Young Adult Literature: From Romance to Realism

by Michael Cart

  This hope—that the popularity of comics and graphic novels might lure kids to the library and induce them to read—was a fundamental reason for librarians’ initial interest in developing these collections. Other reasons that have stood the test of time include the following:

  • Comics’ proven capacity to increase visual literacy, an essential skill in a digital age

  • Their high visual content, which recommends their use with reluctant readers and English-language learners

  • Their established viability as a new—and continuously evolving—art form

  • Their indispensable place in popular culture

  • And—more pragmatically—their demonstrated capacity for increasing circulation and enhanced use of other library collections

  Libraries Enter the Picture

  Nevertheless, it wasn’t until 2002 that a true turning point arrived; not only did YALSA hold its first graphic novel preconference; its Popular Paperbacks Committee issued a recommended list of graphic novels for teens, and “Get Graphic @ Your Library” was selected as the theme for national Teen Read Week. Just three years later, YALSA launched its annual Great Graphic Novels for Teens list, an act that invited serious consideration of how to review and evaluate the evolving art form. The policies and procedures for the Great Graphic Novels Committee list the following criteria:

  • Reflect an integration of images and words

  • Exhibit a clarity of visual flow on the page

  • Ability of images to convey necessary meaning

  • Outstanding quality of the artwork’s reproduction

  • Narrative enhanced by the artwork

  • Narrative dominated by sequential art component

  Several years earlier, curious about this same issue of evaluation, I interviewed the two-time Eisner Award–winning graphic novelist Eric Shanower, creator of The Age of Bronze, an epic retelling of the Trojan War in comic book form. To my question, “How should librarians go about assessing work like yours?” he replied, “They should ask: Is the artwork engaging? Does it draw a reader into the story? Is the movement of the story from one panel to the next clear? The visual storytelling doesn’t necessarily need to be ‘easy’ or even linear but it does need to be comprehensible. Also, does the artwork serve the story? The evaluation of its technical aspects should be specific to the medium of the comics, but the evaluation of the emotional and intellectual content and impact—the aesthetic experience as a whole—will generally have much more in common with the ways other media are evaluated” (Cart 2002b).3

  The continuing—and even expanding—library interest in graphic novels spurred a number of trade publishers (among them Abrams Amulet, Random House, Puffin, and Hyperion) to start publishing graphic novels specifically targeted at young readers. In 2005 Scholastic became the first children’s book publisher to inaugurate its own graphic novel imprint, which it called, appropriately, Graphix. Though initially focused on books for younger readers—including an ambitious, multivolume colorized release of Jeff Smith’s classic Bone series—Graphix published its first YA graphic title, Breaking Up, by Aimee Friedman and Christine Norrie in 2007.

  That same year, Simon & Schuster children’s publishing announced an ambitious division-wide effort to encourage the publication of comics and graphic novels by all of its imprints, and Ginee Seo/Atheneum quickly responded with Chiggers, an original graphic novel by the award-winning cartoonist Hope Larsen.

  By far the most promising and ambitious new imprint, however, was Roaring Brooks’ First Second. Led by the editorial director Mark Siegel, himself a comics artist and book designer, the line launched in the spring of 2006; within a year one of its books had garnered remarkable recognition. American Born Chinese, by Gene Luen Yang, became the first graphic novel to receive the Michael L. Printz Award; it was also the first graphic novel to be shortlisted for the National Book Award.

  Siegel, who grew up in France, brings a cosmopolitan sensibility to his imprint, which publishes not only American comic artists but also editions of distinguished comic art from all over the world in a high-end, soft-cover format with French flaps and a uniform six-by-eight-and-a-half-inch trim size.

  In light of the growing sophistication and aesthetic ambition of the highly visual form, one must ask what, exactly, a graphic novel is these days—is it just, as some have asserted, “a long comic book” (Estrada 2006, C4) or “a comic book that needs a bookmark?” (McGrath 2004a, 26).

