Hey Ellen,
This week the Iranian author Marjane Satrapi is publishing “Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return,” her not-so-imaginatively named follow-up to the popular “Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood,” in which she told with pictures and text the story of growing up in Iran. Next week, Art Spiegelman will be coming out with his much anticipated “In the Shadow of No Towers,” a personal reflection on the demise of New York’s Twin Towers, using illustration and text. Spiegelman, of course, is the author of “Maus” and “Maus II,” which won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
Fritz Lanham, book editor of the Houston Chronicle, took the occasion of these two high-profile publications to focus attention on the emergence of graphic novels in a piece entitled “From Pulp to Pulitzer: How the Underground Comic Found Its Way to the Mainstream.”
I admire Lanham’s attempt to sort through this tricky subject, which has baffled me for some time. In April I ran a round-up of graphic novel reviews by freelancer Carlo Wolff on the St. Petersburg Times Book Pages. We made our own attempt to define just what is a graphic novel, but it wasn’t very satisfying.
Clearly, the name, as Lanham says, is a misnomer. They evolved from comics, but generally these books aren’t funny at all. And, more often than not, as in the case of both “Persepolis 2” and “In the Shadow of No Towers,” they’re not even novels.
In the July 11 cover article in The New York Times Magazine, former NYT Book Review editor Chip McGrath asked if graphic novels will end up replacing the traditional novel as our major storytelling form. Various Internet sites devoted to the comics industry — like Sequential Tart and ICv2.com — criticized his premise (their rebuttal: why can’t the forms co-exist?), but admitted that mainstream attention might at least help give graphic works more legitimacy.
The field is growing. At the end of 2003, it was the fastest growing segment of the book industry (due primarily to the popularity of Manga, a graphic novel style out of Japan). Many bookstores have created a section called Graphic Novels and Publisher’s Weekly has a review section called comics, but often the books that are collected together seem only to have their form in common.
Lumped together willy-nilly, and without much differentiation, are books by cartoonists, works from the literary end of graphic literature, variations on the drug-store variety comics, and even Japanese Manga. That seems about as helpful as grouping all books that are printed in English. To add further to the confusion, in Publisher Weekly’s fall lineup, Pantheon touts Spiegelman’s new graphic work under the rubric of Contemporary Affairs.
So here’s the dilemma: Book editors can hardly ignore such a burgeoning field, but how can we sort out all these vastly different graphic works? We could concentrate on the more highbrow end of the literature, which McGrath did in his piece, but is that a fair way to choose what to review? Does it even make sense to offer a traditional review of any of these works in which both the text and the illustrations are equally important? And finally, as Lanham asks, is attention by the mainstream even a positive development for a medium which thrives so much on being alternative?
Take the average age of book critics working for or contributing regularly to newspapers across the country. Divide it in half, or maybe even three ways. The number you come up with is probably the average age of the person who is enthusiastically following graphic novels. To wit: There’s a generation gap between your average book editor and the typical comic book enthusiast. Not to mention that book people are word merchants, and not especially skilled at comics analysis. This means that book folks risk provoking scorn if they pretend to have expertise they don’t.
But before we get all fussed, let’s put the problem in context. Comic books are hugely popular, but with whom? Graphic novels (a subsection of the comics medium) are evolving, but how much?
Most book sections give spotty coverage to all genres except literary fiction. So aren’t we talking about a problem that either doesn’t exist or needs to be addressed more holistically, as in: Why aren’t we better serving readers of sci fi/mystery/romance etc.? But let’s isolate the problem for a minute. As you’ve attempted to do — and I salute the effort! — Lanham and McGrath have covered graphic novels as a trend. This is fine, although beware of the “Comic Books Aren’t Just for Kids Anymore” angle. That’s so ’90s. As for regular coverage, what coverage?
I checked with my local Manga expert, Carl Horn, who works at Dark Horse Publications, an Oregon-based publisher of comics and graphic novels. With the possible exception of Entertainment Weekly, he said, the mainstream media provide sporadic coverage of comics as an art or literary form.
Attention is paid to the thin band of graphic novels that qualify as literary (Spiegelman & co.), and the occasional oddity — such as a Manga piece Horn worked on called “Eagle: The Making of an Asian-American President.” (Oddly enough, the Democratic candidate at the story’s center was from New England, a Vietnam vet, and had a wealthy wife — how prescient.)
The Los Angeles Times and U.S. News & World Report covered the comic when it came out in 2000 because of its political angle. This is the exception that proves the rule. Generally, Manga and its brethren are dismissed as pop trash or bubble-gum stuff, which, as Horn points out, is true of some but not all.
“When it comes to comics in the U.S., there’s a Madonna/whore complex,” Horn contends. As someone who slaves on the latter side of the equation, he thinks critics are missing a bet.
Horn’s argument, and it’s a good one, is that comics including graphic novels are having so much influence on film (“Ghost World” etc.) and are now distributed so widely (in malls, through the chains) that there’s plenty to cover on a regular basis. But, if you accept his argument, the question becomes: Where to cover? And by whom?
If, as McGrath posits, the graphic novel may one day overtake the all-words version, I’d argue that we’re a long way from that point. Meanwhile, newspapers lose their audiences if they get too far ahead of them. Let’s be real here: “serious” comic books still appeal to only a fraction of the adult reading market, who are the target of book reviews. Manga, which has been the point of explosive growth in the comics market, has as its core demographic high school girls. Doesn’t this suggest features or youth section coverage? Where’s the match-up?
Hey Ellen,
You may be right that the best way to treat Manga is as a feature subject for the trend section, but I don’t think we should be so afraid of plunging into the world of graphic novels, even if it is a bit more cutting edge than our present book page readers. The next generation is going to be far more visually sophisticated than we have been, and newspapers (and book sections) better keep up.
There are, of course, several problems with covering graphic novels. First, the term graphic novels, as I said, doesn’t work. It just causes confusion (anyone have another term to suggest?). Second, we need to distinguish graphic novels from the more general medium of comics — even while proclaiming in our headlines that they have come a LONG way from the cape-and-flying stuff that kids read.
But perhaps the biggest obstacle to reviewing these works is that they are neither fish (totally text) nor fowl (totally art). There are very few of us who know HOW to review this genre. Even when we do address works like “Persepolis” and “Maus,” it is the text that is usually examined most closely, with commentary on the artwork brought in as an afterthought. What should be considered, it seems to me, is the interplay between the two art forms, which lies at the heart of why these works differ from any other.
To avoid having so many good works in this area fall between the cracks, I think book editors need to develop more cross-newsroom contacts with those who cover art, film, television, and the Internet, all areas that involve combinations of words and pictures. As our society gets more and more visually sophisticated, we need to seek out those who can understand, analyze, and translate for us that interplay. Graphic novels may not take over traditional novels, but they are poised to compete and ultimately influence them.
