The way the ears come out the top of the head foregrounds her concern about how visible the wires to her hearing aids are, while making the characters more universal (and cute). It’s a multi-layered comparison that gives her comfort and symbolizes her feelings.īell’s characters are all rabbits, an intelligent choice. As she thinks, “superheroes might be awesome, but they are also different”, with an image of a lonely Batman, back turned to us. The phonic ear means she can actually hear things others can’t, as the teachers don’t take off the microphone when they leave the classroom. She frequently fantasizes about her difference making her better, with superhero interludes that demonstrate how powerful that metaphor can be in accepting and valuing what makes her unique. This “phonic ear” makes it possible for her to interact with others, but she’s embarrassed about what the kids will think of her with this gear. She goes to school with a receiver hung around her neck, wires connecting it to the pieces in her ears, and a microphone to give to her teacher, so she can directly hear what the instructor is saying. Both are simply (but cleverly) illustrated stories of the struggles of a girl in middle school, looking to make friends and find her place while dealing with a visual difference from the others.Įl Deafo is Cece Bell’s autobiographical story of being hearing impaired after a childhood bout with meningitis.
El Deafo, for example, would be a wonderful next choice for someone who loved the graphic memoir Smile. Nowadays, there are award-winning graphic novels everywhere, a glorious thing, particularly when it comes to kids’ books. People who loved it had nothing else to go on with, nothing else to build that habit of thinking of comics as a medium instead of just the superhero genre. The important question when growing comic readers is “what do I read next?” Back in the mid-1980s, in the first graphic novel boom, the appeal of comic-format books faltered because, after Maus, there was little else with the same literary goals and high quality and diverse storytelling.
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