The LGBTQ+ Comics Studies Reader: Critical Openings, Future Directions ed. by Alison Halsall and Jonathan Warren (review)

Debbie Olson’s look at “The Colour of Innocence” within her larger survey of how live-action films for children (and family films that star children) manufacture and privilege notions of innocence is also noteworthy, as are Matthew Smith’s study of girlhood in early British and Hollywood cinema, Bettina Kümmerling-Meibauer’s investigation of how the avant-garde manifests in children’s films, Timothy Shary’s study of the figure of the “tween” in Hollywood films, and Claudia Alonso-Recarte and Ignacio Ramons-Gay’s exploration of the ethical implications of the ways children’s films both work with and represent live animals. Altogether, The Oxford Handbook of Children’s Film is quite an accomplishment. Brown and the contributors have moved the scholarship forward not incrementally but by leaps and bounds. The volume is an essential purchase for libraries, and scholars from film studies to children’s literature would find it a highly useful addition to their personal collections.