Comics and Children’s Magazines

Comics and serial print have a long, closely intertwined history, with the earliest comics proliferating in newspapers before gradually migrating to children’s magazines. In positioning itself between the booming research on comics and periodicals and comics and children’s culture, this book offers a transnational perspective on the diverse connections between the ninth art and magazines.

Beginning with the heyday of children’s periodicals and their incorporation of comics since the late nineteenth century in the UK, the book ends with a survey of paratextual reader engagement in Topolino issues until the 2010s. Its eight chapters showcase different possibilities for analysing vast, serial corpora, ranging from thematic and formal approaches to more distant readings mapping evolutions across magazine issues. It covers the impact of American comics on the Corriere dei Piccoli magazines from the 1920s and 1930s, forms of editorial communication in French and Belgian magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, the interplay of artistic pursuit, commercial needs, and national identity in the American Camera Comics from the mid-1940s, the comics scare in Italy read through the Italian Western comic Pecos Bill, the changing editorial policies of French magazine Lisette, and the construction of post-war national identity in Greek comics.

This book will be of great interest to comic and children’s literature enthusiasts along with researchers of comic studies, cultural studies, literature and art. The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue in the Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics.