, 13, 16–17, 19; comics by, 18, 21, 25 Great Britain, vii, 172 Great Depression, 14, 16, 17, 20, 22, 26, 110 Green, Justin, 199 Greene, Sheila, 3 Griffin, Rick, 108 Groensteen, Thierry, 2, 178n6, 215n4 grotesque. See children: as grotesque Groth, Gary, 215n15, 216nn19–20 Guatemala, 242 Gubar, Susan, 93 Gum Girl! Chews Your Destiny (Montijo), x Hall, Joanne, 19, 26, 27–28n4, 28n5 Halliday, Michael, 152 Hamer, Naomi, 140 Handler, Daniel, 128 Hansen, Miriam, 21–22 Hark, Ina Rae, 27 Harold, Christine, 71, 88 Harold and the Purple Crayon (Johnson), 205 Harrington, Ollie, 71, 76–77, 87 Hartman, Heidi, 94 Harvey, Leon, 56 Harvey, Robert C., 2 Harvey Comics, 48, 51, 52, 55–57, 58, 66, 66n1, 135

258  Index

Hatfield, Charles, 2, 3, 4, 109, 117, 122, 137, 142, 200, 215n1, 225 Hayton, Christopher J., 8, 145n2 Hayton, Janardana D., 8, 145n2 Heer, Jeet, 3, 11n2, 17, 18, 19, 25, 137 Heimermann, Mark, xiii, 9 Hergé, vii, ix, 7 Herman and Katnip, 56 Hernandez, Gilbert, vii, xi, 5 Hernandez, Javier, x Hernandez, Lea, viii Hernandez, Los Bros, x, xi Hero’s Voice, A (Noori), 4 “He’s Shitting” (Wilson), 119 Higonnet, Anne, 131 Hirohito, 149 historietas, ix, 7 Hofstadter, D. R., 215n9 Hogan’s Alley, 54 homosexuality, 82, 112, 120. See also queer themes in comics Honeyman, Susan, 133, 135 hooks, bell, 65 Hornschemeier, Paul, 10, 199–216; comics by, 202, 205, 211, 214 “Horny Harriet” (Crumb), 115, 115 horror comics, 55, 56, 132, 134, 135, 140 Hughes, Langston, 89n3 Huntley, Jobe, 89n3 Hussein, Saddam, 178n5 Hutcheon, Linda, 19 hybridity, in Sweet Tooth, 9–10, 234, 238– 246, 249 I Love Lucy, 96 incest, 108, 197n3 India, 5 Inge, M. Thomas, 1 innocence, childhood, 4–5, 6, 8, 167, 205, 209; comics as a threat to, 11n2, 113– 114, 130, 134–135, 142, 210; the cult of, attacked in Zap Comix, 114–123; in Finnish World War II comics, 30, 35– 36, 37–38, 44; in Jolies ténèbres and Seuls, 185–186, 188, 190, 193–194, 196; in Little Orphan Annie, 19; the loss of, evoked in the work of Lynda Barry, 220, 222, 224, 225; maintaining a performance of, for

the sake of adults, 130–131; the privilege of, denied to black children (like Emmett Till), 71, 75–76, 80, 81, 83, 87; in the Romantic conception of childhood, 235–238; sexualized children as an assault on American preoccupation with, 9; the Western cultural imperative to protect, 184–186, 235 In the Shadow of No Towers (Spiegelman), 128 introjection, 10, 166–168, 171, 173, 174 Iran, 163–164 Iranian Revolution, 163, 164, 177–178 Iran-Iraq War, 163, 164, 167, 174–177, 178n5 Iraq, 164, 174, 178n5 I Saw It (Nakazawa), 163 Islam, 167, 170, 172, 173–174 It Ain’t Me, Babe, 124nn10–11 Ito, Kinko, 155 It Was a Dark and Silly Night (Mouly and Spiegelman), 128, 141 Ivory Coast, ix, 6 Jackson, Jesse, 89n3 Jackson, Matthew Christian, 75 Jackson, Stevi, 37 Jacobson, Sid, 49, 52, 53, 56, 61, 66; comics by, 59, 63, 64 Japan, 165, 178, 183, 220. See also lolicon; manga Jenkins, Henry, 6 Jenks, Chris, 234, 235 Jet magazine, 81, 83 “J. Gonzo.” See Gonzalez, Jason “Joe Blow” (Crumb), 116, 121 Johnson, Crockett, 128, 205 Johnson, James Weldon, 86 Jolies ténèbres (Vehlmann and Kerascoët), 181–196, 189 Jones, Terry, 57 Joyce, William, 141 Judaism, 173 juvenile delinquency, 111, 113, 134 Kadokawa Shoten, 148–149 Kashmir Pending (Ahmed and Singh), 5–6 Katzenjammer Kids, The (Dirk), vii, viii

