The first American Girl comic book, Julie and the Blue Guitar, is a worthy installment in the franchise

polygon.com:

My memories of American Girl literature are strong. The chapter books painted backstories for my favorite dolls, giving me a taste for historical fiction and nonfiction that I still have today, and books like Hair: Styling Tips and Tricks for Girls and The Care and Keeping of You: The Body Book for Girls offered a gender-affirming look at girlhood in an otherwise fraught moment for representations of women in media: the mid-2000s.

So, when IDW Publishing and Mattel announced they were partnering for a set of American Girl graphic novels for the kids of the 2020s, I got really excited. Polygon got the chance to read the first, Julie and the Blue Guitar, written by Casey Gilly and drawn by Felia Hanakata, before it was released to readers this week. Blue Guitar continues the American Girl tradition of telling fascinating historic stories through a hopeful lens, but it also brings forth a failure inherent in the dolls themselves: their singularity.

Gilly and Hanakata are not new to transforming iconic franchises into comic books — between them, they’ve worked on well-received tales in the canon of Buffy the Vampire Slayer, The Dragon Prince, My Little Pony, and Dungeons & Dragons, to name a few — so it’s no surprise that Julie and the Blue Guitar is compelling and inventive.

The creators build on the history of Julie Albright, a ’70s-era doll introduced in 2007, bringing her story into the 21st century via her diary, which is discovered by the book’s present-day lead, Emma Dhillon, while moving into her new home in San Francisco. This kicks off two parallel tales — one in which Emma makes a documentary about her journey to figure out who Julie is, and Julie and her friends try to solve the mystery of a stolen blue guitar in 1977.

To keep the stories straight, Hanakata borders Emma’s sequences in blue and Julie’s in yellow, but I’ll admit I was confused by the premise at first. A panel of Emma and Julie shouting simultaneously while facing each other had me thinking