Cub, by Cynthia L. Copeland
Cover art of Cub, by Cynthia L. Copeland.
Cub is a graphic memoir about growing up in Connecticut in 1972; about friendship and family and seventh grade; about getting hooked on journalism and photography; about starting to notice, understand, and get involved in the larger world.
Cindy starts out as a kid who loves English, keeps her head down in order to avoid bullies, notices but doesn’t comment on the different expectations her father has for her versus her brothers, and wears the clothes and hairstyle her mother chooses for her.
Over the course of the book, we see her:
love of English morph—via an internship with a local newspaper—into a love of journalism, and along with it, a newfound love of photography
develop the confidence to deal with her less-than-pleasant peers
gently voice her observations about her father’s ingrained sexism
start to figure out her own self, her interests and preferences and hopes for the future—from what she wants to wear, to what she wants to spend her time doing, to what kind of person she wants to be.
It’s smart, it’s easy-going, it’s observant, it’s FUNNY, and so much of her story—even though it’s set in the early 70s—resonates with issues and questions that kids are still wrestling with in the present day.
Some of those issues are foregrounded more than others—especially the importance of accuracy in journalism and the huge importance of encouraging and training journalists to be willing to ask hard, sometimes uncomfortable, questions—but the background threads, especially the ones about different forms of sexism, are no less relevant.
The stuff with her father is directly dealt with—again, gently, but still in an entirely satisfying way. The threads involving the female journalist she’s interning with and the one about her first boyfriend—the fact that he takes no interest in anything she has to say and cuts her off almost every single time she opens her mouth—aren’t commented on, but careful readers will very definitely pick up on the dynamics and (hopefully) make the connections on their own:
Panel from page 67 of Cub. Photo from my copy of the book, hence the lack of straight lines, sorryyyyy.
And, again, it’s FUNNY.
Here are her observations about the TYPES in her school—she does something similar with some of the teachers a little later on, and I almost DIED when she included the Cool Young Guy Teacher type, barf—which will likely be familiar to most folks who went to public middle school:
Pages 4 & 5 of Cub, by Cynthia Copeland. Pulled from the Fall 2019 Algonquin Young Readers catalog.
Definitely recommended to fans of realistic comic-format stories by Raina Telgemeier and Victoria Jamieson, as well as Shannon Hale’s graphic memoirs Real Friends and Best Friends.