The Monster in the Title of This Book

The Monster Appeal of Jellaby and Bayou

By Suzette Chan
January 25, 2010

Kids love monsters, but not just as adversaries to be vanquished. The continued popularity of books like Where the Wild Things Are, the monsters of Sesame Street and Uglydolls proves that kids not only feel sympathy for the monsters, but also an affinity and protectiveness of monsters, if not an intense identification with the creatures.

Semiotically, monsters are very useful. They can signify all the fears children have of the outside of their inner worlds. They can be avatars for children when they feel like they don't belong or are misunderstood. They can also be thought to represent the traits and values that children want to protect in themselves or in others. For these reasons, monsters can inspire multiple readings, some of which are unexpectedly complex on the part of children.

In his book, Killing Monsters: Why Children Need Fantasy, Super Heroes, and Make-Believe Violence, comics writer Gerard Jones noted that Japanese pop culture in particular has understood children's fascination with monsters: "Hollywood invented the giant-radioactive-monster-attacks-the-city-genre with The Beast from 20,000 Fathoms, but its creations invariably ended with the adult pleasing destruction of the monster by the police or military. Japanese producers followed the formula with the first Godzilla in 1954, but then they noticed what Hollywood failed or refused to see: kids loved the monsters, not the authorities."

Jones goes on to note the increasing popularity of Japanese monster narratives among North American children, for example, Pokemon and Dragon Ball Z. Taking it one step further, I would say that this particular conception of the monster narrative is also seeing local expressions in recent all-ages comics.

Keen Soo's Jellaby and Jeremy Love's Bayou are excellent North American all-ages comics that hinge on this multilayered appeal of monsters. Both books are named after the lead monster in each story, signifying that the subject of the books is the collection of ideas and themes projected onto the title monsters. The actual protagonists of each book are children who are 9 or 10 years of age: i.e, leaving childhood. It's the perfect age to develop a fascination with monsters that go beyond non-understanding fear.

The initial interaction between the children and the monsters emphasize their mutual physical, societal, geographical and racial otherness. At first, the children are startled by the physical otherness of the monsters, and, to a lesser extent, vice versa, but both parties soon acknowledge their shared circumstances. Finally, the kids and monsters act together to face a world that's hostile to them both.

Jellaby

The protagonist in Jellaby is a precocious 10-year-old named Portia, who lives in a suburban community outside of Toronto. The Tom Stoppard-reading only child of a conscientious but workaholic mother, Portia is an outcast at school and lonely at home. One night, she is distracted by a noise and goes out into the woods at night — a classic situation of a kid finding herself in a place she ought not to go — and meets Jellaby, a big purple monster who looks more frightened than frightening. She eventually adopts him, keeping him hidden from her mother and anyone else in town whom she fears will not understand. But she can't hide Jellaby from Jason, a bullying victim with absentee parents with whom Portia has discovered a tentative affinity. Additionally, with the last name of Tham, Jason seems to be of Asian heritage. Portia and Jason, both outcasts and loners, bond over Jellaby, who represents their otherness, their loneliness.

They also bond with Jellaby. At one point, Jellaby is enthralled by a video of Return of Godzilla — identifying with the monster, of course; later, Jellaby just as readily identifies with a toy pony, showing the range of avatars that can interest a single imagination. Portia and Jason's instinct to hid Jellaby is not borne out of a sense of shame for what the monster might represent in them, but out of a desire to protect Jellaby from some of the harshness of their own lives. Given the rejection they have experienced at school. the children are reflexively protective of Jellaby, fearing that his difference will endanger him in their community. Portia and Jason also vow to return Jellaby to his home, partly to fulfull some dreams of their own. Portia says: "Everyone should be with their mother and father."

