Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  There is, of course, a great deal of factual information about censorship, ALA being a staple source of much of it. There are a few works of fiction, too, that put a more human face on the issue, including Nancy Garden’s The Year They Burned the Books and Places I Never Meant to Be, a collection of stories edited by Judy Blume and written by often-challenged authors. Reading Blume’s introduction to this book is—for me, anyway—a trip down memory lane. Blume recalls that as a junior in high school she went to her local public library in search of a copy of the novelist John O’Hara’s A Rage to Live. “But I couldn’t find it,” she explains. “When I asked, the librarian told me THAT book was RESTRICTED. It was kept in a locked closet, and I couldn’t take it out without permission from my parents” (Blume 1999, 2).

  Today it’s not locked closets we need to worry about; it’s locked minds—minds that are impervious to alternative points of view and terrified of telling young people the sometimes-thorny truth about the realities of the world. One certainly understands and empathizes with parents and other concerned adults who wish to protect youngsters from the sensationalistic, the meretricious, and the mendacious. I confess that I, myself, worry when I observe the levels of extreme violence my three great-nephews are exposed to in the video games they play for hours at a time (two of the three boys are nine; the third is thirteen). And I certainly believe that parents need to be aware of and responsible for their offspring’s reading, viewing, and interacting habits. However, I draw the line when parents unilaterally and adamantly decree that not only their own children but also those of other parents may not have access to materials. Perhaps even more troubling to me is the continuing barrage of sensationalistic articles that appear in the mainstream media—media that are, or so I was taught in journalism school, supposed to be defenders of intellectual freedom and the people’s right to know (the blogosphere is another story, an exponentially more visceral place, where anonymous posters condemn and castigate to a fare-thee-well, one reason I avoid its precincts). As was the case in the 1990s, a never-ending stream of over-the-top exposés of books for youth continues to emanate from the fourth estate. Here’s a sample collection of twenty-first-century headlines:

  “Tales of Raw Misery for Ages Twelve and Up” (New York Times, July 20, 2007)

  “Young Readers, Harsh Reality” (New York Times, June 13, 2002)

  “New Book on Children’s Sexuality Causes a Furor” (Associated Press wire story, April 3, 2002)

  “It Ain’t Half Hot, Mum” (Manchester Guardian, February 23, 2003—yes, some of these stories appeared in the British press)

  “So It’s Goodbye to Janet and John” (London Times, May 2, 2003)

  “City’s Ed. Boobs” (New York Post, October 13, 2003—the lede for this story is “The three R’s in education were almost always racy, raunchy, and risqué”)

  “What (Sex) Boys (Sex) Think (Sex) About” (New York Times, October 7, 2003—this is actually an article about the television series Life as We Know It, but the show was adapted from Melvin Burgess’s controversial YA novel Doing It)

  “Teen Playas” (Entertainment Weekly, March 7, 2005)

  “Racy Books for Teens Pondered” (Brattleboro [Vermont] Reformer, July 9, 2005)

  “Battle of the Books: The Problem with ‘Problem’ Young Adult Fiction (Slate, June 17, 2005)

  “Racy Reads” (New York Journal News, July 10, 2005)

  “You’re Reading . . . What?” (Wall Street Journal, June 24, 2005)

  “Young Readers Pulled into a Rich, Amoral Teen Universe” (San Francisco Chronicle, September 24, 2005)

  “Teen Fiction Plots Are Darker and Starker” (Denver Post, July 5, 2009)

  “It Was Like All Dark and Stormy” (Wall Street Journal, June 6, 2009)

  “Rape, Abortion, Incest: Is This What CHILDREN Should Read?” (Daily Mail, July 9, 2009)

  As was the case in the nineties, too many of these articles were written by reporters who had not a clue about young adult literature and had not read the books they decried. In announcing the impending publication of Melvin Burgess’s Doing It, for example, a reporter for the Guardian snarkily wrote, “Apparently it’s really filthy” (Cooke 2003). It’s not, of course. Provocative, yes, but also a clear-eyed look at three teenage boys’ sex lives—or occasional lack thereof. That one of the three is having an affair with his (female) teacher is doubtless responsible for the appearance, in its wake, of several other YA novels dealing with the same sensitive subject: R. A. Nelson’s Teach Me (Razorbill, 2005) and Barry Lyga’s Boy Toy (Houghton Mifflin, 2007). Each of these titles must be evaluated on its own merits, but it’s worth noting that Doing It received the Los Angeles Times Book Award as best young adult book of the year.

