If you are a comic book reader, you’ve probably heard this at some point in your life. You’ve probably had someone looking down on you, telling you that comics are for kids, that they are just a silly form of entertainment. It’s been a common place for such a long time. As a reaction, in the last decades, comics artists, publishers, and critics have been busy trying to shake off this misconception. In doing so, we probably lost track of a simple truth: comics are for kids too!

But in recent years it has become impossible to ignore this simple fact. Driven by a manga explosion, with series like One Piece, Demon Slayer, and Attack of Titans climbing the best sellers lists in different countries, comics have become “one of the fastest growing segments in the publishing industry”. These are the words used by the Bologna Children’s Book Fair (BCBF), probably the most important fair in the world dedicated to children’s book publishing. 2023 marked the 60th edition of the book fair, which for the second year has opened up a special area entirely dedicated to comics. Bologna, in the middle of Italy, halfway between Venice and Florence, is the city where I live, so let’s take a look at what was going on at the BCBF in the first week of March.

It could seem a paradox, but the BCBF is not a place for children or families. It’s a place of business. Entrance at the fair is reserved for professionals only: that means mainly publishers buying and selling rights, translators, teachers, and a good number of illustrators looking for jobs. The first thing welcoming visitors is indeed the Illustrators Wall: actually, four walls full of flyers, drawings, and business cards, put up by artists in the hope of catching the eye of some publisher. I don’t know if anybody ever succeeded in this, but certainly it is worth trying: BCBF 2023 edition has seen 1456 exhibitors from 90 countries and almost 29.000 professional visitors, all gathered in Bologna for a week or so.

Walking through the four pavilions of the book fair is like taking a tour around the world: Spain, France, Holland, Korea, China, Brazil… all these countries have a stand gathering their most important productions in children’s publishing. A special place has been reserved for the “Market of honor” Greece, along with an area dedicated to publishers from Africa and a focus on Ukraine illustrators. Between a business chat and another, professionals can attend one of the many debates regarding the main themes of the present and the future of the children’s publishing industry. 2023’s debates are about compelling issues like censorship in children’s books and the AI role in the future of publishing and illustration. Illustrators can instead attend a rich program of workshops, masterclasses, and portfolio reviews.

Let’s wander through the pavilions with some photos while we hurry to the comics corner.

The BCBF’s comics section is a new area and it has grown since its first edition in 2022. Comics, so it seems, are no longer seen as a surrogate of reading. BCBF’s organizers now value them as “a perfect language to introduce children to their first experiences of independent reading”. While comics publishers are chatting about rights and licensing, I made my way towards the conference area: a presentation is about to begin, to introduce the winners in the comics categories of the BRAW Bolognaragazzi awards. Three categories reserved for comics have been added to the BRAW awards since 2020. This year’s winners break another misconception: even when comics are intended for children, they don’t necessarily have to be simplistic. The titles awarded couldn’t prove it any better.

Whose sock? by Sun Jun from Taiwan (Hsin Yi Publications) is the winner in the Comics – Early readers category. The story is a classic: a kitten finds a yellow sock and starts looking for its owner, wandering through the building where he lives, populated by different animal families. The pages are filled with hidden jokes and details demanding multiple readings, and the apartment block, with all its different animals-residents, is a micro-world reflecting the diversity of a multicultural society.

Un matin (A morning), by Jerome Dubois and Laurie Augustie from France (published by La Partie), winner in the Comics – Middle-grade category, is both charming and challenging. It’s an adventure, an exploration, in the newly formed memory of a child. The leading character (the gender is not defined) wakes up one morning only to find that all the colors in the world have disappeared. It seems that the colors have all ended up inside some strange beings that have the shape of large marbles. These beings are indeed memories, and by re-collecting them, the child will be able to put the colors back in the world – but only if the reader is willing to follow along because Un matin has a “choose your own adventure” structure.

Planetarium Ghost Travel by Sakatsuki Sakana from Japan (published by PIE International) plays with story structures too. The book is composed of different chapters and stories – one is a classic manga, and another is made only of space panoramic views with small poetic texts – kept together by a common atmosphere and by a deep blue color. All the stories are about the loneliness and the melancholy of a young space traveler (but not about sadness) – themes, I guess, resonating with today’s young readers, having grown up through lockdowns and a pandemic.

The BCBF has a long list of collateral events happening in the city of Bologna. After a day of work at the book fair, a crowd of publishers, professionals, and illustrators pour into the city center to attend a presentation or an exhibition opening. Long queues stretch outside the exhibition Formidable by the French illustrator Rébecca Dautremer and The precious things by Italian artist Beatrice Alemagna. In the covered square of the Sala Borsa public library, located in the central piazza del Nettuno, visitors can browse through a selection of over 600 nonfiction picture books. Just below them lay the old Etruscan and Roman settlements, visible through a crystal floor. Bologna is a well-preserved medieval city, and the historical Palazzo Re Enzo, built during the 13th century, today hosts one of the most beloved children’s bookshops in town, Giannino Stoppani: during the last summer a fire damaged it, but now the bookshop is as good as new, and just in time for the BCBF.

One of the more interesting venues for comics in Bologna is the Academy of Fine Arts: since 2005 the Academy has opened a course in Comics and Illustrations, and for the students, the BCBF is an opportunity to show some of their works. One of the exhibitions organized in the Academy’s halls is actually by a former student: his name is Majid Bita, he arrived in Bologna from Iran in 2014 and he is now displaying some pages from his first graphic novel. Born in Iran (published by Canicola) is a powerful and touching autobiographical story about Bita’s childhood and teenage years in Teheran in the early 2000s. It’s like reading a follow-up to Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis – though Bita’s drawing style is very different from hers – with a new generation protesting against Iran’s authoritarian regime and getting caught in its repression.

Marjane Satrapi was in Bologna just some weeks ago, to hold a lectio magistralis for the opening ceremony of the academic year of the University of Bologna. You can watch Satrapi’s lesson here (she speaks English! Go to minute 57 to skip the rest of the ceremony).