El Deafo by Cece Bell
Cece Bell attempts to recreate her childhood experience as she struggled with being deaf and the challenges of trying to lead a life similar to that which other children enjoyed. The author takes the character of a rabbit but maintains her legal name, Cece. Many characters are involved in Cece’s narrative; teachers, neighbors, classmates, and her nuclear family. Notably, Cece makes her first friend, Emma, and things do not work out. Then she becomes friends with Laura and Ginny, but these two do not work out. Finally, she makes friend with Martha, who would eventually become the best friend Cece had always desired. There is also Mike Miller, Cece’s first crush and neighbor. The narrative revolves around a child’s life and focuses on her two primary environments; the home and school.
As a young girl, Cece is diagnosed with meningitis, which led her to develop deafness, and she had to use hearing aids and attend a special school to learn sign and other nonverbal skills to help her communicate. Her family moves to Roanoke, where she believes she will have a chance at a normal life by fitting in with the other kids and making friends. The hearing aid makes her stand out from the rest, but all she wants was to be seen as the other girls. She finds a friend in Laura but soon discovers how controlling she is and even lets her dog bit Cece. She then makes another friend, Ginny, who, despite being caring, is overly sensitive about Cece’s hearing problem and often introduces her as her ‘dear friend,’ further alienating Cece from the rest. Cece saw herself as weak, and the constant failures in gaining a meaningful relationship with her peers led her to find help from within. She develops a alter- ego, El Deafo, who is a superhero with super hearing powers. Through El deaf, she can reconstruct her reality, allowing her to feel better about herself. Also, she makes friends with Martha, who treats her no differently from the other kids, and they get along well. Cece finally gathered the courage to speak to her crush, Mike Miller, telling him of her hearing device's unique specifications, which made her listen in to what was happening from a distance. Mike and other kids thought this was cool, and Cece often used her super hearing powers to warn the class when the teachers were approaching. She became a superhero with unique superpowers that could help her friends. She could now fit in, not because she was like other kids, but because she was different.
Arguably, El Deafo is a transitional book, featuring simple sentences, short chapters, and color illustration. The comic’s primary audience is young children who have just learned to read but are yet to develop advanced concentration. The young reader can only read and understand a few sentences and carry a simple idea at a time. Cece Bell is aware of this factor and chooses minimal penalties to complete an image. She uses big letters for easy reading and accompanies these statements with colored illustrations to keep the reader hooked. Also, she uses photographs to create a mental image within the reader’s mind to carry the main idea (fig 2). The author uses large wavy bubbles to indicate Cece’s imagination, and her thoughts presented by special bubbles, narrated in a yellow background (fig 1). Cece’s use of color is strategic; to keep her audience’s attention captured. Limiting to simple colors like black and white can be boring to the young reader; color attracts their attention, further developing a more vivid depiction of the narration.