  Yes and no. The form certainly has its roots in the humble comic book. And in the comic book industry itself, graphic novels are still often called trade comics, and many graphic novelists continue to call themselves cartoonists. That said, graphic novels are, in fact, distinguished from comic books, first, by their greater length and, second, by their sturdier format. Traditional comic books remain a cross between a pamphlet and a magazine; they’re single-issue publications that usually appear monthly, are stapled rather than bound, and are seldom longer than thirty-six pages. Graphic novels, however, are square bound, original, never-before-published, book-length stories or collections of (previously unpublished) short stories.

  They are a medium, not a genre; a form that combines words, pictures, and iconic language presented in sequential panels to create a whole work that is larger than the sum of its parts. They require the reader to invest creative energy and imagination to supply actions and events implied by breaks between the panels. And before we get too lost in analysis, graphic novels are technically different not only from comic books but also from trade paperbacks, which are book-length compilations of previously published material, usually consecutive issues of an ongoing series. To further confuse the issue, trade paperbacks can be published in either soft or hardcover formats, and graphic novels can also be nonfiction.

  Though comics and graphic novels have clearly been a field in flux since the mid-1980s, one thing about them did remain fixed for far too long: the medium’s tendency to attract significantly more male readers than females (as evidence, consider that a hallmark of comics has been their unfortunate tendency to objectify women). Which is not to say, of course, that there were no girl-friendly comics. Consider the popularity of two very different classics: Little Lulu and Wonder Woman.

  Little Lulu was the creation of the cartoonist Marjorie Henderson Buell, who signed her work “Marge,” but Wonder Woman was the creation of a man, William Moulton Marston, a psychologist who is famous for having been involved in the invention of the polygraph.4 His superheroine debuted in All Star Comics No. 8 for December 1941 and—immediately popular—has been published, more or less continuously, since. The character’s popularity received a boost, of course, with the debut of the television series starring Lynda Carter in 1975 (it remained on the air until 1979). But the comic’s popularity gradually waned in the 1980s, and it was actually discontinued for a year in 1986 before being reintroduced in 1987. It was not until 2006, however, that the adventures of the superheroine were, for the first time, written and drawn by a woman, the cartoonist Gail Simone.

  Though few women actually worked in the field, Little Lulu and Wonder Woman weren’t the only comics targeted at girl readers. A whole subgenre of romance comics came into existence in the late 1940s (at the same time that romance fiction for teens was the reigning genre in book publishing) and stuck around until the 1970s. With titles like Young Romance, Falling in Love, and Heart Throbs, they were as full of clichés, stereotypes, and overripe dialogue as a B movie. And, of course, they were all written by men. As the romance comics gradually faded into oblivion in the 1970s, Paul Levitz, the president and publisher of DC Comics, told Publishers Weekly, “Publishers essentially abandoned the [female] demographic. Nobody put a lot of effort into trying to reach them for the next couple of decades” (Deahl 2007).

  Manga

  This situation began to change dramatically with the mid-1990s explosion of manga—Japanese comics. Like graphic novel, the term manga describes a format, not a genre, becau
se manga can be about any subject and addressed to an audience of virtually any age, though the earliest manga to reach the United States were typically for children, such as Pokémon. Despite the diversity of their content—which includes media tie-ins, superheroes, fantasy, science fiction, romance, sports, action-adventure, humor, and more—manga tend to conform to a readily recognizable artistic style: their characters all have enormous eyes and tiny noses; most of the books are done in black and white; and—most challenging to older American readers—they are read from right to left and back to front. Most manga are also part of seemingly endless series (Jason Thompson identifies more than nine hundred of them in his recent book Manga: A Complete Guide [Del Rey, 2007]), each of which may fill thirty or more paperback volumes and, like soap operas, run for years. (Ranma ½, the first manga to become popular in the United States, is also the longest- running series to date, having lasted thirteen years! The successor to Ranma appears to be Masashi Kishimoto’s Naruto. A total of forty-four volumes of the adventures of this young ninja in training had been published through September 2009.)