  Because the reporters of these media accounts have no background in YA literature, their pieces oftentimes approach the ludicrous—at least to knowledgeable professionals. Unfortunately, it’s not only professionals who are reading them. It’s also credulous parents or people who are looking for a cause—célèbre or otherwise—and who, in turn, also fail to read the books but nevertheless head to the barricades or, more probably, the nearest library to file a challenge (I’m speaking here as one who was himself a public library administrator for twenty-five years and served as president of both YALSA and the Assembly on Literature for Adolescents of the National Council of Teachers of English). This explains such odd anomalies as finding Looking for Alaska, John Green’s superb and Printz Award–winning novel, being lumped together with the pedestrian Rainbow Party, simply because both address sexual conduct.

  By now it should be clear that the twenty-first century has brought new artistic freedom to both writers and publishers of young adult books. With that new freedom, however, has come new responsibility—not only for them but also for librarians, teachers, and reviewers. That responsibility includes reading widely, receiving a grounding in the history of the literature, developing critical evaluative and thinking skills, being aware of the realities and problems of YA life, and being on the lookout for the truly exploitative and irresponsible—especially because the ongoing process of liberating young adult literature from some of its former restraints continues to redefine not only its audience but also its marketplace.

  Who knows what tomorrow may bring, but as for today, this surely remains one of the most exciting periods in the whole history of young adult literature. And to prove that, even more excitement awaits us in the next chapter.

  Notes

  1. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, http://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/preview/ mmwrhtml/ss5905al.htm

  2. A transgender person is one who identifies with the opposite sex; a transsexual is a person whose sex has been surgically changed.

  3. www.ala.org/oif.

  the viz biz

  Transforming the Funnies

  Beginnings

  The comics have long been a staple of American popular culture; in fact, they were one of the seven “lively arts” identified by the cultural critic Gilbert Seldes in his landmark 1924 book of the same title.1 Nevertheless, they found neither respect nor place in America’s school and public libraries, where, for decades, they were considered at best ephemeral and at worst either subliterate or downright subversive. This impoverished attitude began to turn around in the 1980s and 1990s, but it didn’t become a certifiable phenomenon until YALSA devoted an entire 2002 preconference to the subject. To widespread surprise, the event was a sellout and was, in fact, the best attended of all the ALA preconferences that year. How the comics came to the library limelight and, almost overnight, turned into must-have staple constituents of library collections is a fascinating story.

  It began in the 1890s with the first newspaper comic strips. One of the earliest and most influential of these was R. F. Outcault’s Hogan’s Alley, which debuted on May 5, 1895, in the New York World. Not a strip but a single-panel cartoon, the feature introduced the Yellow Kid, who quickly became its signature character. As the comics historian Richard Ma
rschall (1989, 24–25) writes, “It was ‘Hogan’s Alley’ starring the Yellow Kid that truly turned the newspaper world upside down. Every paper had to have its own color comic section and every publisher longed to have its own counterpart of the Yellow Kid.”

  Among those early counterparts were Rudolph Dirks’s The Katzenjammer Kids, Frederick Opper’s Happy Hooligan, and Winsor McKay’s gorgeously drawn Little Nemo, which would influence generations of children’s picture book artists to come, ranging from Maurice Sendak to William Joyce.

  Created, frankly, to sell newspapers, the comics quickly attracted huge audiences of eager readers, among them the many new immigrants who were arriving in America as part of the greatest wave of immigration in this country’s history. The strips appealed not only because they featured immigrants themselves—especially the tenement dwellers of Hogan’s Alley and the German Americans in Katzenjammer Kids—but also because people who did not have English as a first language embraced visual stories that they could comprehend at a glance.

