Flight into Adulthood

I'm determined to finish discussing all the graphic novels I read as a judge for the 2007 Cybils Awards before I have to start reading middle-grade novels for the 2008 awards. So today's entry is about Flight, volume 4, an anthology of short stories in comics form edited by Kazu Kibuishi.

With well over 300 pages of color comics, this book offers a sampling of many styles and sensibilities from up-and-coming author-illustrators. Most of the stories have some fantastic element, but not all do.

If I had to pick out a favorite, I'd choose Ryan Estrada's "Mystical Monkey." It's a summer-camp story with a difference, since this camp involves meditating to meet one's "power animal." Tyrone discovers his animal guardian "is a jerk."

A close second is Lark Pien's "Story of Binny," another tale of a troublesome animal. The binny even has the audacity to insist, "You read too many books."

In the Cybils judging of Graphic Novels for Young Adults, I think Flight, volume 4, suffered from being an anthology up against long unified stories (i.e., novels), which had more room to spread out. It also suffered, in my mind, from not really being a book for Young Adults.

Kibuishi's own story, "The Window Makers," is about working your first full-time job and seeing your future in an older co-worker. J. P. Ahonen's "And Hope for the Best" is about a couple wondering about whether to become parents. Pascal Campion's "The Storm" follows a drunken lover, Neil Babra's "The Blue Guitar" shows a musician attempting suicide with a gas stove, and Clio Chang's "To Grandma's" is a meditation on Little Red Riding Hood in the context of child-molestation fears.

I'm not saying that Young Adult literature can't consider suicide, sex, alcohol, and other "edgy" topics. Books written for teenagers have been handling those topics since before the term "Young Adult" was invented. But they do so from a teenager's perspective.

Those stories and others in Flight, volume 4, clearly reflect the interests and development of twentysomething adults, not teens. And while other stories, such as "Mystical Monkey" and Raina Telgemeier's "Dinosaur Egg" speak to the sensibility of pre-teens, I don't think we can just average them all out and call the result "Young Adult."

I suspect that if Flight were an anthology of prose stories with the same plots, instead of being an anthology of comics, no one would even consider labeling it Young Adult literature. But our culture still associates comics with kids, so that skews the expected readership of Flight down a few years.