Index   259

Kauranen, Ralf, 8 Kehily, Mary Jane, 6 Kelly, Walt, 57, 128 Kelp-Stebbins, Katherine, 238–239 Kerascoët (Marie Pommepuy and Sébastien Cosset), 183, 188, 190, 193–194; art by, 189 Key, Ellen, 22 Khomeini, Ayatollah, 164 Khrushchev, Nikita, 111 Kick, Russ, xii Kimmel, Michel, 112, 124n5 Kincaid, James, 5, 235 Kindt, Matt, 249 King: A Comics Biography (Anderson), 87 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 77, 87, 89n3 Kirtley, Susan, 219, 221, 222, 224–225, 227–228, 229 Kligman, Albert, 242 Kominsky-Crumb, Aline, 2 Kramer, Aaron, 89n3 Kremer, Warren, 49, 52; art by, 64 Kress, Gunther, 9, 148, 151–152, 153, 154, 156, 160 Kristeva, Julia, 71 Krugman, Saul, 242 Kunzle, David, 1 LaGreca, Nancy, 93, 105n1 Laird, Peter, 136 Laird, Roland, 89n5 Laird, Taneshia Nash, 89n5 Latin American comics: Argentinian, ix, 5, 9; Brazilian, ix; historietas, ix; Mexican, viii, ix, x Latina/o comics, viii, x–xi, 4–5 Lavado, Joaquín Salvador. See Quino Leave It to Beaver, 96, 112 Ledesma, Alberto, x Lejeune, Philippe, 200, 215n2 Lemire, Jeff, 9–10, 238, 240, 243, 244, 245, 246; comics by, 241, 245, 247, 248 Lemony Snicket. See Handler, Daniel Lenox, Emi, 249 Lewis, John, 72, 77, 78, 81, 163; comic by, 79 lianhuanhua, viii Life magazine, 110, 112

L’Île aux cent mille morts (Vehlmann and Jason), 190 Lipsitz, George, 124n5 Little Audrey, 8, 48–69, 50, 59, 63, 64, 135, 145n2 Little Dot, 56, 135 Little Lit (Mouly and Spiegelman), 7–8, 129, 130, 140–145 Little Lotta, 56 Little Lulu (Marge), 51, 52 Little Nemo (McCay), 7 Little Orphan Annie (Gray), 7, 13–29, 18, 21, 25 Little Orphan Annie film (Holmes, 1938), 16 Little Orphan Annie film (Robertson, 1932), 16 Little Orphan Annie radio show, 16 Little Rascals, The, 58 lolicon, 9, 148–162 Lolita complex. See lolicon Look magazine, 74, 78, 86, 88–89n2 Lorde, Audre, 89n3 Lord of the Flies (Golding), 181, 182, 183, 184, 236 Love, Jeremy, 83, 84, 89n6; comic by, 85 Lowriders in Space (González), x–xi Lucky Luke, 185 lynching, 71, 72, 77, 78, 83, 87 Macaulay, David, 128 Mafalda (Quino), ix, 5, 9, 92–107, 98, 101, 102, 105 Malchiodi, Cathy, 229, 231 male privilege. See privilege, male manga, vii, x, 148; conventions of, reshaped in Latina/o comics, viii, xi; importance of, in postwar Japan, 149; by Osamu Tezuka, 149–160; and the resurgence in popularity of reading comics, 4. See also lolicon Mangual, Carlos M., 249 Mano del Destino, La (Gonzalez), x Marble Season (Hernandez), xi, 5 March: Book One (Lewis, Aydin, and Powell), 77–80, 79, 81, 83, 87, 163 Marcus, Sharon, 20, 23–24 Marks, Clifford, 10