  Though at first confined to a single panel, the new comics quickly became a more kinetic exercise, assuming the form of multipanel strips of sequential images. It didn’t take long thereafter for the first spin-offs to appear: book-length compilations of previously published daily strips that, as early as 1902, were being called comic books.

  The first comic book to contain all new stories and characters, New Fun 1, debuted in 1935, the same year that Walt Disney’s first comic book, Mickey Mouse Magazine, appeared.

  In the meantime, another kind of kinetic reading experience that married words and pictures in a seamless symbiotic unity, the children’s picture book, had debuted (Wanda Gag’s Millions of Cats [Coward McCann, 1928] is often cited as the first of these), and cartoons had begun to move in the form of animated film even earlier. Winsor McKay, for example, produced a hand-colored film of his Little Nemo around 1911, and Disney’s first sound cartoon, Steamboat Willie, came along in 1928. In the decades since, all three of these art forms have continued to maintain a creatively symbiotic relationship, though it is the comic book that has contributed most directly to the emergence of today’s library-friendly comics form known as the graphic novel.

  In 1938, three years after the first original comic book appeared, the comics made another giant leap forward with the publication in 1938 of Action Comics #1, which introduced Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster’s soon-to-be-immortal Superman. A year later, another caped crusader, Bob Kane’s Batman, appeared, and within a decade another four hundred superheroes had joined the ranks. America had never been so well protected!

  The next two decades saw such an exponential growth in comic book publishing that the period is generally regarded as the golden age of comic books. According to the industry observer Michael R. Lavin, comic book sales were ranging from 500 million to 1.3 billion copies a year by 1953.2 In the meantime, however, those same comic books had become much edgier in content thanks to the rise of graphically violent horror, crime, and war “comics,” especially those published by William Gaines’s EC imprint. In 1954 the child psychiatrist Frederick Wertham’s controversial book The Seduction of the Innocent (Rinehart) appeared. Linking comic book violence to the rise of juvenile crime, Wertham’s book created a backlash that resulted in the Comic Book Hearings of the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Juvenile Delinquency and the creation of the starchy Comics Code Authority. The adverse publicity almost destroyed the comic book industry as sales plummeted and the number of publishers shrank from some three dozen to no more than nine.

  Fortunately, the visual has always had an enduring appeal, and by 1956 a new silver age of comics had begun, quickly becoming a more robust revival, with the 1960s debut of two new features from Marvel Comics: Fantastic Four and, perhaps more notably in terms of young adult literature, Spiderman, who was, in reality, the troubled teen Peter Parker, arguably the first psychologically complex superhero. While this was happening, the counterculture movement of the sixties had begun spawning adult, underground comics created, most notably, by R. Crumb, whose work has, in the years since, become so respectable that it is now regularly featured in the New Yorker!

  The increasing sophistication of characterization and subject matter came together in 1978 in the pages of veteran cartoonist Will Eisner’s ambitious book A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories. To describe this novel-length collection of four linked literary stories, Eisner used the term graphic novel, which has since become identified with him, though it had actually been used two years before in George Metzger’s 1976 book Time and Again.

  The Comics Come of Age

  Nearly another decade would pass, however, before three other important, genre-changing works appeared in the same landmark year, 1986, to truly launch a new age of grown-up comics called graphic novels. The three were Art Spiegelman’s Maus, Frank Miller’s Dark Knight Returns, and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen. Until that time, comic books had been sold at newsstands or, increasingly, at specialty comic bookstores. As the developments we’ve been charting began to broaden the comic book audience, however, some publishers like Fantagraphics, Drawn & Quarterly, Viz, and Dark Horse started selling their output through general bookstores. This, in turn, began attracting the attention of librarians. Thus, as early as 1984, the Hawaii State Public Library System began acquiring this form of visual and verbal communication. California’s Berkeley Public Library followed suit in 1989. Enough libraries had hopped on the comic book bandwagon by 1994 that VOYA magazine launched a regular column, “Graphically Speaking,” in which the librarian Kat Kan became one of the first to review graphic novels for a library-based readership. In the meantime, Spiegelman’s Maus and its sequel Maus II, released in a single volume in 1992 by Harper, received the Pulitzer Prize and signaled that the venerable comic book had finally come of age as a newly vibrant and vital art form that deserved a place even on respectable library shelves.

