How many of us know Quadratino? The boy whose scrapes often involve being de-shaped and re-shaped, from a hexagon, for instance, back to a square. Beautifully drawn by Antonio Rubino and published in the long-running Italian children’s magazine, Corriere dei Piccoli in 1910, Quadratino exemplifies the rich variety of children in comics and how they are framed within preconceptions concerning both childhood and the medium of comics. Part of an emerging and rapidly changing modern consumer culture, these children's publications are a key source for reflections on notions of childhood and the young, constantly muting medium of comics. These productions for children, part of an emerging and rapidly changing modern consumer culture in the early twentieth century, are a key source for reflections on notions of childhood and the young, constantly muting medium of comics.
The rise of the graphic novel in the 1990s was accompanied by the rise of comics studies. Keen to counter the assumption that comics are for kids, this field tends to focus on comics for adults and to overlook the many connections between children and comics. Recently, the interest in comics for children (including young adults) has increased, in proportion to the success of such comics. However, this research has essentially focused on comics in English and remains quite limited
COMICS, Children in Comics: An Intercultural History from 1865 to Today, pieces together an intercultural history of children in comics and children and comics from 1865, the year Wilhelm Busch published his famous illustrated poem about the incorrigible Max und Moritz, to contemporary graphic novels. While focusing on key European centers of comics production - Britain, France, Belgium, Spain, and Italy - it also covers transnational interactions, especially the influence of American comics. When turning to contemporary graphic novels, COMICS places North American and European comics in a productive dialogue.
COMICS maps the vast scope of connections between children and comics including:
child characters in comics;
reconstructions of childhood in comics and graphic novels;
comics for children;
childishness of comics styles;
In doing so, COMICS establishes a new, exciting field of research at the intersection of comics studies, childhood studies and periodical studies which unpacks the hitherto ignored roles of the child and children's periodicals, conceptions of childhood and childish drawings and children's drawings in comics, from the earliest days of the medium to the present.
COMICS mines the vast potential of examining children in comics, across formats, cultures and over more than a century of comics production. It sheds light on a dynamically changing medium, its interactions with other media, such as cinema, and print culture at large, and on the rapidly transforming children’s culture. It also valorizes a corpus of forgotten material, especially the rich variety of European children’s comics magazines from the first half of the twentieth century. Team members have also engaged with children's ephemera connected to comics and traces of children's interactions within the periodicals themselves. In the case of contemporary graphic novels, COMICS offers new possibilities of understanding the ubiquitous children in comics, unpacking the intertwined history of the cultural legitimization of comics and conceptualizations of childhood and childishness.
