Kiddie lit & the comic form, or, The marsh in which comics are bogged.
We've spoken so often in this class throughout the year about the medium of comics as harboring a more elevated form than previously considered by popular culture. While I think we all agree that comics truly are "not just for kids anymore," something has come to my attention as of late that I found rather interesting: if we consider illustrated children's books, where is the line drawn between the graphic novel & kiddie lit?
The components are all essentially there: images that support & flesh out a plotted text; a text that parallels & behooves illustration. If a children's book is meant for a child by its form, what are we to consider Moonshadow? The text is narrator-driven, with minimal dialogue coming from the characters themselves, & static images on each page serve to balance this narration. Consider the Clifford the Big Red Dog series, or Arthur, or even chapter-by-chapter illustrated texts for children like the Sideways Stories series or - & perhaps this is a stretch - Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. There are elements in all of these books that speak to adults as well as children (some, of course, more blatantly than others), but why does this make them more of a "comic"? Or does it even make them more of a comic at all?
If the aesthetics of a comic & of a children's book are similar in such regards, I contest that this only adds to the historical delineation of the comic form itself. Place a page from Moonshadow side-by-side with a page from The Great Kapok Tree & displace the differences. In my mind, the similarities sharply outweigh them, & it is from such an angle that the cultural (in)significance of comics should be tackled.
Comments
Weight of the Word
I posed a similar question some time ago in this post, and I think there is definitely a clear parallel and important connection here. From that discussion and since, I've come to think that the time "graphic novel" more usefully extends to include things that aren't written in the comic form as well as some things that are - I could go on for hours about where the division is, but I will refrain from doing so here.
To answer you a bit more directly, I would say that children's books are, in general, the "kiddie lit" counterpart of the graphic novel, but I would not include some of the works you mention in the category, namely the Wayside School series (which I take to be what you mean by the Sideways Stories series). I would say that the illustrations in these books - as with many mostly-prose children's books - are non-critical to the text as a whole, and do significantly less work than the words on the pages. I think for something to be a graphic novel, the "graphic" portion needs to have at least equal weight to the verbal portion. So: Clifford and Arthur get my approval.
Yes, yes, okay.
You make a solid point here, but one thing I will say is that for a book like Huckleberry Finn the original illustrations have become much more heavily weighted over time & have gained near-cult status along with the heroic status the text itself holds. I agree with you about Wayside (& Phantom Tollbooth, which I didn't originally mention but deals with the same basic illustration-text ratio), but there is something about the weight of the canon & time's passage that can do a lot for a book's simple illustrations. It's interesting to think about at the very least.
Any discussion of
Any discussion of nomenclature will inevitably have to deal with exceptions - if we had categories to fit everything nicely, there'd be too many to count. I think we can count some mostly-prose novels as somewhat liminal - maybe novels, maybe graphic novels. It feels like it's almost the same question as exists with the handful of "poetry novels" out there - written in poetic verse, not prose, but still considered novels, which is contrary to the common thought that novels are inherently prose works.