Fantastic Fangirls: Comics and Culture

Posted by Jennifer

I’m pretty sure Raina Telgemeier lived my life.

No, that’s not entirely accurate. Raina is, after all, nine years older than I am — I grew up with Hanson and gel pens, not New Kids on the Block and hairspray. Raina also has one more sibling than I do, and she grew up in earthquake-prone San Francisco, not industrial central New Jersey. There are plenty of differences between us. I’m not about to accuse her of stealing my identity, and, having met her at several conventions, I’m at least 99% sure she isn’t my evil twin, either.

Yet the contents of her graphic novel memoir, Smile, so closely reflect my own middle school experiences that I found myself alternately grinning and cringing with recognition on almost every page. Girl Scout meetings. Fair-weather friends. Annoying siblings. Crushes. Self-loathing. And, of course, the ever-present specter of increasingly painful orthodontia.

Smile structures itself around Raina’s nightmarish adventures with dental care, starting from the moment she knocks out her two front teeth in 6th grade and ending when she finally gets her braces off in 9th. And, certainly, the trips to the orthodontist’s office make up a big portion of the book. Anyone who has ever had braces can identify with the scenes of gag-inducing mold-making, painful wire-tightening, and everything in between. But the heart of the story lies in the way Raina, as a character, comes into her own as a person over the course of those three years. Even as the trials of puberty rock her to her core, she’s able to discover where her passions lie (in cartooning), what true friends look like (not girls who spend all their time teasing her), and how to handle those first stirrings of romantic desire (first for a fellow band geek named Sammy, and later for a popular basketball player named Sean).

These experiences were Raina’s experiences, and the story is very specifically her own. Yet my own easy identification with her tween self speaks to a universality of those emotions and rites of passage. Raina touches on feelings shared by millions of preteen and teenage girls, never resorting to melodrama or condescension in their description, and the book’s honesty and specificity make it relateable in a way a consciously and blandly universal story might not.

I first encountered Raina’s work on the four Baby-Sitters Club graphic novel adaptations. Her obvious love for that seminal series of middle-grade books (of which I’ve read all 150+) helped me identify her immediately as a kindred spirit, and I quickly fell in love with her clean, simple cartooning that so accurately and lovingly brought to life the characters an entire generation of young women had grown up with. That brilliant, expressive, adorable cartooning — which reminds me, in many ways, of Fantastic Fangirls favorite Colleen Coover — carries over to this book, giving even the most minor of supporting characters personalities through their clothing, expressions, and style. I would gladly frame and display any page of art from this book.

But the cartooning — and the fantastic coloring by Stephanie Yue — also highlights a particularly gratifying aspect of the book: its determinedly multi-cultural cast. I’ve complained before about how media for children and teens is so frequently whitewashed, with one or two token minority characters thrown in to fill some arbitrary quota. But Raina’s world is one of natural diversity, the kind of diversity I remember from my own middle and high school groups of friends. I have no idea if every friend and acquaintance drawn in the book is a real person from Raina’s childhood, or if she added even more diversity for effect. Either way, it’s gratifying to see that Scholastic had no problems publishing a book with such a colorful cast, which includes an African-American crush (Sean) for Raina.

This is all, of course, the diversity piled on top of the obvious — the fact that this is a book written, drawn, colored, and about a woman, and includes female characters of all stripes, not to mention male characters who are able to be — gasp! — friends with female characters without romance getting in the way. In a medium dominated by reflections on the male adolescent experience with girls present only as love interests, Smile is a breath of fresh air.

I don’t think I can truly express how much it meant to me to read this book, and I recommend it to anyone who has ever been a preteen girl — or, for that matter, to anyone who just likes good comics. But I want to give a special recommendation to all those girls who are currently living through these kinds of experiences.

At one point in the book, Raina’s mom tries to comfort her about the headgear for her braces. “Lots of kids wear funny stuff to help fix their bodies,” she says. “You probably just don’t realize it because no one talks about it.”

“Well, maybe someone should start talking about it!!” Raina exclaims, then thinks, Maybe it would make us feel less like freaks.

Eleven-year-old Raina was absolutely right. But luckily for the kids of 2010, adult Raina has talked about it, beautifully and expressively, in Smile. And if Smile can help just one stressed-out, self-loathing preteen girl feel less like a freak, this book will have done its job.

By Jennifer Smith
E-Mail: Jennifer@fantasticfangirls.org
Twitter: throughthebrush