The Visual Poetics of Play: Childhood in Three Canadian Graphic Novels

Abstract

This article explores the ideological work of play as it is represented in three contemporary graphic narratives – Kean Soo's Jellaby and Jellaby: monster in the city, and Mariko & Jillian Tamaki's Skim, analyzing the relationship these texts create between urban spaces and the ‘innovative’ spaces of the panel and page. The author is interested in the various ways the graphic novel can be read as a ‘leisure genre’ (to borrow a term coined by cultural anthropologist Victor Turner) that creates a dynamic, interactive ecology, encouraging protagonists and readers to participate in a ludic, pediarchic poetics of play. The content and the formal properties of these texts posit ‘play’ dynamically in relationship to ‘flow’ as a subject of the texts' critique, but also as an activity occurring in the liminal spaces in and between panels. The novels address readers as clever, sophisticated accomplices in the meaning-making process. Play is represented as subversive of adult authoritarianism and narrative domination, thwarting the co-optation and commodification of play in the cultures of young people.