Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

The Sidekick Comes of Age: How Young Adult Literature is Shifting the Sidekick Paradigm by Stephen M. Zimmerly

2020; Johns Hopkins University Press; Volume: 45; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/chq.2020.0024

1553-1201

Anne W. Anderson,

Comics and Graphic Narratives

Reviewed by: The Sidekick Comes of Age: How Young Adult Literature is Shifting the Sidekick Paradigm by Stephen M. Zimmerly Anne W. Anderson (bio) The Sidekick Comes of Age: How Young Adult Literature is Shifting the Sidekick Paradigm. By Stephen M. Zimmerly. Lexington Books, 2019. An old riddle asks, "When is a door not a door?" and answers, "When it is ajar." Pun aside, the riddle raises questions of purpose and function and the relation between the two; the double meaning of "ajar" suggests that doors themselves are relative concepts. Similarly, from its cover onward, The Sidekick Comes of Age challenges readers to rethink their preconceptions of sidekicks, their purposes, and their functions. Despite the cover image featuring silhouettes of a powerfully built man and woman, capes flowing, hands clenched at their sides, and bodies poised to leap into action, author Stephen M. Zimmerly briefly discusses, then mostly distances himself from, the superheroes found in comics to focus on what he terms "literary sidekicks" (3). Zimmerly calls sidekicks "another archetypal character that occurs almost as universally as the hero [and who is] a close companion or friend, usually understood to be in a subordinate or deferential position to another" (1), including examples from varied times, genres, formats, and media. Zimmerly asserts that sidekicks in general are undertheorized and that young adult literature offers an especially rich field for studying them, as this genre "is where the truly cutting edge of sidekick development may be found" (3). After first grounding his exploration of sidekicks in the archetypal theories of Northrup Frye, [End Page 189] Joseph Campbell, and Carl Jung—as well as in Claude Lévi-Strauss's semiotic understanding of "archetypes as the semantic building blocks from which myths are made" (6) and in Maria Nikolajeva's structural arguments as to the purposes of secondary characters—Zimmerly then turns to the question of what constitutes YA literature. He draws on Patty Campbell's thematic understanding to arrive at a working definition of YA literature as any "text [that] struggles with this central question of how adult identity should be shaped" (11). This definition, Zimmerly notes, "opens the door for even more supposedly 'adult' texts to be considered part of YA" (11). Door open, Zimmerly devotes chapter 1 to exploring what he terms the "four foundational (or classic) sidekick roles" (15)—narrative gateway, devil's advocate, comic relief, and foil—by pairing a non-YA text with a more traditionally defined one. For example, he compares Dr. Watson's role as a "'narrative gateway' through which the reader can better understand . . . an enigmatic hero [in this case, Sherlock Holmes]" (16) with Scout's role in revealing "Jem's maturation" in To Kill a Mockingbird (20). Other literary selections in this chapter range from Cervantes's Don Quixote and Ben Edlund's The Tick to Mark Twain's The Adventures of Tom Sawyer and Ursula K. Le Guin's A Wizard of Earthsea. In chapter 2, Zimmerly continues establishing "the literary, historical, and critical foundation" (15) of the use of sidekick characters by focusing more closely on the "particular nature of the bond that forms between [hero and sidekick] as characters within the story itself " (41), relationships that he claims "tend to simulate those of parents and children or those of two siblings" (41). He first discusses an obvious example, Batman/Bruce Wayne and Robin/Dick Grayson as father/son, then considers how that dynamic is stretched in a more recent iteration in which the Robin/Dick Grayson character is replaced by a female Robin/Carrie. As in the first chapter, Zimmerly illustrates similar quasi-family dynamics across a wide range of literature including Nancy Drew, The Incredibles, Dune, The Hunger Games, and more. He also considers how two sidekicks and a hero form a triad, focusing especially on the relationships among Percy Jackson, Annabeth Chase, and Grover Underwood—as well as how the sidekick void is filled when the plot causes the absence of one or both of them—in Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and the Olympians series. After establishing the groundwork of how sidekicks function relative to and in relationship with the hero, Zimmerly traces the various ways that...