Introduction

Before starting my annotated bibliography I had a very difficult time in finding a theme which I felt passionately about. I had recently read Shaun Tan’s graphic novel, The Arrival, and although I greatly enjoyed the pictures and creatures within the story and I found the ability to tell a story with no words to be remarkable skill, I was not blown away with the content of the novel. Last year, in our LIS Children’s Literature course, we studied Raymond Briggs wordless novel, The Snowman. I fell in love with that story and was blown away with the depth of the wordless book. Remembering The Snowman got me thinking as to why I had been affected so greatly by one wordless graphic novel and not the other. Therefore, I have chosen to examine wordless graphic novels to explore the differences in styles and to find out how wordless graphic novels can affect people so greatly.

I was not sure how I would go about finding enough graphic novels for my annotated bibliography but I knew I wanted to examine the resources available to me before choosing my target age group. I began my search by looking up resources on the internet. I soon found that most of the resourceful websites pointed out the same few wordless comics (including Shaun Tan’s novel). My most useful resource for listing wordless graphic novels wound up being the website LibraryThing under the heading of “graphic novel” and “wordless.” I thought that I had found a gold mind of resources because the list contained 120 novels for me to choose from. I began to go through the list and cross checked the ones I was interested in on Amazon.com. I did this because Amazon has created it so customers can actually view the inside of books before they buy them. I find this to be a very useful tool, especially for books with illustrations, because I can take a guess at which age group the book is targeted for. After finding a wide variety of novels I planned my annotated bibliography to be on wordless graphic novels for adults. There were enough to do an annotated bibliography on children but a few of the books that I was really interested in viewing were inappropriate for younger children to see. Many also included mature and complicated political storylines.

The next step I took in finding books was to find what was available. This was perhaps the most difficult job for me as neither the public nor the university libraries contain many of the books I wanted. I went back to the list of wordless picture books, this time not looking at what books I was most interested in but in what was available to me. I really wanted to be able to look at the entire book instead of just viewing it online as I feel I personally do not learn as well without a hard copy. The libraries seemed to have a wider collection of wordless graphic novels for children, which I suppose makes sense as there is a pretty good selection of wordless children’s books which don’t necessarily fall into the category of graphic novel. Also, I found that it is sometimes difficult to distinguish which age group a wordless comic is for. Some, especially the books with a heavy political message, were simple to categorize as books for older or young readers. Some of the novels were not so easy to categorize. For example, one of my selections, entitled Robot Dreams, is a light and simple story about friendship, yet, there is a lot of feeling and emotion behind the pictures which adults can appreciate just as much as children. In fact, it was one of my friends, a thirty year old man, who introduced me to this book. Surely this should mean the graphic novel is not just meant for children? After my search I found that I wanted to modify my target age from adults to young adults, which was fine with me as I am more interested in working with such an age group in the future.

After selecting all of the books for my annotated bibliography I carefully looked through them and wrote my comments. I used the University of Alberta’s database Book Review Index Online Plus to find further reviews for my articles. This was a very useful tool in finding many good and detailed reviews and I definitely plan to use it again in the future. For the books which had no reviews on the database I performed an online search for reviews. Although I prefer to use library databases as resources, the online searches were also very useful.

One more comment, before I begin introducing my selections for my annotated bibliography, is that I am surprised at the small collection of wordless graphic novels which our university library owns. Many of the books I selected, and many I could not find, are deep and profound novels and would make superb teaching tools for high school students. The Curriculum Library had a fairly good collection, but even it did not have such books as George Walker’s collection Graphic Witness: Four Wordless Graphic Novels. I only closely examined two of the four stories in Walker’s collection but by the end of each one I slowly let out a deep breath and was amazed by the powerful political messages they illustrated. I could not find a copy of this novel in any of the libraries and could not even find it in the bookstores without having to order a copy. I was lucky that Professor de Vos had a copy in her private collection or I would not have had the chance to read the graphic novel.