by Maggie Block
"Rad Books for Rad Kids" is the Emerald's spin on a book review column featuring South End librarian Maggie Block's analysis of youth literature through a radical lens.
When I was a kid I loved comics, but I didn't really buy them or collect them myself – they didn't really feel like they were for me. And they kinda weren't – it's still a male-dominated medium – but during my childhood, it was nearly impossible to find a comic series fronted by women that I could relate to. If there were women they were always too sexy, too femme, too stylish, too one dimensional, too focused on their love interest, too actually-a-man-reincarnated-into-a-woman's-body (no, for real) for me to find my child self in them.* It's important to point out that authentic representations of people of color, in particular women of color, were even harder for young readers to find (after I sent this piece to editing I read about how a variant cover for Marvel's new Iron Man series, featuring Riri Williams, a 15-year-old Black Girl as Iron Man, was released. The picture was hyper-sexualized, and in noway looked like a 15-year-old girl. Which is to say thecomic industry's over-sexualization of women and girls, in particular, Black women and girls, is not a thing of the past).
And it's been a bit of a bummer as I've grown up to see that so many white boys and men have really taken nerdom's marketing to straight white men to mean that they are the cultural gatekeepers. From video games and comic books to participation in nerd culture women and girls have to fight for their ability to critique and often times even just participate in the fandoms they love (not that white fanboys have taken comic franchises attempting to diversify their flagship characters any better).
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(Bevin Lucas: Comic Fan. A multimedia piece by Mooj Zadie)
So I bet you can imagine how excited I was to learn about Seattle's GeekGirlCon! A Con that exists to "…create community to foster continued growth of women in geek culture through events". I kinda feel like GeekGirlCon is what the world needs. I am heartbroken to tell you that I was unable to go this year (it's not even for a good reason, I had too many errands… adulting is hard, ok?!), but I just had to do something in tribute to GeekGirlCon, and hope this blog post will suffice for this year.
So as this title says I'm going to recommend comics written for young audiences with girl heroes, and as the title further says these books would be great reads for girls, boys, and kids beyond the binary. #BooksHaveNoGender, yes girls need to see female heroes, SO DO BOYS, so do nonbinary kids! Plus these comics are just plain GOOD, all kids should like them, seriously #BooksHaveNoGender.
The Lunch Lady series has a perfect combination of classic comic corniness and absurd concepts to permanently wedge its way into your heart! By day Lunch Lady is, in fact, a lunch lady, serving nutritious meals to Hector, Terrace, Dee (the Brunch Bunch) and their schoolmates; but by night Lunch Lady is a badass mystery-solving crime-fighting wielder-of-justice! Lunch Lady's tools? Fish-stick nunchucks! Whisk Whackers! Sloppy Joes on the road, and honey mustard on the windshield! And of course, her sterile yellow rubber gloves! With her sidekick Betty (a fellow lunch lady) and the Brunch Bunch always close on their heels Lunch Lady foils even the most sinister capers, all while using a flawless amount of food puns. You may find yourself gasping "great spaghetti!" for days to come. And if that isn't enough to sway you, the author Jarrett J. Krosoczka gave a heartwarming TED Talk about how he created the Lunch Lady books to sing the praises of unsung heroes in our school lunchrooms! A working-class superhero your kids will LOVE! I would say this book is well suited for mid-elementary to late-elementary school-aged kids.
The first awesome kid's comic I found focused on around a great heroine was Zita The Spacegirl. I was visiting a friend in Western Massachusetts, I stopped into their radical bookstore and devoured the book in one sitting! Zita blew my mind! It's the tale of a girl (Zita) and her how her life gets thrown into an adorably whimsical sci-fi adventure when she and her best friend (Joseph) press a red button they find at the bottom of a crater and are sucked into a world many galaxies away! Once in the new world Joseph is abducted by the Screed – a kid-appropriate alien doomsday cult – and Zita must try and find a way to save him. As Zita goes along on her journey she acquires a crew of misfits (probs a bit of a nod to The Wizard of Oz) who are loyal and endearing, and by working together they hope to get Joseph back! This book has just the right amount of complication, Zita is not perfect and in fact, may need to save Joseph for her own redemption as much as anything else to give the book weight and importance – but don't worry it doesn't get too heavy. AND if you, or a young person in your life, loves Zita she has a whole series you can read! I would say this book is geared for kids around late-elementary to early-Middle school.
