She applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis takes a reader into a chapter about Indigenous comics in Canada that explore the enduring violence of settler colonialism, the Indian Residential School system, and its legacy of intergenerational trauma in graphic narratives written for young readers. David Alexander Robertson’s masterful series Tales of Big Spirit (2014—16) reframes history from a distinctly Indigenous perspective, bringing the forgotten (or silenced) history of the Beothuk people into the present by means of young Jessie, who learns the value of reclaimed history.Learn more about Growing Up Graphic at the Ohio State University Press.
This page addresses many of the central assertions that I make about the particular affordances of graphic narratives about crises, challenges, and predicaments, a new trend that my book identifies in literature for young readers. Growing Up Graphic, drawing on a resource base of more than fifty graphic narratives (originally written in English or translated into that language), considers graphic texts for and about children and youth from diverse cultural and ethnic backgrounds, varied regions of the world, and wide-ranging gender identities and levels of ability. These texts contest images of childhood victimization, passivity, and helplessness, presenting instead children as actors who attempt to make sense of the challenges that affect them. Specifically, it highlights visual representations of a range of young people, including child soldiers, migrants, Indigenous peoples in Canada, queers, and young people living with impairments and/or undergoing particular medical life events. As page 99 confirms, many of these comics rely on a desire to expose readers to some lived realities that young people living all over the world might tackle. Robertson’s comic The Ballad of Nancy April, featured on page 99, exemplifies the particular abilities that comics have to “speak beyond linguistic, cultural, and intergenerational gaps,” to translate across cultures in an effort to bring up issues of discussion between and among different audiences. As alternative and often subversive forms of storytelling, Indigenous comics such as this one present visual and narrative opportunities to truth-tell, to reflect on and resist Canada’s history of colonialism, allowing readers to immerse themselves in vivid verbal and visual sensory fields.
Page 99 aligns with this project’s larger commitment to showcase how the multimodal affordances of comics enhance the persuasiveness of these visual stories, offering insight into “society’s soul through the way in which it treats its children,” as Mandela discussed in his 1995 speech to launch the Mandela Children’s Fund. In focusing on the experiences of children and youth, their challenges and hardships, comics remind readers, parents, librarians, and critics that young people are as deeply shaped by the political decisions made by the national governments, international organizations, corporations, and nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) that govern their existence and identities as are adults. As persuasive tools for knowledge-building, the comics that Growing Up Graphic studies have the potential to educate readers about their own rights and global humanitarian issues and can inspire those who want to become individual agents of right activism.
--Marshal Zeringue
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