Discovering the Child’s Voice in Intergenerational Comics

Abstract

This article is an answer to Victoria Ford Smith’s invitation that scholars ‘find ways to talk about real children, despite a critical tradition that insists we conceive of the child as other, alien, or inescapably tied to adult desire’ (256). It concerns the web and print comics series Axe Cop (2009–2017), created by two brothers, Malachai and Ethan Nicolle, and the first volume of Riad Sattouf and ‘Esther’s’ comic book series Les Cahiers d’Esther ( Esther’s Notebooks) (2016).1Each comic followed a similar process: a child related a story, either autobiographical in the case of Esther’s Notebooks or the result of practice play in the case of Axe Cop, to an adult artist who then rendered that story in comic book form. Both texts manifest a, to borrow Rick Iadonisi’s term, ‘narrative wrestling match’ (52); the adult collaborators construct the child as a figure of adult desire while, at the same time, the child author remains a palpable presence in the text and engages in a reciprocal construction of adulthood. In the case of Esther’s Notebooks, Sattouf further uses his collaborator’s lack of knowledge to critique adult assumptions of children, suggesting a more equitable partnership between children and adults.