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Although scholars have explored the meaning-making affordances of peritextual features such as dust jackets, case covers, beginning and final endpapers, frontispieces, title pages and imprint pages in picturebooks, limited research has focused on the peritextual elements of graphic novels. Purposive sampling was used to select a data set of 30 graphic novels, and the functions and examples of the Peritextual Literacy Framework (PLF) were used as a structure to analyze the books. As the content analysis proceeded, revisions were made to the original PLF due to the nature of the peritexual elements featured in the graphic novels. Analysis of the data set revealed the following: although all six functions of the PLF were realized in the graphic novels, the production and promotional functions were the most predominant functions of the peritetxual elements; substantial variation was evident with respect to the presence of peritextual elements associated with each function; and the types of peritextual elements in the graphic novels required the addition of multiple features, especially to the production and promotion functions. Overall, the findings showed how the publishers and creators of the graphic novels included diverse peritextual elements in various locations in the books and that these features fulfilled multiple functions, at times simultaneously. The complex and rich nature of the peritextual elements featured in graphic novels requires readers to engage in careful looking and deep thinking in order to understand, appreciate and critically consider the functions, and information and aesthetic value of peritextual elements.

The framework of visual grammar (Kress and van Leeuwen, 2006, via Serafini, 2014) is used to examine the artwork of Laurie Halse Anderson and Emily Carroll's "Speak: The Graphic Novel," which tells through words and pictures the story of Melinda Sordino, a girl who is raped just prior to beginning her freshman year in high school. Three key sets of images that depict the various dimensions of Melinda's silence are analyzed in order to demonstrate how Carroll's images, in conjunction with Anderson's text, work to convey Melinda's ongoing trauma and eventual recovery: Melinda's artwork, the various mirrors that appear in the book, and the abandoned janitor's closet that Melinda transforms into her private refuge. The overall purpose of the paper is not to compare the original novel with the graphic adaptation, but rather to interrogate how--and how effectively--Carroll is able to depict silence, and Melinda's eventual triumph over silence, through the visual grammar of pictures. The paper argues that the visual grammar instructs us in how to read the images, which ultimately work to show us what Melinda cannot tell us.

The numerous ecological catastrophes of the twentieth century caused by humans have found their way into mass culture. Among them is the Chornobyl nuclear accident that took place in Ukraine in 1986. This disaster became a subject of reflection not only in Ukrainian literature but also in world films and computer games. Along with other works on the nuclear theme in world literature, books by Ukrainian writers for children and young adults (YA) such as Leonid Daien's "Chornobyl -- trava girka" ("Chornobyl -- the Bitter Grass") or Yevhen Hutsalo's "Dity Chornobylia" ("Children of Chornobyl") that depict the Chornobyl accident and its consequences for Ukrainians. I explore the Chornobyl catastrophe concept in the above-mentioned books as well as in the cartoon "Travel-book. Ukraine. Ghost Town" and in the game "S.T.A.L.K.E.R." I claim that Ukrainian works on the Chornobyl theme belong to the genre of ecofiction as a warning to humanity about the negative effects of human behavior on the ecosystem, based on ecocritical theory referred to by Buell, Dwyer, and others. My position is that the Chornobyl nuclear theme in children's literature is centered closely on the cultural memory of Ukrainians. In reference to Erll's interpretation of cultural memory as the interplay of present and past in socio-cultural contexts, I consider cultural memory in children's literature as a need to deal with the traumatic experience of the Chornobyl nuclear accident and ethnocide of Ukrainians in their colonial past. My analysis then focuses on the investigation of how these concepts are implemented in children's books, films, and games, via their imagery.

