However, it focuses less on the book’s nuts-and-bolts educational aspects than it does on its portrayal of young Cece’s emotions. The miniseries, which Bell co-wrote and executive-produced with Harriet the Spy’s Will McRobb, appealingly duplicates Bell’s quirky art style. The amused youngster saw this ability as a kind of superpower, and, in times of stress, she would imagine herself as a superhero called “El Deafo.”

In fact, the mic was so good that it allowed the young girl to hear what her instructor was doing outside of class-including using the restroom. Sometimes, Bell’s tone is explanatory, as when she notes a primary drawback of lip-reading-that “many words sound similar and people’s lips look the same when they are saying them: Mop, mob, mom, bop, bob, pop, or pom? Vase or face? Sherry, cherry, or Jerry? Sue or zoo?” At another point, she includes a detailed, annotated diagram of her Phonic Ear hearing aid-a powerful device that allowed her to clearly understand her teacher’s words when the latter wore a special microphone. On the page, Bell gets across the experience of too-quiet and hard-to-understand dialogue with faded lettering and garbled text, as well as empty voice balloons when she could hear nothing at all. In both, Bell tells of how she used lip-reading and sometimes-clunky hearing aids to better understand words spoken by people around her, at home and at school, and by actors on TV shows (which didn’t have closed-captions at the time). The memoir and miniseries both ably portray the young author’s significant hearing difficulties, although they do so in slightly different ways. A three-episode animated miniseries adaptation, which Bell narrates, premieres on Apple TV+ on Jan.

In an author’s note, she states that the memoir is mildly fictionalized, with some composite characters and some invented conversations the most notable diversion from reality, though, is that everyone in it is depicted as an anthropomorphic cartoon bunny. With wonderful, colorful illustrations and a sharp sense of humor, the author tells of how, after being hospitalized for meningitis at the age of 4, she lost most of her hearing, and how she dealt with the challenges of living with deafness as an elementary-school kid in 1970s Virginia. Cece Bell’s 2014 graphic memoir for children, El Deafo, was not only a Newbury Honor book but also a finalist for the Kirkus Prize, and it’s easy to understand why.

El deafo comic