KinderComics, alas, has been away for too long. This spring and summer, I have had to channel my energies elsewhere. I hate to admit it, but my academic-year workload does not make room for frequent blogging, and when the summer or intersession comes around, well, then I end up having to advance or complete other long-simmering projects. Lately I’ve had to cut back, refocus, and make a point of not driving myself nuts! Still, I am going to push for several reviews this summer; I want to keep KinderComics alive. The field of children’s comics is too important, and my interest in it too intense, to let go.

I’ll have a review of 5 Worlds: The Red Maze up later this week, and then a few (probably short) ones between now and Labor Day, in order to keep the engine humming. Thank you, readers, for checking out or revisiting KinderComics. I’ll keep pushing.

There has been a great deal of news on the children's comics front during my four-month absence. Would that I could go into all these stories in detail:

Besides all that news, awards have been given out:

My gosh, what a busy and exciting field. Keeping up is a challenge! I hope to do a better job going forward.

When it comes to public-facing scholarship and comics criticism, one of the most inspiring figures to my mind was the late Derek Parker Royal, co-creator, producer, and editor of The Comics Alternative podcast. Derek, a major critic of Philip Roth, Jewish American literature and culture, and graphic narrative, passed away recently, leaving a grievous sense of loss in the hearts of many. He was a scholar, innovator, and facilitator of a rare kind, generous, engaged, and prolific, and will be greatly missed in the comics studies community. He brought many people into that community; for example, at the Comics Studies Society conference in Toronto last weekend, his longtime collaborator Andy Kunka spoke movingly of how Derek encouraged him to enter the field. I will think of Derek whenever I post here, and the soaring example that he set.

Of course San Diego’s Comic-Con International begins today, along with the associated Comics Conference for Educators and Librarians at the San Diego Central Library. Part of me wishes I could be there, but, as the saying goes, I have other fish to fry. First, an announcement:

After next Monday, July 23, KinderComics will be taking a four-week break so that I can prepare for the Fall 2018 semester and also address some technical problems that have arisen around this site. That is, I will have a review up next Monday, but after that KinderComics will likely hibernate until Monday, August 20. My hope is to get KinderComics on a more secure tech footing and then resume blogging on a biweekly basis just in time for the Fall semester. Expect this site to delve into teaching in a big way come August 20-27.

I’m sorry that I’ll have to be out of action for a bit. KinderComics is something I’m very proud of, and has given new shape and meaning to my life as a comics reader. Since taking this blog public about four months ago, I’ve published nearly forty posts and reviewed nearly a score of books, including nine or ten brand-new titles. I’ve hosted posts by Joe Sutliff Sanders and Gwen Athene Tarbox, published news and commentary, brainstormed for my forthcoming children’s comics seminar, and drawn hundreds of visitors. This is a project I definitely plan on continuing, even if my teaching schedule may make weekly posting impossible. Essentially, KinderComics is my way of keeping track of the new “mainstream” in comics, practicing comics criticism, and reflecting on the emergent discourse of children’s comics scholars—so it matters a great deal to me. Look out for new posts on July 23 and August 20!

Secondly, back on July 3, which to me feels like a hundred years ago, Inks editor (and my Comics Studies Society colleague) Jared Gardner published an interview with me at Extra Inks that delves into why I am doing KinderComics and what I hope this blog can contribute to the scholarly community. Jared, a top-notch scholar and critic, is one of my guiding lights in this profession, and I'm proud and grateful that he chose to spotlight KinderComics. In general, Extra Inks (the blog of Inks: The Journal of the Comics Studies Society) is a great resource for reviews and features pertaining to comics and comics scholarship, well worth bookmarking and visiting often. (Take for example my colleague Candida Rifkind's timely and helpful post spotlighting migrant and refugee comics, from July 8.) Thank you, Jared!

Back soon...

This post is about teaching. As I said when I started KinderComics, one of my goals in doing this blog is to brainstorm publicly about a course I'll be teaching this coming Fall 2018 semester at CSU Northridge: an English Honors seminar titled Comics, Childhood, and Children's Comics (English 392). Despite having taught at the intersection of comics and children's culture for years (including bringing comics into my entry-level Children's Literature class and designing courses on picture books that also explore comics), this upcoming Honors seminar marks the first time I've actually pitched a course devoted to children's comics per se. I'm excited about the prospect, and honestly a bit daunted by it too.

Why daunted? Comics and childhood, together, make for a sprawling, complex area—and perhaps you can tell from my course's title that I haven't yet committed to a particular focus. Which is to say that I haven't decided how to delimit the course or what objectives to put front and center. I've been thinking about those things for a while. Thing is, the students and I will have fifteen weeks together, which in practice, experience tells me, means about twelve weeks tops for introducing new readings. What's more, part of the brief for an Honors seminar with, say, between a dozen and twenty students is that the students take turns presenting to and teaching one another, sharing the results of deep, self-directed research (fitting challenges for an advanced course). So it seems clear that I'll have to make some severe choices when it comes to focusing down. Yow!

