Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics

Snoopy and Charlie Brown, Calvin and Hobbes, Tintin and Snowy… comics are home
to many memorable child and animal figures. Many cultural productions,
especially children's literature and cartoons, stress the similarities between
children and animals, similarities that have their limits and often place the
child, as human, above the animal. Still, these fictional situations offer
opportunities for thinking of child-animal relationships in diverse ways
through, for instance, considering the possibilities of privileged contact
between children and animals or of animals that are more knowledgeable and
powerful than children and even adults.

Despite the prevalence and success of child-animal tandems in comics and
culture, we know very little about these relationships. What makes them so
popular? How do they work? How much do they vary across time and cultures?
What do they tell us about the place of animals and children in comics and in
the real world?

_Strong Bonds: Child-animal Relationships in Comics_ takes a first, important
step in this direction. Bringing together scholars with a diverse range of
comics expertise, the volume’s chapters combine contextualized readings of
comics with relevant theories for interrogating childhood and animalhood,
their overlaps and divergences. The strong bonds between children and animals
mapped out here point towards alternative modes of conceptualizing family and
identity and, ultimately, alternative means of reading, interpreting and
imagining.

With chapters on early comics (the Italian children’s magazine _Corriere dei
Piccoli_ during WWI, Harold Gray’s _Little Orphan Annie_ ) international and
regional classics ( _Tintin,_ the Flemish _Jommeke_ ) and contemporary graphic
novels (Bryan Talbot’s _A Tale of One Bad Rat,_ Brecht Even’s _Panther_ ),
this critical anthology sheds light on a vast array of child-animal
relationships in comics from Europe and North America.