Shannon Hale, Dean Hale, and Nathan Hale's graphic novel set "Rapunzel's Revenge" (2008) and "Calamity Jack" (2010) features fractured fairy tales that take up the issue of 'the damsel in distress,' questioning and complicating traditional gender roles in fairy tales. Throughout both graphic novels Rapunzel's character challenges traditional representations of being feminine within the heterosexual matrix (Butler, 2006). And, in many instances, Rapunzel does this by blending masculine and feminine traits, rather than trading one for the other. However, she also falls back into traditional fairy tale tropes that maintain boundaries around who women are and what they can do in these narratives. Because of the opposing narratives of femininity in these Rapunzel-influenced graphic novels, there were openings for seventh grade students reading these texts in their English Language Arts class to notice, critique, and question the texts and their messages. By exploring both the texts and students' responses to them in detail, this article focuses on textual tensions around gender representation that offer opportunities for young people to critique and analyze reading a "wonder tale." These young readers wondered and re-imagined how gender and femininity could be represented, not only in fairy tales, but also in their worlds beyond the text. Ultimately this article seeks to advocate for books that take up a more complex and fluid portrayal of what it means to be human and reading practices that support that complexity and fluidity.

Mainstream American culture still commonly considers disabilities as defects. Whether physical, emotional, or mental in nature, these features are hindering an individual, separating them from the perceived norm, and having a negative impact on their acceptance. Films and literature targeting children and young adults currently are seeking to change this impression. One example of this phenomenon is the disabled characters in Pixar's animated movie "Finding Nemo." In the wake of the film's popularity, a plethora of middle-grade and young adult novels also began using piscine symbols, imagery, and idioms to frame, present, and discuss disability. Symbolic devices found in cover art and within these texts, such as "fish out of water" and "swim against the tide," demonstrate the condition of the disabled characters in children's literature, providing non-human representations to bridge the theoretical gap between the medically diagnosed disabilities and the reality of the social identity of the lives of those who have a disability. This study examines texts, published from 2006 to 2015 that all use fish as symbols to examine issues of identity, especially in relation to disability. Reading the novels through the lens of disability studies highlights the ways in which these fish symbols and fish-related idioms sometimes portray disabled characters in reductive, simplistic ways, but also often work to portray disabled characters holistically and as possessing agency against the expectations of the norm.

This essay argues that Maggie Thrash's "Honor Girl" navigates a multi-liminal space allowing it to participate in and expand upon traditions that already exist within children's literature, graphic memoirs, the comics medium, and the history of girl camps as homosocial spaces. By discussing graphic memoirists for adults (such as Alison Bechdel and Phoebe Gloeckner) and children (such as Raina Telgemeier and Cece Bell), the paper establishes that Thrash adopts practices of representing sexual desire from both traditions in order to establish new territory for adolescents. Turning then to camp environments, the essay examines how camp becomes a space for campers to experiment and come to be true versions of themselves, with the all-girls camping environment being particularly suited for young lesbians. Finally, this paper looks at how Thrash utilizes the medium of comics to draw Erin and Maggie together (both literally and figuratively), illuminating how this relationship, while certainly not subtextual, is also not presented as explicitly as heterosexual romance for a younger audience. By operating both within and outside traditions, "Honor Girl" allows for the possibility for queer content within memoirs for young people, while also raising an expectation that queer identities still must be shielded and coded.

Cece Bell's (El Deafo, Amulet, New York, 2014) is a middle childhood graphic novel memoir that explores the author's experiences of losing her hearing and growing up with a severe hearing loss. As a graphic novel, the story is able to avoid a medicalized view of disability by combining image and text, a format that allows readers, those with hearing and those without, to step inside the narrative and deeply consider Bell's experiences. The narrative elements typically found in graphic novel autobiography create a communal reading experience, which does not allow readers to forget who the book is about. After an analysis of the primacy of these narrative graphic novel elements in telling a story about a disability, this article shares the reading experiences of university students in exploring this story, during which students used both the image and text to help them confront misconceptions they had about deafness, broadening their understandings and experiences around disability.