  There are a prodigious number of manga subcategories, but two of the most prominent are shojo and shonen; the former—targeted at girl readers— tend to be character driven, and the latter, aimed at boys, are typically plot driven.

  Though still a relative newcomer to the U.S. market, manga have been a fixture of Japanese popular culture for more than sixty years.5 It wasn’t until women began writing and drawing manga for the first time in the late 1960s, however, that shojo became an indispensable part of the Japanese comic mix. And even then, they didn’t begin to attract an audience of American readers until the late 1980s and 1990s, when Viz and Tokoyopop, which became the two largest publishers of manga in the United States, were founded.

  Since that time, manga has become one of the fastest-growing segments of the publishing industry, and girls are among its fastest-growing group of readers; indeed, manga were the first comics that many modern girls ever read. Why them and not American comics? Well, in part because of the diversity of shojo’s content. If American comics focused on superheroes, shojo explored a much wider, girl-friendly world ranging from fantasy to fashion and from high school stories to romantic comedy.

  Not surprisingly many of the most popular shojo titles are not only written and drawn by women, they also feature female characters and, perhaps accordingly, are sometimes called the chick lit of the graphic novel world (especially josei, manga aimed at adult women readers).6

  Sailor Moon is probably the classic example of shojo. Created by Naoko Takeuchi, it’s the story of a fourteen-year-old schoolgirl who is granted magical powers after she meets a talking cat named Luna. (The shojo tradition of female characters having magic powers may derive, the critic Paul Gravett argues, from the Shinto tradition of female deities and priestesses.)

  Arguably even more popular than Sailor Moon is Fruits Basket, by a female artist who works under the pseudonym Natsuki Takaya. Fruits Basket is the story of an orphan girl named Tohru who lives in a tent in the woods. There she is befriended by a mysterious family named Sohma, the members of whom, when hugged by a person of the opposite sex, turn into one of the animals of the Chinese zodiac.

  Speaking of opposite sex, Ranma ½, though drawn and written by the female artist Rumiko Takahashi, is the story of a male teenage martial artist. He’s a male some of the time, anyway. It turns out that Ranma is enchanted and turns into a woman whenever he is splashed by cold water. To turn back into a male, he must be splashed by—you guessed it—hot water.

  As Ranma demonstrates, some shojo feature male characters. Another notable example is Clamp’s xxxHolic, the story of a teenage boy who goes to work for a witch. Clamp is not a single artist but a four-woman studio that, over the past seventeen years, has produced twenty-two popular manga series, including—in addition to xxxHolic—Chobits, Cardcaptor Sekura, Tsubasa, and X. Finally, another form of shojo that features male protagonists is shonenai. Translated as “boy love,” these books indeed feature idealized romantic relationships between two boys. Shonen-ai are seldom sexually explicit, though a form called yaoi, aimed at older readers, often is.

  The appeal and influence of manga of all sorts on the U.S. market have been significant. By 2005 the form had even spawned an American version called OEL (original-English-language) manga, comics created for the American market by non-Japanese artists.

  But it is manga’s role in establishing a female audience for graphic novels that may be its most lasting contribution. As a result, more women are entering the field, and mainstream American graphic novel publishers are beginning to aggressively court girl readers.7 The publisher NBM, founded in 2005, initially targeted the tween market for young girls by issuing graphic adaptations of the classic Nancy Drew mysteries. In 2006 DC introduced an entire new imprint called Minx, a line of original graphic novels aimed at young female readers. In reaching out to this new audience, DC took an unusual step for a comics publisher: it joined forces with Alloy Marketing and Media, the packager—as we have seen—responsible for such successful book series as Gossip Girl and Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants. The Minx line debuted in May 2007 with a graphic novel titled The Plain Janes. Written by the established YA novelist Cecil Castellucci, the novel had art by Jim Rugg and recounted the doings of a nonconformist art girl gang. Unfortunately, despite significant media attention and the publication of nearly a dozen critically praised graphic novels, DC retired the new imprint barely two years after its 2007 launch.