  In the wake of Maus, established comics publishers like DC, Fantagraphics, Top Shelf, and Drawn & Quarterly began experimenting with similarly serious graphic novels or alternative comics, as they were also called. In fact, DC started two imprints—Vertigo and Paradox Press—to differentiate its darker, more sophisticated efforts from its traditional superhero series. The former imprint, launched in 1993, published such early classics as Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta and Neil Gaiman’s Sandman (an original Sandman graphic novel, The Sandman: Endless Nights, published in 2003, became the first graphic novel to make the New York Times Best-Seller List). The latter imprint, formed the same year, published both Howard Cruse’s novel of the civil rights era, Stuck Rubber Baby, and Max Allan Collins and Richard Rayner’s Road to Perdition, which, some years later, would become a movie starring Tom Hanks and Paul Newman.

  The trend to the alternative continued in 1995 when the Canadian publisher Drawn & Quarterly began issuing Adrian Tomine’s serially published Optic Nerve, while in 1998 Fantagraphics published Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World and, in 2000, Joe Sacco’s innovative exercise in graphic journalism Safe Area Goradze.

  At the same time, a handful of major trade book publishers began experimenting with what—to them—was still a new form. One of the first was Avon; its imprint Neon Lit debuted in 1994 with a graphic version of Paul Auster’s noir novel City of Glass. Three years later, Bob Mecoy, who had become vice president and senior editor at Simon & Schuster after launching the Avon imprint, told Publishers Weekly, “Basically what we were doing was making paper movies.” He continued, “Book publishing now competes with the rest of the entertainment industry and that means finding other viable ways to tell a story, especially at a time when the public seems so interested in multimedia entertainment” (Morales 1997, 49).

  Not only was the public interested but so, increasingly, were other traditional book publishers. In 1996 Little, Brown, the longtime American publisher of the Belgian cartoonist Herge’s internationally celebrated Tintin, published Ben Katchor’s critically hailed
Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer, and Pantheon, which has since become the most important trade publisher of literary graphic novels, followed in 1998 with Katchor’s next novel, The Jew of New York. Pantheon subsequently published Clowes’s David Boring (2000) and Chris Ware’s extraordinary Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000), which is widely regarded as the field’s first masterpiece.

  Though avidly read by teens, all of these books were technically published for adults. One of the first titles to be published expressly for young adults was Karen D. Hirsch’s original anthology Mind Riot: Coming of Age in Comix (Simon & Schuster/Aladdin, 1997), and—in 2000—the Joanna Cotler imprint at HarperCollins launched the Little Lit series, coedited by Art Spiegelman and his wife Francoise Mouly, the art editor of the New Yorker. Clearly, as Spiegelman quipped, “Comics aren’t just for grownups any more” (Reid and MacDonald 2000, 44–45). And they certainly weren’t just for collectors, aging fan boys, or other habitués of specialty comic bookstores. By the time the silver anniversary of the graphic novel arrived in 2003, Time magazine had claimed, “Graphic novels have finally reached a point of critical mass in both popular consciousness and sales. Micha Hershman at Borders confirms the trend, saying, ‘Over the last four years graphic novels have shown the largest percentage of growth in sales over any other book category’” (Arnold 2003).

  As noted earlier, libraries had begun purchasing this vital new art form as early as the mid-eighties; indeed, as Judith Rosen (2003, 52) pointed out, “Initially libraries led the way in embracing comics as a way to get young people to read. And wholesalers that service libraries developed catalogues, e-mailings and Web sites to help with building graphic novel collections.”