Many Americans assume that timidity — or its close cousin, shyness — is solely a negative trait. In our culture, calling an individual timid suggests that he is carrying anxiety, fear, and a lack of confidence. And while some of these associations might be accurate, we could also choose to see this attribute for its potential values. Timidity might go hand in hand with thoughtfulness, deliberateness, even a rich and full interior life.

Enter Jonathan Todd’s new middle-grade graphic novel, Timid. The bright cover on the book alludes to the potential for all these characteristics, from the bad to the good, captured in a single image. A Black tween sits behind an oversized red composition notebook with cartoon sketches splayed across its cover. He is wide-eyed, his oversized glasses poking out from behind the book. The rest of his face is almost completely obscured, as four giant sweat drops jump off his forehead. He is obviously anxious, clutching his book with two huddled arms. But what else is going on behind the surface?

Images from Jonathan Todd’s Timid.

Jonathan Todd/Graphix

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Jonathan Todd/Graphix

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Written and drawn by a longtime cartoonist and comics educator Jonathan Todd, who has dedicated the book to “anyone who has ever felt alone,” the semi-autobiographical Timid follows the boy on the cover, 12-year-old Cecil Hall. He is a 7th grader whose family moves from Florida, where they have been living for most of his life, to Massachusetts. From the beginning, it’s clear that Cecil knows exactly who he is and who he wants to be—a future famous cartoonist. But it’s not always easy for him to express or act on his desires. It’s also obvious that others around him, in part because he is so quiet, don’t always take his preferences into account.

Cecil’s father, who grew up in a public housing project, thinks his son needs to be tougher, because it was toughness that got him through his own childhood. His sister thinks he is not showing enough pride in his Blackness, and she advises him to befriend other Black children at his new school immediately.

Cecil knows that his family members are only looking out for him, but it’s his gentle, soft-spoken mother who makes him feel most relaxed. Though their relationship is often relegated to the sidelines, the few quiet scenes showing them alone together reflect a Cecil completely at ease. His mother knows how to let him simply be himself, and she trusts he will find his way on his own terms.

Pages from Jonathan Todd’s Timid.

Jonathan Todd/Graphix

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Jonathan Todd/Graphix

Meanwhile, at school, Cecil struggles to adjust, particularly in finding a friend group. He is confused by the difference in social make up from his previous school to this new one. Among other changes, what he notes almost immediately is how kids at Webber Middle School are a lot less integrated. This is problematic, for example, when he has to figure out which table to join for lunch—the Black children mainly sit at their own, separate table.

Organized into 14 chapters illustrated in deliciously bright colors, Timid’s offbeat, cartoony drawing style captures the powerful emotions that drive young people’s lives. Above all else, Cecil wants to be recognized, by his peers and the adults around him, as an artist—to carve out an identity for himself based on the activity that brings him the most joy and fulfillment. Though he may, at times, have difficulty asking for what he wants in a direct manner, he takes chances in his own way. After several false starts, he strikes up a friendship with Sean, another Black student. They share a love of storytelling and Star Trek. They enter, and come in second, in a comic contest.

On the outside, Cecil may seem overwhelmingly timid, but upon closer look it’s clear he is full of bravery. Sometimes bravery just materializes in disguise.

Tahneer Oksman is a writer, teacher, and scholar specializing in memoir as well as graphic novels and comics. She lives in Brooklyn, NY.

A couple of years ago, Carlos Matias was living in Florida and feeling nostalgic for his hometown.

“I just started writing little short stories about New York,” Matias says. “And then I started submitting them to the New York Times Metropolitan Diary.”

His short story, Emergency Quarters, became a “Best of the Year” finalist in 2021 and this year, a children’s book.

“Growing up, when I first started to walk to school by myself, my mom would give me a quarter every single day,” Matias says. She’d tell him, “‘If you need me, or if you’re going to come home late, or if you’re going to hang out with your friends, give me a call and let me know.’ So I was a young Carlos running around with a bunch of quarters in his pockets back in Queens.”

Emergency Quarters is about a little boy named Ernesto who, like Matias, gets to walk to school without his parents for the first time.

