In general, how do different stylistic choices in different time periods shape how the story is constructed by the reader? Have your students individually or in small groups focus on one specific part of the narrative, and do a close reading of a range of illustrations of that particular moment in other texts. You can explore the illustrations posted on the websites, or use the picture book list on the Sur La Lune page to gather picture books from the school and public library. Why might Phelan have made those choices? How does Phelan punctuate the book with color? Why is color used where it is? Why not in other parts? How does he use line and shading to convey emotion? When you have completed the book, have your students explore the illustrations of previously published versions of the “Snow White” story, using the Sur La Lune webpage as well as the Rutgers University Snow White website. Consider when the words disappear and the reader is fully immersed in the narrative arc of the illustrations alone. Explore Bang’s principles of design with your students, to give them the tools to more deeply unpack the illustrations.

Picture This, Molly Bang’s seminal book on illustration, has been reissued by Chronicle Books. As you read Phelan’s Snow White, have your students take note of how the illustrations work. This impressive graphic novel has multiple layers of intertextuality and historical detail ripe for classroom exploration.Ĭlose Reading of Illustrations. Readers in the know can almost hear the hum of the film reel. A cinematic pulse runs through this almost virtually black-and-white narrative, particularly during the multi-page wordless sequences. But the strength of this story is the medium, which adopts the motifs of the silent movies so popular at the time.

As in the original tales, Snow White expresses limited agency in some parts of the narrative, and a man must save her. Phelan’s revisions to the story are bounded by historical context, not ideology. Phelan replaces the seven dwarves with a multicultural gang of boys, and replaces the prince with Detective Prince of the NYPD.

Soon after, the Snow White narrative as we know it commences, with a few particular twists and turns to embed the story in the tumult of autumn, 1929. Fast forward a decade, and Samantha, affectionately called Snow by her now dead mother, must watch her father remarry the star of the Ziegfeld Follies. Readers are next taken back to the early years of protagonist Samantha White’s childhood, when she played in the snow in Central Park. In this retelling, the glass coffin is the window of Macy’s department store, decorated for the holidays and behind a police line. Phelan introduces the climax of the novel at the very beginning, revealing to readers a sleeping Snow White in her glass coffin. The Roaring 20s and Art Deco New York City meet the Great Depression in Matt Phelan’s new graphic novel Snow White.

Snow white by matt phelan