‘The Magic of Raina Is Real’

If you do not have a child under the age of 16, or are not yourself under the age of 16, you might have no idea who Raina is. So it was with me. I called a friend with kids and said, “Have you heard of an author named Raina Telgemeier?”

“Of course,” she said, sounding bemused, as if I’d asked whether she was familiar with the automobile.

“Like the Beatles for children,” another parent friend explained.

Last spring, standing in the theater at the Billy Ireland Cartoon Library & Museum in Columbus, Ohio, surveying the hundreds of kids and teenagers who had come to meet Raina, I realized the scale of my ignorance. Half an hour earlier, her fans had been standing on their seats, jumping up and down, waving their arms in the air, but now the long wait for autographs had begun. Everyone had been assigned a number and organized into subgroups so they could approach the signing table in shifts. Nobody seemed to mind especially—many were plunked down on the floor, contentedly rereading her books, as an hour passed, then an hour and a half.

One mother and her 8-year-old daughter had come from Philadelphia. Another family had driven up from Tennessee. “We would go anywhere to see Raina,” one parent said.

“The magic of Raina is real,” confirmed a school librarian who’d brought her daughter to meet Telgemeier here, at a public event celebrating the author’s first retrospective. Every spring, the librarian told me, she runs a report to determine which of the library’s books have been checked out the most. It was June, so she could share that, once again, “four out of the top five are Raina books. Children reread those books over and over and over.”

Telgemeier, a smiley yet somewhat shy 46-year-old with glasses and dangly earrings, has almost accustomed herself to being known mononymically, like Cher. She has boxes and boxes of fan mail in her basement, more than she can open, and there are boxes more at her publisher’s offices in New York. It’s wonderful, she told me, and unnerving. She got her break in her mid-20s, when Scholastic commissioned her to create graphic-novel adaptations of books from The Baby-Sitters Club series. Her editor took an interest in a web comic she was self-publishing at the time, which became her first graphic memoir, Smile. Scholastic published the book in 2010 as a kind of experiment. At the time, the market for middle-grade comics was dominated by superheroes and fantasy. Would kids want a nonfiction comic about a normal sixth-grade girl’s tricky journey with braces? Publishing executives had doubts about whether enough girls could be persuaded to read comics at all. (It was assumed that a comic with a girl protagonist would require an audience of girls.)

’s first print run , and the book spent 240 weeks on the best-seller list. In 2014,, and in 2019, . This trio of graphic memoirs has made her, like Roald Dahl and Judy Blume, the kind of author who , and whose books, in turn, have helped define a generation’s experience of childhood.