260  Index

Marshall, C. W., 10 Marvel comics, x, 58 Marvel Studio, xii Marx, Karl, viii, 167, 174 Marxism, 164, 167, 173 masculinity: an alternative script for, 121– 123; hegemonic, devalued, 62, 64; performance of, within the nuclear family, and anxiety about, 110, 111, 112, 114, 122. See also gender in comics; privilege, male materialism. See consumerism/consumer culture Matson, W., 215n7 Matty’s Rocket (Fielder), xii Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Spiegelman), 128, 130, 137, 140, 163, 165 Max and Moritz (Busch), vii, 7 May, Elaine Tyler, 111, 112, 120 Mayer, Sheldon, 135 McCay, Winsor, 7 McCloud, Scott, 1, 2, 6, 159, 178n6, 214, 215nn4–5 Medovoi, Leerom, 111 Memín Pinguín (Vargas Dulché), ix, x memoirs. See autobiographical comics and graphic novels memory: childhood, and the shaping of our adult selves in The Three Paradoxes, 207; Hillary Chute on, 166; the use of praxis to manifest, in the work of Lynda Barry, 220–233 Metha, Suhaan, 5 Metress, Christopher, 72 Mexico, viii, ix Mickey Mouse, 117, 132, 135 Middle Eastern culture in comics, viii, 10, 164, 167 Milam, J. W., 74, 77, 78, 81, 86, 87, 88–89n2 Miller, Frank, 140 Miller, Nancy K., 165 Ministry of Supply (Finland), 31–32, 33, 36, 41, 43 Mintz, Steven, 20, 133, 237 miscegenation, 49, 74, 80, 81 Mitchell, Doris, 230 Mitchell, Sally, 13, 14, 15, 18

Mizuki, Shigeru, 165, 178n3 Monkey and Tortoise (Rizal), vii Montijo, Rhode, x, 4 Moody, Anne, 89n3 Moore, Alan, 140 Morrison, Toni, 86, 89n3 Moscoso, Victor, 108, 117; comic by, 109 Mother, Come Home (Hornschemeier), 209, 215–216n15 motherhood in comics: and childhood trauma in the work of Lynda Barry, 231; critique of, in Mafalda, 96–105; failure of, in Little Orphan Annie, 22; and the middle-class American Dream in Little Audrey, 50 Motherless Oven, The (Davis), viii Mouly, Françoise, 7–8, 128, 129, 131, 137, 140, 141 movies, 112, 133; mimicked in manga, 149 “Mr. Natural” (Crumb), 108, 109, 118, 120, 122 Muerto, El (Hernandez), x Muffatti, Steve, 51, 52, 53, 61; art by, 59, 63 Mundo, El, 99, 102, 104 Mystery, 135 Nabizadeh, Golnar, 3 Nadel, Alan, 111 Naghibi, Nima, 165 Nakazawa, Keiji, 163, 165 Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! Naked Ladies! (Barry), 219 Nancy and Sluggo, 108 nationalism/patriotism in comics, 36, 149 Native American comics, 4 Nazis/Nazism, 172, 182, 186 “new girl,” 13–14, 16; in fiction, 14–16; Little Orphan Annie as, 16–19, 27 Newman, Ralph, 52 Newsboy Legion, 132 New York Age, 70, 72, 75, 76 New Yorker, 128 Nigeria, 242 Nisbet, G., 216n17 Nixon, Richard, 111 Nobis, James G., 9 Nyberg, Amy Kiste, 2, 114, 133