Next, I want to recommend a graphic novel author, Raina Telgemeier. She does really fun earnest graphic novels with a bright classic-cartoon style about tween girls. She got her start doing The Baby-Sitters Club graphic novels, a book series she brings to life perfectly as she was a fan of them as a child. She grew to great children's-graphic-novel-writer's fame when she wrote Smile. Smile is is a fantastic little book, it's her memoir of her childhood, dealing with a long-term process of fixing a dental accident, earthquakes, boy interest, and other sixth-grade adventures. She followed up Smile with Sisters, which is another memoir about her relationship with – you guessed it – her sister! It's told over the course of a multi-day road trip, staggered with flashbacks of their younger childhood, it's about the difficulty, resentment, competition, and ultimately the love and real tangible need sisters have for each other. Finally, I'd like to recommend Drama. The main character, Callie, develops crushes on twin brothers who both are also involved in the school play she is set designing for. It's lovely and has a very diverse group of characters, and while it focuses on her crushes, Callie ending up with a boy at the end isn't the point (or even what happens). I recommend Telgemeier's books for later elementary school through middle school.**
I want to sing the praises of Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur. Lunella Lafayette is a nine-year-old genius (so smart in fact that Marvel has announced Lunella is the smartest person in the Marvel Universe – step aside Mr. Fantastic), she's so smart that she has a really hard time fitting in. She's too smart for her classes, her classmates DO NOT get her, and her parents pressure her to act more like everyone else so that she can blend in, make friends, be happy. But Lunella is not about that. Lunella has a secret lair underneath her school, more badass inventions then you can shake a stick at, and a mission! You see Lunella has the inhuman gene, and she is terrified that the gene will transform her (as it is apt to do) into something else, so she is on a mission to save herself from the possibility of an inhuman transformation. So she hunts down a Kree Omni-Wave Generator convinced she can harness its power to prevent any inhuman changes, and when the Kree Omni-Wave Generator brings a bright red T-rex and a crew of evil cavemen who proceed to wreak havoc on New York City her mission gets a little sidestepped. Lunella initially is scared of Devil Dinosaur, but when they team up it is delightful, and they're just a perfectly matched odd couple. Can I also just throw in there that Lunella's fashion sense makes me LIVE? Her uniform in life is a tee shirt (often with a science graphic on it), khaki shorts, knee high socks, and her natural hair always up in in a pony or pigtails – it is TOO CUTE! I would recommend this book for late-elementary on through high-school-aged readers.
Lumberjanes is the comic book series I wish I had when I was a kid. It's about a cabin of girls at Lumberjanes' Camp for Hardcore Lady Types. It's so lighthearted and fun, it's a fantasy adventure that doesn't take itself seriously, and packs on awesome punch of girl empowerment (they are constantly exclaiming "holy Joan Jett" or "holy Ida B. Wells" or "holy [insert awesome woman from history here]!") and the importance of friendship ("FRIENDSHIP TO THE MAX" is a Lumberjanes saying). It shows a number of different girls, who express their girl-ness in different ways and shows great diversity in terms of race and ethnicity, sexual identity, and gender identity. Another thing I love about Lumberjanes is that each girl contributes to the team in different but equally important ways. It's also a series I have no doubt they will just keep on printing, so if you and/or the kids in your life like it y'all can keep on reading it forever. I'd say middle-school on through high-school students (on through adults!) would enjoy Lumberjanes.
