The Cartoonists Club Review

Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is pretty close to the top of the comics canon reading pile. And that it's been there for something like three decades says a lot about its significance to comics as a whole, not to mention the legions of individual comics creators. There were captivating books about the creation of comics before Understanding Comics and the book has had more than a few criticisms thrown at it since then, but it has effectively never gone out of print because no one has been able to come up with anything remotely like it.

Raina Telgemeier made a big splash about fifteen years ago with her semi-biographical comic, Smile. Originally a webcomic, it was soon picked up for publication by Scholastic and has sold a bajillion copies. Her subsequent books have all sold incredibly well, to the point that there were several years where she was single-handedly selling 5% of all comics in the US, both in terms of volume as well as dollars. Five percent of all comics sold in this country had her name on them! No one has done that before or since for any period of time, not to mention for multiple years back to back! Now sales do not necessarily equate with quality of course but she's clearly doing something right when it comes to making comics that that many people -- many of whom never read comics before in their lives! -- keep buying her books.

So theoretically, if you take these two together and have them work on one book, wouldn't you expect to get an amazingly relateable story that describes many of the root concepts of comic creation, but does so for an audience of pre-teens instead of adults?

Well, not only is that Telgemeier's and McCloud's intention with The Cartoonists Club, but they absolutely nailed it in the execution!

The story is about some middle school kids who are interested in making comics, but have different approaches and skillsets. So they form a club that meets after school to discuss making comics as well as practice. The school librarian helps guide them and the book ends with the kids tabling at a local show at the public library.

The story is about a small group of kids. They're fun and relatable to varying degrees, just like every other of Telgemeier's books. The characters aren't reductive -- even the ones that might seem so at first -- and they all act like kids you know/knew. Telgemeier does her usual great job with the story, and this book fits in smoothly with the rest of her oeuvre. If you've liked any of Telgemeier's previous books, you'll like this one as well.

As for McCloud's part, I'm not going to re-hash the content of Understanding Comics for you. If you're reading my blog, you've probably already read that and, on the off chance that you haven't, I bet it's already on your list of books to check out when you're able. Many of the same basic ideas there are laid out here, just at depth and understanding level of a middle school student, i.e. there are considerably fewer Magritte jokes.

In the back matter, Telgemeier notes that the basic idea with the book was basically to present Undestanding Comics in a more kid-friendly format, so that a twelve-year-old could benefit from that knowledge instead of having to wait until they were considerably older to "get it." That is precisely what this is, and it succeeds enormously well both at re-contextualizing McCloud's work and doing so in an entertaining fashion. If you had any skeptical thoughts around two very different types of creators trying to collaborate and winding up making something considerably less than either of them might make individually, you'd needn't worry -- this is simply the best bits of both creators, fused together in about as seamless a manner as possible.

The Cartoonists Club came out last month from Scholastic. It retails for $14.99 US and should be available from any bookstore.

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