Graphic journalism on grief, public health, and the quiet daily disasters that never reach the front page

Camila Kerwin’s debut, Soft Targets, begins by registering that, in 2020, guns became the leading cause of death for American children and teens, claiming roughly seven young lives a day. Published by Street Noise Books on October 27, the book is a patient, unshowy act of refusal. It will not let the statistic remain a statistic. It drags these children and teens back into bedrooms, kitchens, and chats, where they were once people with strong opinions about life.

The book grew out of Kerwin’s reporting on the 2018 Parkland shooting, when she began speaking to the families of children lost to gun violence. She builds the book around four lives. Joaquin, 17, was killed in a school shooting. Makiyah, 10, died in a neighborhood drive-by shooting. Jonah, 17, died by suicide. Ethan, 15, was killed by an unsecured gun at a friend’s house.

Journalism talking about this theme often rewards immediacy, outrage, and dramatic headlines, the book approach favours intimacy, reflection, and the ordinary details of these children’s lives. Kerwin keeps the four deaths distinct, and the book is strongest when the children are still alive on the page, teasing their parents, looking after their neighbors, and doing something nice. What keeps it from becoming an elegy alone is the second layer: between the family chapters, Kerwin cuts to the history behind the grief. She covers the NRA’s origins, the question of who was historically allowed to own guns, and the Dickey Amendment. The friendship between physician Mark Rosenberg and the racial fault lines of American gun violence provides the book’s warmest, strangest subplot.

The book “Soft Targets: Guns in America and the Kids Caught in the Crossfire “ is insightful, heartbreaking, and required reading for understanding the human cost and genuine repercussions of the United States’ lax gun laws

Visually, Kerwin, who holds an MFA in visual narrative and has already won an Edward R. Murrow Award for an illustrated WLRN report, draws in loose, expressive lines, mostly in black and white, with a single terracotta-yellow accent: a warm, human palette. The effect is warm rather than lurid, so the violence reads as silence rather than spectacle. Her attention to small details, like the hat a boy actually wore, suggests a journalist who treats a drawing as something that has to be fact-checked, too.

Soft Targets does not pretend to be neutral. It is an indictment of American gun culture and lax regulation, written from the side of the children who died. Some readers will want the other side of the argument to be given more room; others will say a book about dead children owes no one a balanced ledger. Either way, it is carefully sourced and plainly told. Furthermore this comic makes complex historical and political subjects accessible to readers who might otherwise avoid them.

The book “Soft Targets: Guns in America and the Kids Caught in the Crossfire “ is insightful, heartbreaking, and required reading for understanding the human cost and genuine repercussions of the United States’ lax gun laws. In addition to being deeply moving in its portrayal of the loss of these young lives, this non-fiction graphic novel raises two important questions: how is it possible that these deaths remain unacknowledged despite their alarming numbers? And why is there so little concern for those who may become future victims?