I've thought of at least four potential foci that are important to me:

1. The tradition of comics about children, particularly US newspaper strips, from the late 19th to late 20th century, including formative work by Outcault, Dirks, Swinnerton, and McCay and beloved later work by cartoonists like Crosby, Crockett Johnson, Schulz, Watterson, and Lynn Johnston. This could entail tapping the scholarship of, say, Jared Gardner, Ian Gordon, Philip Nel, and Lara Saguisag, among others.
2. The roughly mid-20th century concern, or moral panic, over comics as children's and young adults' reading, particularly in the US, which led to the damning of comic books in other media and the imposition of a suffocating self-censorship "Code." This is a well-covered and  probably inescapable topic, one that taps research by, for example, Martin Barker, Bart Beaty, James Gilbert, David Hadju, Amy Kiste Nyberg, Chris Pizzino, Leonard Rifas, the late John Springhall, and Carol Tilley.
3. Critical, unsentimental, or subversive depictions of childhood in contemporary comics, particularly graphic memoirs, for adult readers. I think here of David B., Bechdel, Thi Bui, Findakly and Trondheim, Justin Green, Nakazawa, Satrapi, Small, and so on. The scholarly sources here are legion, including Michael Chaney, Hillary Chute, Elisabeth El Refaie, Andrew Kunka, Joseph Witek, Gillian Whitlock, and many others. Memoir is probably the most obvious intersection of comics and literary criticism at the moment, and depictions of childhood are vital to the genre.
4. The current young readers' comics movement that has grown around the idea of the graphic novel (and most nearly reflects the focus of this blog!). That movement intersects children's and YA literature study, children's and teen librarianship, the growing professional literature on teaching with comics, and the idea of comics as a distinctive form of, or pathway to, literacy. Again, the scholarship here, though recent, is growing by leaps and bounds. On the literacy teaching side, I think of James Bucky Carter, Katie Monnin, and many others; on the literary criticism side, I know of no better distillation of current trends than the collection Graphic Novels for Children and Young Adults, edited by Michelle Ann Abate and Gwen Athene Tarbox and published just last year. It is this area that got me excited about teaching the course, and so I feel it has to be well represented.

All these areas seem important. Child characters are central to the satirical and sentimental uses of comics and to the form's popular spread; the history of moral panic is crucial to understanding comics' reputation, even now; the depiction of childhood in adult texts is key to the burgeoning alternative comics and graphic memoir canon, from Binky Brown to My Favorite Thing Is Monsters; and the sheer popularity of graphic novels for young readers today is a trend so dramatic as to throw all the other areas into a new light. So, the question for me is, what objectives do I want students to achieve as they work at the crossroads of comics and childhood?

With all this in mind, I'm inviting several of my close colleagues in children's comics studies to join me here in an intermittent series of posts that I'll call a Teaching Roundtable. This roundtable will amount to, again, brainstorming, and perhaps debating the importance of our different teaching objectives. First up, TOMORROW, will be Dr. Joe Sutliff Sanders, author of, among other things, the new book A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child (U of Minnesota Press, 2018), editor of The Comics of Hergé: When the Lines are Not So Clear (UP of Mississippi, 2016), and faculty member at the Children's Literature Research Centre at the University of Cambridge. Joe will be following up on this initial post -- readers, please come back tomorrow to follow and chime in on the discussion! Add your voices! Thanks.

​WELCOME to KinderComics, a blog at the intersection of comics studies, childhood studies, and children's publishing.

Essentially, KinderComics will offer comics criticism and children's culture criticism. It will feature reviews and commentary centered on children's and young adult comics and picture books, children and young adults as readers, fans, and makers of comics, and depictions of childhood, adolescence, and coming of age in comics. Its content will consist mostly of brief reviews of recent graphic books, comic magazines, picture books, and other visual texts aimed at or depicting young people—but we will also include other things, such as longer essays, commentary, interviews, and link posts.

This blog is mainly the work of comics scholar Charles Hatfield, or See Hatfield—that's me.* It's a sequel of sorts to a column of mine that never quite jelled at The Comics Journal between 2011 and 2013 (if you're curious, see reviews here, here, here, and here). At the heart of KinderComics is my enthusiasm for comics and picture books as art forms, and my critical interest in the ongoing reception, or cultural construction, of comics as a medium "for" children. You may notice that I'm somewhat skeptical about certain topics that come up often in discussions of children's comics, including reading levels, developmental theory, and formal educational uses of comics. I don't mean to reject these topics outright—they are important—but I do tend to view them critically. I will be glad to learn from readers when I make mistakes about, or too quickly dismiss, these topics (or any topics!). At bottom, I'm less concerned about work that is prescribed to children because it is supposed to be "good for them," more concerned with work that I think is actually good.

Overall, I'm drawn to comics as a form of art and of text with its own traditions and aesthetics. I enjoy practicing the art of reviewing, and KinderComics is the place where I can share my thoughts about the part of my comics reading life that most directly concerns children and childhood. I hope I'll be able to post here once or twice monthly—and I plan to run a series of posts over the summer that will help me brainstorm and prep for my fall course "Comics, Childhood, and Children’s Comics."

If you love comics and take children's texts seriously, I hope KinderComics will be right up your alley. Again, welcome!

BTW, you can find (pretty much) this same introduction on our About page.