Ernesto throws on his lucky kicks and his favorite Mets cap.

“Feelin’ freshhhh!” he says to the mirror. 

But before he can sneak out the door, his mother stops him.

“For emergencies, Ernesto,” she whispers, covering his right hand with both of hers. “If you need me, look for a pay phone.” 

A what?

“When I do story times and stuff, I have to always start off with asking the kid, ‘Do you know what a pay phone is?’ And I get the funniest answers,” laughs Matias.

If anyone reading this doesn’t know what a pay phone is — send a telegram to NPR headquarters and someone will get back to you. They might be few and far between now, but when Matias was growing up in the 1990s, payphones were on practically every street corner. At the peak, the FCC says there were more than two million in the United States. But by 2016, there were fewer than 100,000 in service.

Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

“This one was a really fun one to work on,” says Gracey Zhang, who illustrated Emergency Quarters. “I think because we’re both ’90s kids.”

To bring Matias’ childhood to life, Zhang worked traditionally, starting off with pencil sketches. Then, on huge pieces of paper, she used black ink for the line work and gouache paints for the color. “I like to work bigger than the book is actually being published,” Zhang explains. “So that when it’s scanned, the image is not blown up, but it’s shrunken down.”

Her guiding light for the color palette, the feel of the book, was another staple of the ’90s: the windbreaker. You know the kind. Shiny, swooshy. Bold, saturated colors.

“For each book that I work on, I kind of like to focus on a specific feeling or object that I want to evoke,” she explains. “This story has almost — think ’90s sitcom show colors. That kind of informed a lot of the clothing that the characters wear.”

For research, Zhang also did some — gentle — stalking of Matias’ childhood photos on the internet. And Matias sent along some shots of his neighborhood — Corona, Queens.

Emergency Quarters

Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

Queens is colorful — and detailed — in Zhang’s paintings. The streets are crowded, the arcade has purple-checkered floors, Señora Mayra’s fruit stand umbrellas are tropical blue, pay phones (of course) dot the landscape, and you can practically hear the 7 train roll through the neighborhood.

“Living in New York, I’m very particular about the subway train depictions,” says Zhang. “I spent like, way too long just making sure I had the right train — the model of the train, the line.”

“One thing people always mention that are from Queens are like, ‘Oh my god The Lemon Ice King, the Dominican fritura restaurants,” says Matias. “So the fact that those actually made it on there, these famous places, that was pretty cool.”

On Monday, Ernesto and his friends visit Señor José’s bodega. His friends buy cheese puffs and gummy worms, but Ernesto saves his emergency quarters. On Tuesday, they go to Manny’s Video Games, but Ernesto doesn’t play any games. That night, he asks his mom why he doesn’t have as many quarters as his friends. She tells him that fewer quarters means each one is special — kind of like limited-edition baseball cards.

Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

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Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

“On Wednesday morning, he can feel his three quarters jingling in his pocket all the way to school,” Matias writes.

“¡Jugos de frutas! Seventy-five cents!” Ernesto loves Señora Mayra’s fruit juices; they make him big and strong. 

“¡Hola! ¿Jugo de chinola, Ernesto?” 

The bright tropical drink reminds Ernesto of summers back in the Dominican Republic. 

“Thanks, Señora Mayra, but I’m saving these limited-edition quarters.”

“Such restraint at a young age,” laughs illustrator Gracey Zhang. “My mom did not trust me with any coins. I would just like, rummage through the house for whatever spare coins to buy myself my own snacks.”

Nevertheless, Zhang says she felt a connection to Ernesto. Before she lived in New York City, she grew up in a small town outside of Vancouver, Canada, where she also walked to school on her own, just like Ernesto. Except they didn’t even have any pay phones. “There was just this period where kids almost had less distractions,” she says. “So this sort of young independence really spoke to me.”

“True,” adds author Carlos Matias. But — he points out — what Ernesto has is actually the best of both worlds. Because, as he writes in the book, the mother is never very far away. Ernesto can be independent and experience the world while also knowing that his parents are only an emergency quarter call away.

And if it happens to be an empanada emergency…

Illustrations © 2024 by Gracey Zhang

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