Index   261

Olson, Debbie, 6 One! Hundred! Demons! (Barry), 218–226 op de Beeck, Natalie, 129, 142 Open Wounds from the Cutting Edge of Comics, 136, 138, 139 Ormes, Jackie, 71, 76, 77 Otava, Hugo, 33, 37 Otherness, 53, 58, 62, 65, 66, 83; in Persepo­ lis, 165, 166, 167; in Sweet Tooth, 240, 245, 249 Oubrerie, Clément, 6 Our Army at War, 58 Our Gang Comics, 57 Outcault, Richard F., 7, 54 Ozzie and Harriet, 112 Pablo’s Inferno (Montijo), x, 4 Palomar (Hernandez), vii Panter, Gary, 137 Papua New Guinea, 178n3 Paquín, viii Paquito, viii Paracuellos (Giménez), 5 Paramount, 51; and Harvey’s acquisition of comics characters, 56 Parks, Rosa, 78 Parmenides, 204, 211, 215n7 Patmore, Coventry, 93, 105n3 patriarchy. See privilege, male Patterson, Joseph Medill, 17, 19 Patty-Jo ’n’ Ginger (Ormes), 76 “Paul” (Doury), 138, 138 Payo, El, x Peanuts (Schulz), 5, 11 Pekar, Harvey, 199 Pellegrin, Annick, 7, 8 Pep Comics, 132 Pepín, viii Perón, Eva, 96 Perón, Juan, 95–96 Perrault, Charles, 197n3 Perry, Rochon, xii Persepolis (Satrapi), ix, 10, 140, 163–180, 169, 172, 175, 176 Philippines, vii picture books, 3, 142 Picture This (Barry), 218

Pilkey, Dav, 145 Pite, Rebekah, 104 Pittsburgh Courier, 76, 81 Plato, 203, 216n18 Playboy, 108 Playful Little Audrey, 51, 52 Polk, Toland, 72, 81–83 Pommepuy, Marie, 183, 190. See also Kerascoët Posada, José Guadalupe, x Post, Howard, 52; comic by, 50 Powell, Nate, 78; comic by, 79 Power, Natsu Onoda, 160 praxis, 10, 218–233 pre-Socratic philosophers, 199, 200, 203, 211, 212 Pressler, Shirley, 235 Primera Plana, 92, 97, 99, 102 privilege, male, 9, 52–53, 58, 64–65, 93 privilege, white, 57, 58, 75, 80, 82 Progressive era, 14, 15, 131 propaganda, comics as, 57, 163; wartime, 31–33, 36, 41, 44 psychoanalysis, 10, 225, 229 Pulitzer Prize, 128, 137 Quality Comics, 57 queer themes in comics: coming out, xi, 82–83; paranoia about, xi; queer childhoods, 26 Quino, ix, 5, 92, 93; comics by, 98, 101, 102, 105 race and ethnicity in comics, 8; and the Comics Code, 55; and Emmett Till, 70–89; in Little Orphan Annie, 25, 26; and the undermining of the status quo in Little Audrey, 48, 53–54, 56, 57–60, 65, 145n2 racial segregation/desegregation, 8–9, 48, 77, 78, 80–81 racism in comics: against African Americans in comics of the 1950s, 56–58; against Asian Americans, viii; and depictions of Emmett Till, 8–9, 70–89; in early comics, 54; in Little Audrey, 60–66; manifests on three levels, 54;

262  Index

in multicultural comics, 5; reaction against, in the work of Osamu Tezuka, 149; stressing the need for African American leadership against, 77; and xenophobia, ix. See also racial segregation/desegregation; xenophobia in comics Ramparts, the, 89n3 Rampaul, Giselle, 6 Räsänen, Joel, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41, 42; comic by, 40 RAW, 7, 136–140, 141 RAW Junior, 128, 129–131 Read Yourself RAW, 136, 137 Récréations (Simon), 181 Ress, Stella, 19 Reynolds, Kimberley, 135–136 Richards, Gary, 81–82, 83 Richie Rich, 135 Ríus, ix Rivera, Jules, x Rizal, José, vii Robbins, Trina, 122, 124n11, 136 Robin, the Boy Wonder, 132 Robins, Scott, vii rock and roll music, 133 Rocketo (Espinosa), x Rodriguez, Spain, 108 Romano, Renee Christine, 80 Rosenkranz, Patrick, 124n3 Roure, Benjamin, 194, 195 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 36, 235 Rumble Girls: Silky Warrior Tansie (Hernan­ dez), viii Rwanda, ix Sad Sack, 56 Saguisag, Lara, 7 Saldaña, Carlos, x Salonen, Erkki, 33, 37, 38, 40, 42; comics by, 36, 42 Sambell, Kay, 3 Sanders, Joe Sutliff, 24, 133 Santat, Dan, xi–xii Sapin, Mathieu, 6 Satrapi, Marjane, viii–ix, 10, 140, 163–168, 170–174, 177, 178; comics by, 169, 172, 175, 176

