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. 

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. 

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.

Raina Telgemeier is an engine, a star, a phenomenon. All of us who follow the world of graphic novels have heard this. For several years Telgemeier has borne a job description that, until recently, perhaps no one imagined we would ever need: America’s best-selling graphic novelist. Hype surrounds her like a halo (go, Raina!) Her success is proof of the graphic novel’s decisive new mainstreaming, and further proof, if any were needed, of the buying power and cultural clout of tweenage girls. She is, we’re told, “the Judy Blume of graphic novelists,” and her stardom has been a bellwether of the children’s graphic novel movement.

Telgemeier’s publisher, Scholastic, has capitalized on all this with gusto, rolling out the red carpet for each new release and boosting Raina to million-copy print runs. Earlier this year, a spinoff product, Share Your Smile, a kind of “interactive journal,” signaled a new phase in the branding of Raina: an exhortation to her readers to write their own autobiographical stories in the vein of Telgemeier’s breakout books, Smile and Sisters. I honestly don’t know what to think of Share Your Smile, which seems more about design than revealing content: a guided activity book comparable to Wreck This Journal, The Diary of an Awesome Kid, and so many others. I suppose I had wanted to see something more reflective or essayistic, less about prompts and nearly-blank pages for readers to fill in. (It strikes me that young readers may get more from how-to cartooning books like James Sturm et al.’s Adventures in Cartooning or Ivan Brunetti’s Comics: Easy as ABC!)

Telgemeier’s latest, though, Guts, now that’s a real book — and for me, her best. 

Guts is a middle-grade girlhood memoir akin to Smile and Sisters, and designed to match (Telgemeier’s autobiographical books and fictional books are distinguished by different design schemes). It’s in familiar Raina territory: a story of social awkwardness and anxiety, family and friendship, and the minute moral decisions and moments of confusion, defensiveness, and selfishness that can make school life so complicated. Predating the events of Smile, it depicts Raina, the author’s childhood self, going through fourth and fifth grade. Though it matches its sibling titles (indeed, Scholastic has just released all three in a boxed set), it stakes out its own thematic turf, revealing Raina’s anxieties and phobias in an emotionally charged way that goes a step further. It’s a brave book, and, I’m tempted to say, one that only a well-established children’s author could get away with. 

Guts depicts panic attacks and (as the title hints) upset stomach, cramping, and retching, as well as social and eating-related anxieties. It joins the considerable body of autobiographical comics that deal with anxiety, psychological distress, and neurodivergence. (Such themes are foundational to autographics as a genre, from Justin Green onward.) For a middle-grade graphic novel, Guts is, well, gutsy; it includes many scenes visualizing physical and psychological discomfort, and in some cases sharp pain and outright terror. It also includes quite a few scenes of bathrooming, bodily embarrassment, doctor’s office visits, and therapy sessions. “Treatment” is essential to its story. In short, Guts contributes to the graphic medicine movement. In the process, it yields the most harrowing and inventive pages Telgemeier has yet created. At the same time, Guts is very much a young reader’s book, never forgetting its main audience and taking care to explain and palliate the scary stuff—not with promises of quick cures and happy-ever-afters, but by showing that anxiety and panic are survivable and can be understood and, with practice, coped with and reduced. Young readers who dig Telgemeier’s books are likely to find Guts a warm, awkwardly funny, and ultimately reassuring guide.

I tend to think that Telgemeier’s best books are her memoirs. Her fictional graphic novels to date, Drama and Ghosts, have been well-intentioned liberal fables with under-examined premises (Drama has been faulted for reproducing romantic stereotypes of the antebellum South, and Ghosts for naive cultural appropriation and whitewashing colonial history). Both have tried to do good things: Drama is a queer-positive, gender-defying romance, and Ghosts a story of family affected by illness and disability. But they aren’t tough-minded books, and Telgemeier doesn’t quite skirt the pitfalls built into their premises. In her memoirs, however, Telgemeier has crafted a believably human alter ego, just anxious and at times selfish enough to pose serious ethical dilemmas, and she has a way of disclosing certain hard things that don’t get solved, even as her boisterous cartooning conveys a bright, affirming outlook on life. The balance is exquisite, and Telgemeier usually nails it.

Guts is the Raina book I’ve liked best. I will remember its formal gambits (startling for a middle-grade graphic novel) and its honesty. Telgemeier, at once a first-class storyteller and a commercial powerhouse, has clearly hit her stride. This book take chances, the chances pay off, and I’m impressed by the way she manages to walk the tightrope.