On the Graphic Novel

Santiago García, Bruce Campbell

• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781628464825
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Critique littéraire de bandes dessinées et de romans graphiques

A noted comics artist himself, Santiago García follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world. García not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically associated with children, often viewed as unedifying and even at times as a threat to moral character, comics art has come a long way. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, García illustrates how the graphic novel, with its increasingly global and aesthetically sophisticated profile, represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comics and what they can achieve.

Chapter One

An Old Name for a New Art

It seems to me that comics have already shifted from being an icon of illiteracy to becoming one of our last bastions of literacy.¹

—Art Spiegelman

Reading Comics is Highbrow

The view we have today of comics has changed enormously in the last twenty years. In 1992 it caused a sensation when a comic book won the Pulitzer Prize—despite being an unprecedented, special award—and the success of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, considered a unique phenomenon, was attributed more to its serious content—a memoir of the Holocaust—than to the medium in which it was expressed. We might even say that Maus received such distinction not for being a comic, but despite being a comic. In 2008, the Pulitzer Prize for fiction was awarded to the novel The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, by Junot Díaz, which opens with a quote from Galactus, a supervillain who appeared in The Fantastic Four, the comic book series by Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. That the novel of the year would quote a comic book is no longer surprising; it is not even surprising that the quote would not be ironic, but respectful and consistent with the content of the original work; nor does it surprise that the referenced comic book would be a simple superhero comic book, for kids. These days, in fact, to speak of a simple comic book is one of the quickest ways to be viewed as simple oneself.

Junot Díaz is not a rare case. The most recent generation of American writers is brimming with comics fans: Michael Chabon made use of the golden age of the comic book as the setting for his most celebrated work, The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, and later brought to the comic book format the fictional characters that appeared in the novel; Jonathan Lethem has written purely for pleasure a revival of the 1970s superhero Omega the Unknown; Dave Eggers invited Chris Ware to guest-edit the literary anthology McSweeney’s so that Ware could show the world the splendor of the contemporary cartoon; Zadie Smith included Ware, Daniel Clowes, Charles Burns, and Posy Simmonds in her anthology of contemporary narrative, The Book of Other People. Graphic novels like Fun Home by Alison Bechdel and Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi have been selected among the best books of the year (without distinguishing between those that include drawings and those that do not) by prestigious journals and magazines.

The phenomenon affects not only the literary world, but the world of visual art as well. Comics expositions are no longer quaint events, but increasingly gain access to the spaces of high culture based on their own merits, and not as footnotes to “true art.” In the first months of 2009, an exposition titled “Le Louvre invite la bande dessinée” presented original pages by comic book artists like Nicolas de Crécy and Marc-Antoine Mathieu in the most important art museum of Europe, commissioned by the museum itself. And none of this, as noted above, comes as a surprise anymore; the most important part of this news is that it is no longer news. From the special Pulitzer Prize for Maus to now, recognition of the value of comics within the worlds of art and literature has been growing, and not only in the United States and France, great creative and industrial centers of Western history, but also in countries on the periphery of cultural activity, such as Spain. In 2007 the Spanish government awarded for the first time a national comic book prize, and the main cultural supplements of the major daily newspapers have begun to regularly include reviews of comics alongside those for novels. The departments of literature and art history in the universities dedicate increasing attention to cartoons. Even our young novelists, like their American counterparts, are finding comics infectious. Nocilla Lab (2009), by Agustín Fernández Mallo, ends with a comic by Pere Joan.

Suddenly, reading comics is highbrow among intelligent adults. To be certain, this is not the first time comics have played an active role in society, nor the first recognition of their artistic value. Comics have always received a nod from their older siblings, such as James Joyce’s fascination with Frank King’s series Gasoline Alley,² Picasso’s with the comics supplements of the American press, or John Steinbeck’s with Al Capp, the author of Li’l Abner, who Steinbeck said was the best satirical writer in the United States and deserved the Nobel Prize in Literature.³ In 1966, John Updike raised the possibility that in the future a novelistic masterpiece might be produced by an artistic talent with a gift for both prose and images.⁴ Even Goethe himself blessed the efforts of Rodolphe Töpffer, considered almost unanimously today to be the pioneer of modern comics. Thus it is nothing new for prestigious writers to confess themselves readers of comics, although it is indeed extraordinary that they should leap at the opportunity to write comic books with the true passion of fans.