Saturday Evening Post, 51 Savage, William W., Jr., 54 Schrag, Arial, 219 Schulz, Charles, 5 Scott, Darieck, 72, 86 Scott, Sue, 37 Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky, 26 Sendak, Maurice, 128, 130–131, 142–143; comic by, 143 Seuls (Vehlmann and Gazzotti), 181–196, 187, 191 sexism in comics, 5, 58–60, 62–65 sex/sexuality: and anxieties about teen pregnancy, 37; and the contradictory constructions of childhood, 235–238; fear of “deviant,” 110, 111, 112, 114, 118– 120, 122, 134; and the “new girl,” 14–16; in postwar Japan, 151; racialized, 76, 77, 78, 80, 81, 82–83; removal of, from fairy tales, 184; and rights/freedom for women, 95, 104 sex/sexuality in comics: in Ayako, 154, 155– 160; and the Comics Code, xi, 54–55, 113–114; and depictions of sexualized children, 9, 41; and Emmett Till, 71, 72, 76, 77; graphic, as a commentary on sexual morality in underground “comix,” 108–123, 136; in horror and crime comics, 135; in manga, 151; in RAW, 138–139; and the trauma of early experiences in the work of Lynda Barry, 227. See also queer themes in comics Sgt. Fury, 58 Shadow Hero, The (Yang), viii Shelton, Gilbert, 108, 116, 117, 121, 122 Shuster, Joe, vii Sidekicks, xii Siegel, Jerry, vii Simmel, Georg, 20 Simon, Claire, 181 Simplicius, 203 Singh, Saurabh, 5 Skeggs, Beverley, 34 Slaymaker, Douglas, 151 Sleeping Beauty, 143 Sloper, Alexander “Ally,” vii Smith, Carmel, 3 Smith, Jeff, xii

Index   263

Smith, Sidonie, 163, 165 social distance and intimacy, 152, 154–156, 159 Socrates, 210, 211, 212, 213 Söderström, Paul, 32 Soviet Union, 30, 31, 34, 43 Spain, 5, 7 speech balloons, 201, 215n13 Spider-Man, x Spiegelman, Art, 7–8, 128–129, 130–131, 135, 136–137, 140, 141, 145n2, 163, 165 Spirit, The (Eisner), ix, 57 Spirou, 181, 185, 190, 194 Spock, Benjamin, 110 sports comics, 57 Staples, Robert, 57 Star Trek, 215n12 Star Wars, 215n12 Stassen, J. P., ix stereotyping, gender and racial, in comics: and Emmet Till, 75, 81, 84; manifests on three levels, 54; Persepolis’s counternarrative to, 164, 171, 177; subverted in Little Audrey, 51–54 Still I Rise: A Graphic History of African Americans (Laird, Laird, and Bey), 89n5 Stinny, George, Jr., 89n6 Stobbe, Mike, 241–242 Stockton, Kathryn Bond, 237 Stowe, Harriet Beecher, 85 Strange Love, 135 Strange Stories for Strange Kids (Mouly and Spiegelman), 128, 143, 144 Strömberg, Fredrick, 54 Stuck Rubber Baby (Cruse), 81–83, 82 Studlar, Gaylyn, 22, 23 Sugar and Spike (Mayer), 135, 136 Supergirl, 124n10 superheroes in comics, ix, 3, 132, 135, 136, 144–145; dual identities in, 225; female, 124n10; formative experiences of, 11; image privileged over word in, 178n6; Latina, x; Muslim, viii; young, 132, 135; in Zap Comix, 110, 116, 121. See also specific superheroes Supermachos, Los (Ríus), ix Superman, 11, 115, 116, 132, 135