  There is no question, however, that graphic novels by women author-artists have become an important part not only of manga but also of the entire graphic novel scene. A well-attended panel at the 2008 New York Comic Con was devoted to the growing number of comics aimed at girls, and two of the most critically hailed graphic novels of the past ten years are by women: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis and Alison Bechdol’s memoir Fun Home (Houghton Mifflin, 2006) (Rosen 2009b).

  Comic Art—Oxymoron or Appraisal?

  Satrapi and Bechdol are distinguished writers as well as artists, and they evidence another trend that has been building in the field since about 2005. The television journalist Rachel J. Allen explains: “Graphic novels have gotten bigger because they’re, well, better. The past five years have often been trumpeted by the comic book industry as ‘The Golden Age of Writers’” (Allen 2006).

  First Second’s Mark Siegel agrees: “With the advent of an author-driven market—as opposed to series-driven or merchandising-driven market—creators have a platform and potential to reach a great audience by developing their own personal vision, their own unique voice” (Brill 2006).

  As a result, a number of celebrated authors have been drawn to the graphic novel as a new form of self-expression. Such luminaries as Michael Chabon, Jonathan Lethem, Jodi Picoult, Greg Rucka, Brad Meltzer, and Joss Whedon have all tried their hands at writing graphic novels. Even manga have been affected, thanks to the emerging popularity in 2008 and 2009 of gekiga, or literary manga, the alternative comics of Japan.

  The new popularity of the form with writers has also manifested itself in the appearance of young adult books with protagonists who want to be cartoonists. Some of these books, like Daniel Ehrenhaft’s 2006 novel Drawing a Blank, Sherman Alexie’s 2007 National Book Award–winning The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, and Stephen Emond’s Happyface, include their characters’ artwork; others—like Barry Lyga’s The Astonishing Adventures of Fanboy and Goth Girl—do not (Lyga by the way is the coauthor of a professional volume for teachers titled Graphic Novels in Your Media Center). A slightly different take is found in Perry Moore’s 2007 novel Hero (Hyperion) in which the teenage protagonist is not a cartoonist but the son of one of the greatest superheroes of his time!

  The growing aesthetic excellence of the form is further evidenced by Houghton Mifflin’s decision to add an annual volume of Best American Comics to its acclaimed Best American series; further evidence is Yale Universi
ty Press’s publication of Ivan Brunetti’s two-volume Anthology of Graphic Fiction as well as Masters of American Comics, the catalog of a landmark exhibition of comic art organized jointly by Los Angeles’s Hammer Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

  The Current Market

  The market for alternative comics and graphic novels has grown steadily since the late nineties, which has meant a continuing shift from the traditional comic bookstore as the prime sales outlet to general bookstores, especially the chains. As a result, in 2006 the sales of graphic novels actually exceeded those of comics for the first time ($330 million compared to $310 million). Some 2,800 graphic novels were published that year, according to Milton Griep of ICv2, a pop culture website that tracks the market. A total of 144 of these were targeted at teens and tweens, up from only 64 in 2005. And fully 1,200 of the 2,800 graphic novels were manga, a growing number of them coming not from Japan but from Korea, where they’re called manhwa. Statistics for 2007 were even more positive: sales rose 12 percent to $375 million and the total number of graphic novels grew to 3,391, of which 1,513 were manga (MacDonald 2008).

  Though the growth in the number of teen and tween titles for the same period slowed to only 1 percent and that of literary graphic novels to 2 percent, the library portion of the market remained significant, as demonstrated by the fact that an entire day of the 2006 New York Comic Con was devoted to a conference within a conference. Stackfest, cosponsored by Library Journal and the distributors Diamond and BroDart, was targeted specifically at librarians and those who are interested in reaching them. The next year, the 2007 Book Expo America (BEA)—the book trade’s leading exposition and trade show—featured a large panel with the topic “The Science, Art, and Magic of Graphic Novel Selection for Libraries,” and the 2009 BEA boasted three such panels (Reid and MacDonald 2009).12