Book Review - Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics

reviewed by Chris York

Maaheen Ahmed, ed. Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics. Presses Universitaires de Liege, 2020. 295 pp. ISBN 978-2-87562-259-4.  http://www.presses.uliege.be/jcms/c_22440/acme-6

http://www.presses.uliege.be/upload/docs/application/pdf/2021-02/acme_6_free.pdf (open access link to entire book)

  Maaheen Ahmed notes in her introduction to Strong Bonds that there is a disproportionately small amount of scholarship on the child-animal relationship in comics, despite its prevalence throughout comics history, across publication formats, and across cultures. Strong Bonds addresses this need with a collection of essays that are engaging and insightful, and show the range and complexity of the child-animal relationship in comics.

The book is structured around five sections: The Alternative Family, Queered Relationships, Childhood Under Threat, Politics, and Poetics. Each section consists of two or three chapters, which, at times, felt inadequate. The section Queered Relationships, for instance, consists of essays that focus on two runs of superhero comics, Supergirl in Action Comics, and Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. While the chapters themselves are well-conceived, having only two essays focusing on comics from major American publishers, DC and Marvel, seemed inadequate for expressing the range of the theme across the spectrum of comics.

The essays throughout the volume find common ground in their assessment of the child-animal relationship’s ability to disrupt conventional dichotomies such as queer/straight, self/other, adult/child, and civilized/savage. Laura Pearson, a contributor of one of the more compelling chapters in the book, notes that dualisms “devalue” the side that is implied to be inferior. The child-animal relationship, as each of these essays attest, is an effective vehicle for exploring these dual conceptions because it is not really dichotomous at all; the adult/parent is always, either implicitly or explicitly, a third contributor to the relationship’s dynamic. Thus, the child-adult relationship is disrupted by the addition of the animal, and the human-animal relationship is disrupted by the child. It is in these fissures that the concepts of the family, gender, identity, and society, among others, are scrutinized and reformulated. The strength of this anthology is that it demonstrates the versatility of the child-animal-(adult) relationship in addressing social conventions.

It is almost inherent in the nature of the anthology that the quality of the chapters will be uneven. Strong Bonds is no exception. However, the majority of chapters in this volume are well-written, show a strong understanding of the field, and add to the conversation in interesting ways. While many of the chapters focus on narrative, I found that the most compelling contributions addressed how the formal elements of comics are able to uniquely represent the child-animal relationship. Pearson’s essay on Matt Forsythe’s Jinchalo, for instance, notes how the sparse use of language, in the form of onomatopoeia, inspires a sense of readerly curiosity and destabilizes a variety of boundaries (linguistic, cultural, generational, species). The instability of the text, Pearson concludes, encourages the reader to explore “[t]he idea of attempting to imagine another.” Elsewhere, the visual structure of comics informs Shiamin Kwa’s exploration of Brecht Evens’ Panther. The unsettling shifts in the illustration of the panther from panel to panel, Kwa notes, is integral to exposing the ambiguity and compounding the tension within the narrative. Both of these essays, and many more within this volume, are aided by attractive, high-quality color reproductions of their subjects.

As I suggest above, the primary critique of this collection is that it does not completely deliver on its intent to show the range of the child-animal relationship in comics. In her introduction, Ahmed states that the anthology covers “a historically and culturally diverse corpus”(10). The comics that are the focus of this collection do touch upon nearly every decade of the 20th and 21st centuries, from Little Orphan Annie to Jommeke to Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur.  However, the collection does not venture beyond the western tradition. All of the chapters deal with comics by British, European or North American creators. The closest the book comes to engaging non-western traditions is the chapter on Matthew Forsythe’s Jinchalo. Forsythe is Canadian, but draws upon Korean culture and language in the narrative. His essay’s play with cultural borders is fascinating, but it left me all the more aware of the absence of other comics traditions in the volume. The child-animal relationship spans all traditions, and it would have been interesting to see non-Western comics in dialogue with the other essays in this collection. With that caveat in mind, Ahmed has assembled a valuable collection of essays for anyone interested in exploring child-animal relationships in comics.

A version of this review will appear in print in IJOCA 23-2 (Fall/Winter 2021).

 

Table of Contents

Introduction
Maaheen Ahmed
Child-animal Relationships in Comics: A First Mapping ................................... 9

Alternative Families
Peter W.Y. Lee
The Maternal Arf!: Raising Canines in the Roaring Twenties in Harold Gray’s
Little Orphan Annie .............................................................................................. 29
Gert Meesters and Pascal Lefèvre
Towards an Unexpected Equivalence: Animals, Children and Adults
in the Popular Flemish Strip Jommeke ............................................................... 51
Jennifer Marchant
Hergé’s Animal Sidekicks: The Adventures of Snowy and Jocko ....................... 71

Queered Relationships
Olivia Hicks
(Super) Horsing Around: The Significance of Comet in Supergirl ................... 91
Nicole Eschen Solis
A Girl and Her Dinosaur: The Queerness of Childhood in Moon Girl
and Devil Dinosaur ............................................................................................. 109

Childhood under Threat
José Alaniz
“Winner Take All!”: Children, Animals and Mourning in Kirby’s
Kamandi ............................................................................................................... 129
Mel Gibson
“Once upon a time, there was a very bad rat…”:
Constructions of Childhood, Young People, Vermin and Comics .................. 149
Shiamin Kwa
The Panther, the Girl, and the Wardrobe: Borderlessness and Domestic Terror
in Panther ............................................................................................................. 165

Politics
Michael Chaney and Sara Biggs Chaney
Animal-child Dyad and Neurodivergence in Peanuts ..................................... 183
Fabiana Loparco
The Most Loyal of Friends, the Most Lethal of Enemies: Child-animal
Relationships in Corriere dei Piccoli during the First World War ................ 195

Poetics
Emmanuelle Rougé
A Poetics of Anti-authorianism: Child-animal Relationships in Peanuts
and Calvin and Hobbes ...................................................................................... 225
Benoît Glaude
Child-animal Interactions in Yakari’s Early Adventures:
A Zoonarratological Reading ............................................................................. 239
Laura A. Pearson
Graphic Cross-pollinations and Shapeshifting Fables in Matthew Forsythe’s
Jinchalo ................................................................................................................. 257

Postscript
Philippe Capart
Boule & Bill: Unwrapped .................................................................................... 279

List of contributors ........................................................................................... 287
Index ............................................................................................................................ 291