“Supreme Constellation of Dormasintoria, The” (Williams), 119, 119 Svonkin, Craig, 142 Swarte, Joost, 137 Sweden, 31 Sweet Tooth (Lemire), 9–10, 238–249, 241, 245, 247, 248 Tales of the Closet Vol. 1 (Velez), xi Tanttu, Erkki, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 41; comic by, 39 Tardi, Jacques, 137 TBO (magazine), vii Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, 136 teenagers in comics: Ayako as (in Ayako), 154, 156, 157, 159, 160; Emmett Till as, 71, 72; Lynda Barry as, 225. See also adolescence in comics “Teen Plague” (Burns), 139–140, 139 television, 197n1, 210; as an exercise in agency and autonomy for children, 133; in Japan, 151, 160; in Mafalda, 92, 99; moral panics about, 131; reinforcing cultural values, 96, 99, 112 Temple, Shirley, 23 Tetsuwan Astro (Astro Boy) (Tezuka), vii Tezuka, Osamu, vii, 9, 148–150, 154–160; comics by, 153, 158 Thompson, Craig, 219 Three Paradoxes, The (Hornschemeier), 10, 199–217, 202, 205, 211, 214 Tilgmann, Arnold, 33, 35, 37, 38, 39, 40, 41 Till, Emmett, 8, 70–89 Tilley, Carol, 134 Tinker, Emma, 219, 229 Tintin (Hergé), vii, 7, 11 Tits & Clits, 124nn10–11 Tommy Traveler in the World of Negro History (Feelings), 70–76, 73, 86, 89n4 TOON Books, 129, 145n1 Tran, G. B., 163 Treat, John Whittier, 151 Tullis, Brittany, xiii, 8, 9 Turma da Mônica (de Sousa), ix Uchmanowicz, Pauline, 165, 168 Uncle Tom’s Cabin, 85 underground “comix,” 108–127, 136

264  Index

United States, comics in: and childhood, 4; and the comics market in France, 184; creators of color in, xii; early, vii; postwar, and superhero comics, 3. See also Comics Code; comics studies urban environment, 15, 16, 22, 24, 25, 26 Valeo, Tom, 218 Valkyrie Squadron (Rivera), x van Leeuwen, Theo, 9, 148, 151–152, 153, 154, 156, 160 Vargas Dulché, Yolanda, ix Vehlmann, Fabien, 181, 182, 188, 190–191, 192, 197n3; comics by, 187, 189, 191 Velez, Ivan, xi Victorian: melodrama, 16, 22; values and standards, 14, 15, 17 Videla, Jorge Rafael, 106n5 Vietnam, 92, 123 Vietnamerica (Tran), 163 Villarrubia, José, 249 violence in comics, 5–6, 54–55, 113, 186; domestic, 55–56; and Emmett Till, 83; in horror and crime comics, 135; in Jolies ténèbres and Seuls, 190, 194; in manga, 151; in underground “comix,” 108 Vollmer, Rob, 150, 153 Wagstaff, Lee, 72, 83–84 Walt Disney’s Comics and Stories, 132 war comics, 56 Ware, Chris, 128, 137, 140 Warner, Marina, 184, 190, 192, 194, 196, 236–237 Watchmen (Moore), 140 Weaver, Lila Quintero, 80, 81, 83 Wertham, Fredric, and Seduction of the Innocent, xi, 11n2, 55–56, 113, 134 What It Is (Barry), 218–224, 228–232 “What’s the Door Doing Open at the

Freak Brothers’ Place at This Time of Night?” (Shelton), 121 Where the Wild Things Are (Sendak), 142 white privilege. See privilege, white Whitfield, Stephen J., 111 Whitlock, Gillian, 165 Whitted, Qiana, 3, 8 Wildsmith, Snow, vii Williams, Robert, 108, 115, 119, 121, 122; comic by, 119 Wilson, S. Clay, 108, 115, 119, 120, 122 Wimmen’s Comix, 124nn10–11 Winner, Ellen, 229 Wojcik, Pamela Robertson, 7 women’s rights. See feminism “Wonder Wart-Hog” (Shelton), 116, 117, 122 Wonder Woman, xi Wood, Mary, 54 Woolf, Virginia, 105n1 Worcester, Kent, 3 World War I, 15 World War II, 149, 151, 172, 184 World War II in comics, 8, 30–47, 54 Wright, Bradford, 2, 4, 133 Wright, Moses, 77 xenophobia in comics, ix. See also racism in comics Yang, Gene, viii, 163 Yellow Kid, The (Outcault), 7, 54 Young, Harvey, 83, 88 Young Lust, 108 Zap Comix, 9, 108–127, 109, 115, 118, 119 Zelizer, Viviana, 14 Zeno, 199, 200, 203, 204, 206, 208, 210– 214, 215n9 Zipi and Zape (Escobar), 7