This article analyses a selection of contemporary children's visual texts (for economy and specificity 'contemporary' is taken to mean the current century), covering a cross-section of age demographics to better understand how the texts depict female characters suffering with mental illness. It examines these primary texts not only to see how such characters are represented but also to see whether they either bolster or challenge the idea of the female being viewed as the male's 'Other'. A brief historical and cultural contextualisation of the relationship between mentally ill females and the male-centric profession of modern psychiatry is followed by a close analysis of four primary texts, analysing visual narratives of mentally ill female characters in two picture books, an illustrated book and a graphic novel, noting how contemporary visual depictions contrast with early ideas and images supporting the nineteenth-century feminisation of madness. The conclusion is that, from the limited selection of texts analysed, contemporary children's visual texts represent a clear contrast to the historical image of the frail and winsome madwoman. The findings are that they do not uphold the image of the female madwoman as Other.

This essay explores the complex relationship that exists between the romance plot and the romanticization of the antebellum South in Raina Telgemeier's critically acclaimed and commercially successful graphic novel, "Drama." The text's use of a "Gone With the Wind"-style musical as its romantic and thematic pivot point complicates its political message and calls into question its seemingly progressive stance on social issues. While critics have praised Telgemeier's text for its racially and ethnically diverse cast of characters, the moonlight-and-magnolias musical that forms the centerpiece to "Drama" traffics not simply in a historical myth, but in a white-centric fantasy. In so doing, the graphic novel demonstrates the limitations of LGBTQ youth advocacy that does not remain cognizant of intersectionality, while it also highlights the problem with millennial forms of liberal multiculturalism that omit critical discussions about race.

Biologist and graphic novelist Jay Hosler has long been introducing young readers to biological subjects through entertaining narratives combining strongly fictional elements with nonfictional ones. Extensive application of fiction to nonfictional subject matter is uncommon, even in graphic novels, but Hosler's "The Sandwalk Adventures" (2003) makes an illuminating case study in the pedagogical benefits of entwining fact and fiction. The book, an introduction to the basic concepts of evolutionary theory, revolves around conversations between Darwin and a pair of young follicle mites residing in his eyebrow. Two competing tales of origins, theistic and scientific, emerge in the telling. In the first section of the paper, I show how Hosler deploys their rivalry to cast doubt on the factuality of received "facts" and to cultivate openness to verifiable ones. In the second and third sections, I analyze the functions of "Sandwalk's" literary form, a simulation of conversational storytelling: it helps Hosler illustrate selection pressures and processes, and engage readers in a scientific mode of thought.

Between the years 1935 and 1946, National Comics--the leading comic book publisher in the United States--experimented with various strategies such as book lists and juvenile book reviews in order to encourage children and young adults to read books other than comics. This paper surveys these strategies and the work of key persons such as Malcolm Wheeler-Nicholson, M.C. Gaines, and Josette Frank, in the context of the broader landscape of children's reading and comics publishing. In addition, the paper argues that National's efforts serve as further encouragement for contemporary scholars to reevaluate the role that comics played in the cultural and literary lives of young readers.

In recent years, reading scholars have increasingly attended to children's responses to picturebook page breaks, reasoning that the inferences young readers make during the turning of the page are central to understanding how children construct continuous narratives in semiotically rich texts. In this paper I argue that comics (including comic books and graphic novels) offer similar gap-filling affordances as picturebooks, but for older children and adolescent readers. A major site of meaning-making in comics is the "gutter" between panels. This is where much of the magic occurs for readers while transacting with the medium. Since the comics medium is popular with many students and has received increased attention from teachers, researchers, and curriculum developers during the multimodal and multiliterate turns of the past decades, I argue that it is vital for educators not only to use comics in their classrooms, but to focus explicitly on gutters in order to exercise the medium's full potential. Pulling from numerous sources, I provide several pedagogical activities that emphasize gutters as rich sites of constructing meaning.

