New Kid by Jerry Craft

Craft’s New Kid  is a comic book about the hardships Jordan faces with friends, school, and his parents. His hardships are primarily based on how he feels as a minority and the expectations put on him by his surrounding environment. Jordan starts attending a new school, RAD, and immediately begins to notice the microaggressions in this new environment. Jordan likes to draw, and every few pages of the book there is a comic strip and drawings by Jordan. His caricatures and dramatization of the people and ideas around him were what I believed was the funniest part of the book. But, I believe there is something much deeper to this humor, it is Jordan’s way of understanding and grappling with his place in this world and the expectations that people put on him. 

The first of Jordan’s drawings that we see are a back to school poster of rulers, calculators, and textbooks with evil faces on them and kids running away. The history textbook is even holding some kids looking like it is about to eat one of them. He shows this drawing to his dad who says, “Uh…Well…the drawing is great…But let’s not show mom, okay? (Craft 6). While textbooks can not eat kids and school materials do not have evil faces, Jordan made this drawing to express his emotions about school. He might believe that textbooks consume so much of his time, just as it looks like the textbook is consuming a student. When I saw this drawing I chuckled because of the over exaggeration of school materials being scary. Many of his comics are tips for how to act in public. In his comic strip, “Jordan’s Tips For Taking the Bus” he has different drawings for when he is in a different neighborhood (Craft 56). In some pictures he has his hood up, in others he keeps his glasses on, but when he is in Riverdale, he says, “I do my best not to look cool AT ALL! No shades, and definitely no hood. I don’t even like to draw ‘cause people might think I’m going to use my markers to ‘tag the bus’! (Craft 57). There is humor in his drawings that explain the constant code-switching that Jordan experiences on one bus ride. He is constantly thinking about how he looks and how he will be perceived as people enter and exit the bus. When he arrives at school Jordan is “exhausted” as he is unable to just sit and be himself without thinking about the stereotypes people put on him. 

Jordan has another humorous drawing called “Judging Kids by the Covers of their Books!” (Craft 130). This one is based on the book fair and a teacher who believes she has picked out “the perfect books” for some kids based on what they look like. The teacher gives a black kid a book that has won “all the major awards for African American Literature” (Craft 129). The kid looks at the book, reads the title, and hands it back to the teacher saying he is not interested. Based on his experience at the book fair, Jordan makes a funny comic strip about judging kids by the cover of their books. Jordan writes reviews about books almost making fun of them and the stereotype they portray just by looking at the book cover. With his drawings, Jordan attempts to understand the experiences and microaggressions that are all around him.