After being fully accepted by the children, Jellaby sees a notice for a travelling Halloween fair, which the mute creature suggests by gesture and drawing is his home. Portia and Jason make excuses to their parents so that they can sneak out and take Jellaby to Toronto via GO train. But Portia sees a man on the train who reminds her of a man that she's having nightmares about, a man with a secret about her missing father. As the man walks menacingly toward the children, Jellaby shields them and escapes from the moving train. In this crucial panel, Jellaby's shape allows him to curl naturally to protect the children, but throughout the story, the gentle monster's embryo-like appearance suggests that Jellaby will eventually emerge into his own, just as Portia and Jason are metaphorically leaving the womb of their homes and childhood identities.

Bayou

There are two monsters in Bayou, the eponymous Bayou, who befriends Lee, the young protagonist, and Cotton-Eyed Joe, the story's locus of antagonism. I use this latter phrase because there is no one antagonist in Lee's story. Set in the 1930s, Lee is the daughter of two generations of freed men. Her father, Calvin, is making a go as an independent farmer, but the racist white community isn't making it easy. Lynchings are common and no one, including Calvin, approves of Lee's friendship with a white girl, Lily (the association with the phrase "lily white" is inescapable). When Lily disappears, Calvin is blamed and jailed. Lee sets out to discover the truth. Along the way, Lee meets and gains the assistance of a bog monster who calls himself Bayou.

Bayou is a seemingly undead giant of a black man, born of a bayou filled with the bodies of black men who were lynched or otherwise killed in racially motivated executions. In this respect, Bayou is an uncanny figure, a powerful bogeyman that has arisen in response to the active oppression of African-Americans and the attempted repression of their legacy of building up some of the country's key industries, especially agricultural products like cotton and sugar. Initially repelled by Bayou, Lee will come to recognize the roots of her family's issues in Bayou's history, and ultimately be revived by Bayou and become a revenant just like him.

Unlike Jellaby, in which the challenges to Portia remain on her plane of reality (her mother, the kids at school, the man on the train), the forces acting against Lee are represented anthropomorphically in the form of a second monster, Cotton-Eyed Joe. Unlike Bayou, Cotton-Eyed Joe is a white monster that is a repository of antebellum expectations and colonial systems. As with Bayou, Cotton-Eyed Joe's specific origin is not included in this volume, but his behaviour generates some interesting readings of Southern exploitation.

Cotton-Eyed Joe eats black children and white children indiscriminately, establishing him as a creature of mass consumption. The industrial system that requires mass labour enslaves blacks, turns whites into consumers and creates a racist culture and economy that eats away at society as a whole. Meanwhile, the environmental price of industry poisons the bayou for everyone.
Cotton-Eyed Joe's name refers to a destructive industry that grows plants (i.e., cotton) that leach the soil and require massive amounts of unskilled labour, provided through the slave system in the southern United States. The brutish monster also lives incongruously in a "borrowed" antebellum house: he's a squatter, unlike Bayou, who lives in and is the bayou. Bayou shares a name with his environs and is shown to be at one with nature, not unlike the Swamp Thing.
Cotton-Eyed Joe kidnaps "guests" for a tea party that exposes the activity's fetishism of the fruits of colonialism and slavery: tea, sugar, "china". Forced tea parties are something of a serial killer motif, showing the monster playing at civility before killing, or in this case, devouring them in the end. In contrast, Bayou naturally reaches out to people and doesn't have to force anyone to be his friend. He lives symbiotically with all manner of natural beings and some supernatural entities (Lee straddles these realms): there is no place for consumption or domination in Bayou's world.

By effectively employing monsters, Bayou and Jellaby can explore issues that are scary (bullying, racial violence), some on an abstract level (existential loneliness, colonialism) to young readers without being simplistic. The monsters also give readers, no matter their age, sympathetic avatars through which to engage the stories emotionally. The first volumes of both Bayou and Jellaby end at a satisfying point. The connection between Bayou and Jellaby with the cultural, social and personal worlds in which they find themselves are so well explored that we're on board and ready to follow wherever the little girls and their monster friends will take us.

The Secret Friend Society — Official Home of Jellaby
Zuda Comics — Official Home of Bayou