ABSTRACT
Serialized narratives such as comics and animated television series are popular narratives for children, young adults, and adults. Still, there is a huge gap between the popularity of these series and scholarly interest in them. Scholarly research tends to favor single high-quality texts of literary fiction, not popular series fiction. The two successive series to be discussed in this chapter, Calvin and Hobbes and Phineas and Ferb, are sequential narratives “in which the characters show few signs of growing older or changing in any way” (Watson 533). Both series present highly competent children as their main characters. The problem for discussion is how children’s rule is depicted in the two series. What roles do the child characters play, and what kind of childhood paradise do they present? In short, I want to investigate children’s rule in comic strips and television series as visual expressions of what childhood is or may be.
