Table Lands: Food in Children’s Literature by Kara K. Keeling and Scott T. Pollard (review)

Abstract

Children’s Literature Association Quarterly ondly, the success of webtoons would make the point that webcomics and their fandoms are truly a transnational phenomenon. In class, I expect I will ask my students to reflect upon and fill this gap by writing notional new “chapters” of their own that apply Kleefeld’s concerns to WEBTOON or Tapas. These criticisms aside, it is hard not to feel grateful for Kleefeld’s work. I was excited to learn of Webcomics, and I’m excited about the prospect of teaching with it. Scholarly treatments of online comics are few and far between, and Kleefeld’s is the only academic book on the topic that I would ask a class full of students to read (and that is in print and fairly affordable). I am reminded of how slow academia can be when it comes to grappling with popular phenomena. Some years ago, I realized that my niece and nephew, by then in their thirties, had been reading webcomics for at least twenty years (I recall them talking about Pete Abrams’s Sluggy Freelance back in the late 1990s). To me, webcomics were still a new and disorienting addition to comics; for too long, I had been deferring my first real engagement with them. To my niece and nephew, though, webcomics were already as natural as breathing—an accessible, established, everyday thing. It took me many years to begin catching up. We need more books like Kleefeld’s that acknowledge webcomics’ ubiquity and explore their teeming variety and undeniable relevance as art and culture. Webcomics, a concise portal into a dauntingly complex phenomenon, should prove a landmark in the study of comics and of online literacies.