Abstract
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.
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Notes
In From Girls to Grrrlz: A History of Women’s Comics from Teens to Zines Trina Robbins makes the claim that Aline Kominsky-Crumb’s “Goldie, A Neurotic Women” in Wimmen’s Comix no. 1 was “the first autobiographical comic ever published” (1999, p. 91). While both Binky Brown and Kominsky-Crumb’s piece came out in 1972, Kominsky-Crumb herself has stated that Binky Brown lead to the production of “Goldie” (paraphrased in Gardner, 2013, p. 132). Nevertheless, both Green and Kominsky-Crumb’s early autobiographical comics are foundational to the field.
Gloeckner’s The Diary of a Teenage Girl (2002) has been called autobiographical, or semi-autobiographical. Gloeckner herself resists the term autobiographical, stating that in writing “you make a character of yourself, and in that sense it’s no longer you,” and calling it autobiography she feels “suggests that what I’m saying is true in a way that it could never be” (Groth, 2011).
Trina Robbins notes that there once “was a time when more girls than boys read comics, a time when comics for girls sold in the millions, outnumbering every other kind of comic book. And it all started with Archie” (7). In post-war America, superhero titles fell from popularity, and two styles filled the void—horror comics and comics for girls. The success of Archie and all its spin-offs (particularly Betty and Veronica) started a flood of other comics made to appeal to and reflect the lives of girls. Titles such as Patsy Walker and Young Romance started during this time. Comic strips such as Little Lulu, have also captivated girl audiences. Both Robbins and Mel Gibson (2015) note that the market for girl comics did fade, becoming virtually nonexistent in the 1990s. However, though the work of Telgemeier and others are revitalizing a market directed toward girls, I still have seen no statistics that during the lull in comics for girls that they were not picking up other comics that were “for boys.”
Telgemeier's memoirs Smile and Sister occupy spots 3 and 8 on the list. Her fiction works Ghosts,Drama and The Baby-sitters Club Graphix: Kristy's Great Idea (with Ann M. Martin) fill spots 1, 2, and 9. Number 4 is held by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell’s March: Book 1, and number 10 is Victoria Jamieson's Roller Girl.
I use queer to denote a non-heterosexual sexuality. Since Maggie does not self-identify as a lesbian throughout the text, I hesitate to label her as such. However, since the focus of Maggie’s narrative is on the cultivation of a same-sex relationship, incorporating Honor Girl into the tradition of lesbian camp experiences also feels appropriate.
Cece also re-writes scripts from the hearing world in developing her hearing impaired persona similarly to how Maggie queers heterosexual scripts. This similar re-imagining is another avenue where memoirs for young readers are pushing on boundaries.
Honor Girl is certainly not the only work for young readers currently interacting with the camp tradition. Boom! Studios Eisner awarding-winning comic series Lumberjanes (Stevenson et al., 2015) features an all-girl camp and follows five lead girls. While the Lumberjanes’ motto is “friendship to the max,” the camp also cultivates a budding relationship between two of the girls. The homosocial space also cultivates empowered women, as the girls frequently use the names of feminist icons and notable women of history as exclamations.
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Christine N. Stamper is a Ph.D. candidate at the Ohio State University in Literature for Children and Young Adults and a Graduate Interdisciplinary Specialization in Sexuality Studies. She researches representations of LGBTQ populations within Young Adult literature. With Karly Marie Grice and Rachel Rickard Rebellino, she published an article in The English Journal about the potential for non-prose multicultural texts in classrooms. She has a forthcoming co-written article for The ALAN Review examining mother-daughter relationships in Latinx YA literature. Her dissertation project studies award-winning LGBTQ-themed YA novels, looking at the identities, subject matters, and themes present to examine what is valued and recognized, and what is ignored. She has presented at ChLA, MMLA, and MPCA/ACA. These papers have included inclusion and diversity in LGBTQ prizing, and queer subtextual identities in Rainbow Rowell’s Carry On.
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Stamper, C.N. “You Are My [Camp]fire”: Tradition and Structure in Maggie Thrash’s Graphic Memoir Honor Girl. Child Lit Educ 50, 110–124 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9336-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10583-017-9336-4