David Almond and Dave McKean's "The Savage" is a hybrid prose and graphic novel which tells the story of one young man's maturation through literacy. The protagonist learns to deal with the death of his father and his own "savage" self by writing a graphic novel. This article reads "The Savage" in the context of earlier, "Northern" literacy narratives--particularly Tony Harrison's poem "Them & [uz]" and Barry Hines' "Kes"--through the discourse of neoliberalism and the notion of the reluctant boy reader. It is suggested that Almond and McKean are influenced by currently dominant ideologies of gender and literacy.

In this paper, we focus on gendered themes promulgated in three books written in diary cartoon form. Although written for different audiences, each of these books constructs gender norms in similar ways. They promote heteronormative gender roles for boys and girls by endorsing traditional femininities and hegemonic masculinities through the following themes: popularity, mean girls/bullying, self-concept and self-esteem, friendship, and adult naivete. First, we discuss the ways in which gender is implicated in children's literature. Then, we describe and analyze the diary cartoon books, contrasting and comparing those with girl protagonists and that with a boy protagonist. Finally, we explore the gendered implications in the books' themes, concluding that girls and boys are represented in different manners that reinforce gender essentialism and heteronormativity.

This article analyses the symbolic meaning of the Moon in two "bande dessinee" books from the Tintin series, Herge's "Destination Moon" ("Objectif Lune," 1953) and its sequel "Explorers on the Moon" ("On a Marche sur la Lune," 1954). It argues that these two volumes stand out in the series for their graphic, narrative and philosophical emphasis on both intellectual achievement and physical death. The Moon, as a goal of modern science and a traditional artistic symbol, is made to celebrate the human mind. But Herge also makes it a dangerous no man's land, where human beings are made to understand the limitations of their physical abilities. The Moon emphasises the distortion between human dreams of grandeur and the concrete impossibility of their realisation, and the threats they pose to corporeality. As a result, the article suggests that the Moon trip can be seen as a modern re-enactment of the mythological journey to Hell, as the works of the human mind are constantly thwarted by the risk of physical death.

This essay examines Eleanor Estes's critically neglected 1960 novel "The Witch Family", arguing that the novel anticipates some of the major preoccupations of later children's literature in its early concern with issues of textuality. While Estes is largely known as a writer of simple family stories, "The Witch Family" is an innovative work of metafiction, which explicitly engages with a number of philosophical and literary-critical issues central to postmodern and poststructuralist discussion. Posing central and overt questions regarding the relationship between reality and fiction, the novel illustrates the contextual, communal, and relational aspects of language and finally suggests that the ability to tell stories ethically is tied to the recognition of one's own contingent position within language.

In this article, the authors examine three Canadian coming-of-age stories, written as graphic novels, and pay particular attention to how the images and print text come together in the telling of the narrative. This approach reinforces the notion that form and content cannot be separated in this medium. Drawing on examples from each of the graphic novels and the interviews with the graphic novelists who wrote them, the article explores the complexity of the coming-of-age theme in each graphic novel, as well as how print text and image converge to make meaning.

In this article David Lewis talks to Posy Simmonds about her career in illustration, cartooning and the writing and illustration of picturebooks. Together they discuss her early experience of working as an illustrator for newspapers and magazines; her first attempt at creating a weekly adult cartoon strip and her subsequent career as a regular contributor to the "Guardian" newspaper. They consider her approach to writing and drawing picturebooks; the balance of realism and fantasy in her work; her mastery of colour effects; her liking for drawing cats and her attempts to capture the truth of a situation in pictures and words.

Two assumptions are challenged in this article: that children are naturally disposed toward the animated cartoon, and that translating Shakespeare's plays into this medium automatically simplifies and gives them child appeal. It examines the confusions and cross-purposes that surrounded the making of the Animated Tales videos, and argues that there are dangers in their uncritical use in schools. It concludes with suggestions as to how they may, nevertheless, be effectively employed with children of all ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]