Growing Up Graphic: The Comics of Children in Crisis

**Honor Book, Children's Literature Association Book Award 2025** In *Growing Up Graphic*, Alison Halsall considers graphic texts for young readers to interrogate how they help children develop new ideas about social justice and become potential agents of change. With a focus on comics that depict difficult experiences affecting young people, Halsall explores the complexities of queer graphic memoirs, narratives of belonging, depictions of illness and disability, and explorations of Indigenous experiences. She discusses, among others, *Child Soldier* by Jessica Dee Humphreys and Michel Chikwanine, *War Brothers* by Sharon E. McKay, *Baddawi* by Leila Abdelrazaq, Matt Huynh's interactive adaptation of Nam Le's *The Boat*, and David Alexander Robertson's *7 Generations*. These examples contest images of childhood victimization, passivity, and helplessness, instead presenting young people as social actors who attempt to make sense of the challenges that affect them. In considering comics *for* children and *about* children, *Growing Up Graphic* centers a previously underexplored vein of graphic narratives and argues that these texts offer important insights into the interests and capabilities of children as readers.