This week, we are offering reflections on the six nominees for the 2015 Eisner Award for Best Reality-Based Work, while contemplating larger questions of the variety of ways comics can uniquely crystallize reality for readers.
Written and Drawn by Cece Bell
Published by Amulet Books, Color, 240 pages.
Going to school and making new friends can be tough. But going to school and making new friends while wearing a bulky hearing aid strapped to your chest? That requires superpowers! In this funny, poignant graphic novel memoir, author/illustrator Cece Bell chronicles her hearing loss at a young age and her subsequent experiences with the Phonic Ear, a very powerful—and very awkward—hearing aid.
The Phonic Ear gives Cece the ability to hear—sometimes things she shouldn’t—but also isolates her from her classmates. She really just wants to fit in and find a true friend, someone who appreciates her as she is. After some trouble, she is finally able to harness the power of the Phonic Ear and become “El Deafo, Listener for All.” And more importantly, declare a place for herself in the world and find the friend she’s longed for.
When my daughter was three, we were leaving the playground and happened past a young man in a wheelchair. Not knowing better, unabashedly, my daughter stopped to ask this complete stranger what had happened and why he had to sit in that chair. His high-worn Raiders cap and all-black outfit suggested to me a more circumspect approach; contrary to my stupid flash of stereotype, he smiled warmly at her and explained with utmost gentleness that he had been in a car accident and couldn’t walk, and that was why he had to sit in a chair. My daughter’s eyes expressed more sympathy than my fancy words could ever fabricate, and we left after a brief, kind conversation. My politeness would have walked right on by.
Cece Bell’s El Deafo is wonderfully for kids, and therefore, for all of us. This third autobiographical nominee in the “Reality-Based” category is Bell’s story of losing her hearing at four years old due to meningitis, her trials and tribulations with hearing aids and school and other kids, and coming of age into the embrace of her difference. It’s about as poignant a book of funny animals, barfs, and elementary school friendship drama as there could be. My daughter was spellbound and charmed, unwilling to surrender the book for an entire weekend camping trip, attached at the lunch table, bunk bed, and everywhere. While my four year-old kid was in the bewildering, unfamiliar environment of a weekend camp, this was the kind of story she could cling to, the story of a girl whose great conflicts are kid-companions who try unhelpfully to help and the perplexing swings between under- and over-sensitivity that mark coming-of-age.
Already a multiple prize-winner, El Deafo is one of those books we adult comics readers can overlook when we mistake it for children’s fare. Our loss. It’s an exemplar of why I’m thankful my reading diet is complemented by the comics I read over my daughter’s shoulder. It includes artistic work that is child-like and not childish, material whose bright pastels somehow exclude it from my serious contemplation, even though in actuality it paces me through territory I’ll pay hundreds in therapy bills to retread. El Deafo embraces its non-“real” aspects, its colorful anthropomorphic animals and superhero origin story and clever visual representations of phenomena like hearing loss (fading text in speech balloons). But the kind of “reality” from which Cece Bell authors her work includes not only the story’s autobiographical detail but the sentiments and experiences about school awkwardness, friendship longings and irritations, and the gigantic assistive devices she both needs and tries to hide, all culled from the raw stuff of the bildungsroman of a fierce and tender spirit. It’s not the physicist’s calculated reality or the philologist’s chronicled reality, but the narrative reality we clutch to as children, clutch to and climb triumphantly into maturity.
Later today, a wide-ranging collection of short comics about a single, vast topic, edited by Jonathan Clode and John Stuart Clark: “To End All Wars: The Graphic Anthology of the First World War.”You can keep up with the entire week’s look at the 2015 Eisner nominations for Best Reality Based Work here.
