The Cartoonists Club

The Cartoonists Club. By Raina Telgemeier and Scott McCloud. Scholastic/Graphix, ISBN 978-1338777215 (softcover), 2025. US$14.99. 288 pages.

"Smile meets Understanding Comics" is the obvious elevator pitch for The Cartoonist Club. While that's a bit facile, many people have said exactly that, and they're not wrong. The story of four schoolkids who form an afterschool comics-making club, this graphic novel combines the friendship themes and social sensitivity typical of Raina Telgemeier's beloved work (and so many other middle-grade GNs) with the didacticism and boosterism of Scott McCloud's celebrated meta-comics. As the cover suggests, the cast is an assortment of social types (nerdy, exuberant, shy, supportive), while certain passages directly channel Understanding Comics or Making Comics. The result is a book that tries to work as the story of a friendship cluster but also an exhortation to make comics.

The Cartoonists Club is not alone among children's graphic novels that also serve as cartooning how-to primers. There's the Cat Kid Comic Club series (2020-2023) by the unstoppable Dav Pilkey, spun off from his mega-popular Dog Man franchise. Pilkey has done five Comic Club books, in which irrepressible cartoon tadpoles make their own minicomics in various styles. Pilkey incorporates some of those comics into the main narrative, inviting readers to appreciate the stylistic variations possible in comic art. These playful exhortations to creativity have sold bazillions and inspired an Off-Broadway musical (2023). Then there's the long-running series Adventures in Cartooning by James Sturm, Andrew Arnold, and Alexis Frederick-Frost, which has yielded, I think, nine volumes to date (2009-2023). In these, a knight, her horse, and a cartooning elf have breathless, page-turning adventures that happen to be packed with instructive content for young artists. There's also Mark Crilley's The Drawing Lesson (2016) and The Comic Book Lesson (2022), graphic novels in which aspiring young creators receive lessons from artistic mentors. These aim for older readers and tackle questions of craft, with chapters named for technical concerns such as "Understanding Light and Shadow," "Character Design," and "Panel Sequences."

​What all these books have in common is the practice of threading didactic elements through a spare and conventional story: essentially, using fast-moving fictions to deliver how-to instruction. In this sense, they differ from more purely instructional nonfiction works like Telgemeier's interactive journal Share Your Smile (2019) or Ivan Brunetti et al.'s Comics: Easy as ABC (also 2019). It's not uncommon for books, even fictional ones, to encourage young readers to take up their own artistic practice; that thread unites everything from Sharon Creech's verse novel Love That Dog (2001) to Grant Snider's recent collection Poetry Comics (2024). Snider implicitly imagines his reader as a young visual poet facing the challenges of the craft, reminding me of Randall Jarrell's classic The Bat-Poet (1964), or for that matter recent YA künstlerromans like Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming (2014) and Elizabeth Acevedo's The Poet X (2018), which encourage up and coming poets to engage the world through their art. What The Cartoonist Club does (in tune with Pilkey, Sturm et al., and Crilley) is use a familiar genre, in this case a middle-grade school story, to expound on the craft of comics.

Raina-style social dynamics meet McCloudian didacticism.

The results are winsome, affirming, and, I'm afraid, fairly predictable. As a story, The Cartoonist Club feels like a sketch rather than a novel; it's streamlined, and packs in no more character development or complexity than I might expect in, say, a brief picture book or early reader. The characters and setting conjure up Telegemeier's previous middle-grade stories but don't get the same complex treatment; the plot is telegraphed and swift. She delivers something like her usual mix of tenderness and high spirits, with characters who seesaw between exuberance and anxiety, but the plot doesn't give them much room to grow. Then again, as a McCloudian incitement to cartooning, The Cartoonist Club is pretty effective, but at times it reads like a potted summary of McCloud's earlier work. I came away not quite as bowled over as I had hoped to be when the project was announced, to much fanfare, in June 2024. 

Lynda's autographics, as drawn by McCloud (spread stitched together in Photoshop, with apologies for glitches).

It's not bad. Not at all. It just feels more like a set-up than a thing delivered. The characters and their relationships feel schematic to me. Again, see the cover: there's Makayla, a bubbling extrovert full of notions who can't seem to focus on turning them into stories. Craft is not her thing, but she's a fountain of ideas. The club itself is one of her ideas; the book starts with her, and her wide-open sense of possibility. Then there's her friend Howard, a compulsive drawer starved for story ideas, who hides his cartooning from a disapproving father. A team-up between Howard and Makayla seems inevitable. Then there's the character Art, his very name a nudge (he's often greeted with the punning line, "Hi, Art!"). His dad is an animator and comic artist manqué who loves to talk shop. Art, though, is less beholden to the idea of pure Comics, more of a Duchampian boundary-pusher who loves any creative challenge. He's a zinester and paper engineer who likes making devices with his hands, as opposed to simply drawing or telling stories. I see a lot of McCloud in him (maybe there's a touch of Ken Wong or Jason Shiga as well?). Finally, there's Lynda, perfectionist and introvert, who only gradually gets involved in the club. Lynda harbors an unspoken loss and bereavement that she ends up confronting in tender autobiographical comics. It's hard for her to get things done because she sees only the flaws in her drawing, but, naturally, she is the most expressive artist. All of the kids' comics (that is, the comics-within-the-comic) are penciled by McCloud, and the revelation of Lynda's work gives him a chance to shine. 

Crockett Johnson's gift that just keeps on giving.

The Cartoonists Club is not as uproarious as Pilkey, nor as technical as Crilley. It gingerly evokes the spirit of today's children's comics movement: a mix of grassroots creativity and adult chaperoning. Notably, a school librarian, Ms. Fatima, serves as the kids' comics literacy sponsor, exhorting, affirming, and, yes, schooling the young artists. She is constant, reliable, and encouraging. The kids, meanwhile, have quiet challenges to get through: settling on ideas, committing to sharing their work, coming to terms with loss, gaining the approval of a skeptical parent. The book's climax is a mini comic-con at a local library, where the club members sell their work and get to see the impact they are having. Actually, this is the last in a series of climaxes, preceded by, first, a meta-comics chapter in which characters break the fourth wall and traverse the blank page (channeling everyone from McCay to Crockett Johnson to Wiesner); and then the chapter in which Lynda finally decides to share her very personal work with the rest of the gang. Throughout, Telgemeier exercises her trademark vulnerability and emotive cartooning chops, while McCloud provides meta-comics, formalist lessons, and encomiums to creativity. Everything clicks, yet leaves me wanting more.

To be fair, The Cartoonists Club is not simply a cynical marketer's dream, a team-up between Telgemeier's branding and McCloud's. The two genuinely admire each other. For Telgemeier, Understanding Comics is a touchstone, while McCloud has been singing Telgemeier's praises since at least her book Drama (2012), which, as editor, he excerpted in The Best American Comics 2014. In some ways, this is the proverbial match made in heaven. Furthermore, the book's celebration of unbounded creativity, artistic community, and risk-taking is genuine; you can't fake that kind of feeling. That said, The Cartoonists Club reads like a reminder of the things that Telgemeier and McCloud have done so well separately, rather than a case of striking out toward something new. Along with Share Your Smile, it feels like a means of consolidating Raina's popularity, as well as reflecting on what the last twenty years have brought to kids' comics. Not a bad thing, though not the newest, freshest thing either.

Certainly, the book would have been inconceivable even ten years ago, and the fact that it is conceivable now makes me happy.