I also am a huge fan of the Princeless series. It's about a princess (Adrienne) whose father puts her in a high tower guarded by a dragon to wait for a prince to save her, but Adrienne comes up with a better plan! She and her dragon go across the countryside freeing her sisters from the monsters that are guarding them! Making a half-dwarf-blacksmith friend, and running into all kinds of silly adventures on the side, the Princeless books are perfect for any kid who read a fairytale and found themselves wanting more. Princeless is a wonderfully diverse comic series, Adrienne and the entire royal family are Black, and in the second volume they meet up with an equally cool pirate princess (Raven) who is Asian. Raven actually gets her own spin-off series, Princeless: Raven the Pirate Princess, which is also deeply wonderful. While Princeless is a goofy parody of fairy tales, Raven is a full an attack of anti-feminists and male cultural gatekeepers. As Raven tries to assemble a crew for her ship – to fight and destroy her brother's who manipulated their father the pirate king into disinheriting her – the men of the pirate-laden port town she's in throw every anti-woman insult we've heard over and over again at her during their interviews, the most memorable being one screaming "not all men!" Raven ends up putting together an all-women crew, which has great diversity in gender expression, race and ethnicity, and sexual orientation, and I cannot wait to see where this adventure goes! I would say that the Princeless series is good for readers in middle school, and Raven is good for high-school-aged readers.
And finally, I would just like to say for the record that Ms. Marvel (Kamala Khan) is EXCELLENT! Ms. Marvel is just a darn good superhero comic. Period. Kamala also is the first Pakistani-American and Muslim-American superhero in the Marvel Universe, and in times like these when Islamophobia doesn't feel like it could be any worse, Ms. Marvel is the hero we so desperately need. We see her as part of a loving, caring and accepting family that puts no more rules or restrictions on Kamala then one would expect from involved parents of any religion. We see her participating in her mosque, and in one scene she goes to talk with her Imam when her parents are worried about her being out all the time (you know, because of the evil she's thwarting!), and he doesn't tell her to change her behavior or that she needs to act a certain way as a young woman, instead he tells her that if what she's doing is so important to her then she needs to find a mentor to help her be the best at whatever it is she's doing (then she teams up with Wolverine, it's great)! And you don't have to be a superhero fan to get these comics either, Ms. Marvel is also a lovely coming-of-age story about a teen girl trying to navigate high school, complicated friendships, family expectations, and superhero responsibilities. I think middle-school- through high-school students could read and love these comics.
And this isn't even a comprehensive list. As I am wrapping this article up I am thinking of comics I could have included (I haven't read Cleopatra in Space yet, but I know it would be a good fit! I ADORE the book Giants Beware, it's a great fantasy adventure for tweens! Valiant Comics recently started a series about Faith, a wonderfully nerdy fat/plus sized super hero! Also, Skim and This One Summer should be required reading for all tween and teen girls!). I remember the first time I rattled off the bulk of this list I came to a big realization. At the end of the year meeting of 2015 for all the Teen Services Librarians in the King County Library System, we were asked to list off any of our favorite books that year. When it was my turn I named many of the titles included in this article, and I realized as I was listing them that all of these comic books were about girls, many of which were girls of color, and how different the world of comics is today. It was then that I realized that if you grew up thinking that comics weren't for you, you could never find yourself in your favorite superhero stories, but that isn't the case anymore. You are in comics. And today's kids can grow up seeing themselves and their friends as the heroes spread across glossy comic pages. And I cannot tell you how much that warms this former-girl's / current-comic-lover's heart!
*I feel that my list of things that women in comic books were implies that femme or sexy or stylish, even is a negative. Being femme and sexy is awesome! Any way that someone wants to express themselves is rad. My issue is/was more that the ONLY way women were portrayed in comics was as sexualized and femme.
**I am not recommending Telgemeier's most recent book Ghosts, in part because I haven't read it yet. But also because it has received criticism for exploring two Chicana girl's relationship with the Day of the Dead in a very inauthentic way. I hope to explore this topic further in a future post, it's a bit off-topic for this post, but I wanted to acknowledge this issue and not ignore it.
Maggie Block is a South End-area Teen Services Librarian. She is very new to the Seattle area — she only moved up here in late August of 2015. She hopes to use this column as an opportunity to recommend amazing books that reflect the South Seattle community back to its young readers. While her expertise as a youth librarian in the community will help when writing these pieces, she writes these articles on her own time, and the opinions she expresses are purely hers and in no way reflect her library system or anyone else they employ.