One might argue that the situation has changed so profoundly that we must pose the question of whether a new phase has opened up, a way of thinking about comics different from how they had been thought of until now. Already twenty years ago Joseph Witek wrote:

A critical analysis of the comic-book form is especially necessary now, when a growing number of contemporary American comic books are being written as literature aimed at a general readership of adults, not with the traditionally escapist themes of comics, but with issues such as the clash of cultures in American history, the burdens of guilt and suffering passed on within families, and the trials and small triumphs of the daily workaday world.⁵

Such a clear and—we might say—sudden inversion of values has its basis in the appearance of a kind of comic that until recently not only did not exist, but was practically inconceivable. Today, author’s comics like Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi, sell hundreds of thousands of copies worldwide (and that before the film adaptation was produced), and in a market as small as Spain’s, Paco Roca’s Arrugas sold more than twenty thousand copies in its first year (and more than seventy-five thousand to date). With good reason, bookstores and cultural supermarkets continuously expand their comics sections, often under the heading “graphic novel,” and museums organize more and more expositions on comics. Something has happened, and the pages of this book will focus on examining that phenomenon.

A New Concept, a New Term

The Scottish comic-book artist Eddie Campbell has observed that “it’s undeniable that there is a new concept of what a comic is and what a comic can be and what it can do that has arrived in the last 30 years.”⁶ Campbell knows what he is talking about, since not only is he one of the most outstanding graphic-novel authors of recent years, he has also dedicated time and effort to reflecting on the phenomenon, in numerous interviews as well as on his own weblog, The Fate of the Artist.⁷ That interest in theorizing the new comic brought Campbell to develop his “Graphic Novel Manifesto,” ten points that posit, humorously and with the ironic wit for which he is known, some of the defining characteristics he has observed in this sort of comic. In his “Manifesto,” Campbell begins by recognizing that the term “graphic novel” is not the most precise, but that it remains convenient as long as we do not forget that we cannot interpret it as a hybrid of the concepts “novel” and “graphics” in their original usage. It may be that the comic Campbell wants to talk about is indeed “new,” but from the outset we recognize the misunderstandings and terminological problems inherited from the old “comic books.” In more than a hundred years, we have not managed to establish a satisfactory definition of what comics are, let alone an agreed-upon name for them. This new era begins under the label of graphic novel, which appears as a name that provokes general distrust, even, and perhaps more than anywhere else, among practitioners.

Daniel Clowes, one of the most distinguished names among practitioners of the graphic novel, has been so resistant to the term that he even went to the trouble of inventing the expression “comic-strip novel” in order to identify his Ice Haven. (Ironically, the Spanish publisher of the work translated the term as “novela gráfica,” ignoring with the stroke of a pen the author’s intentions.) Although Clowes, who received an Oscar nomination for the screenplay of the film adaptation of his comic Ghost World, and who is currently a much sought-after presence in publications like the New Yorker and the New York Times, is in fact one of the cartoonists who have contributed most to the intellectual respectability of comics today, he has shown a fear of that respectability that makes him distrustful of new terms that might shift the comic book definitively into the high-culture imagination. After decades of comics being confined to the marginal position of a mass cultural product for children or a consumer-culture sub-literature, many of the best contemporary comic book artists fear the consequences of taking the step that would move them clearly toward cultural recognition, as if by gaining such prestige some of the most distinctive characteristics of comics might be lost. Clowes himself expressed this conflicted position in his theoretical pamphlet Modern Cartoonist:

While we are certainly held at bay by the preconceptions of the general audience, we also stand to gain in ways that we are often unwilling to exploit. This aura of truthfulness that we speak of comes as a by-product of being thought of as unsophisticated and (culturally, financially) insignificant. The sophisticated and significant cartoonist can for the time being twist this to his or her advantage, “having it both ways,” with the awareness that if he manages to achieve any degree of acceptance alongside the more respectable sort of creator, this not insubstantial quality will be lost forever.⁸

Clowes was writing in 1997, on the threshold of what he himself expected to be a decisive moment in the development of the comic as an art form. His text begins by pointing to the comics of publishing house EC Comics in 1953, just fifteen years after the comic book format first appeared, as the first i...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface to the American Edition: After La novela gráfica
• Preface: The Graphic Novel and Adult Art
• Introduction
• Chapter One An Old Name for a New Art
• Chapter Two Adult Comics before Adult Comics, from the Nineteenth Century to 1960
• Chapter Three The Comix Underground, 1968–1975
• Chapter Four Alternative Comics, 1980–2000
• Chapter Five The Graphic Novel
• Chapter Six The Last Avant-garde Art
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index