"Graphic books"?!
Instead of sleeping I'm going to rant. It's about comics again and it's full of links but it might be kind of interesting, maybe, okay guys? Okay.
I was reading through one of the books for my nonfiction class, hoping to glean some ideas for an essay. The book is called Writing True, by Sondra Perl and Mimi Schwartz, and for the most part it's an okay book, if not completely astounding. But while looking through it tonight I saw a single paragraph that really annoyed me:
"In graphic books, or what are currently referred to as comix, the visuals carry the story line as much as the words do. Like standard comics, they rely on drawings in boxes and balloons for spoken dialogue, but unlike standard comics, the subject matter is often personal and political."
Guys, no one calls comics "graphic books". It's not a term. The only reason I'd think of using it is if said comic is an adaptation of an existing literary work, like David Mazzucchelli and Paul Karasik's ridiculously good adaptation of City of Glass, or the mediocre adaptation of Pride and Prejudice by Nancy Butler and Hugo Petrus. Even so, I'd go with "graphic adaptations" or "comic adaptations" more than anything. And comix is already an established movement developed to avoid the censorship of the Comics Code Authority. It includes artists like R. Crumb, Gilbert Shelton, and Phoebe Gloeckner, among many many others. Comics, unless I'm gravely mistaken, are currently referred to as comics.
I probably wouldn't be getting so fired up about this, except that my friend Mitch and I just had a talk about this sort of thing. Basically, as comics gain legitimacy in mainstream circles, people are more likely to call them "graphic novels" to avoid the stigma of reading "comics" which are seen as either childish, stupid, violent, or all of the above. What Mitch and I agreed is that it's not a "graphic novel" unless it's intended to be read in the same manner as a novel- that is, one complete work with a novel-like storyline, something with a beginning, middle, and end. So that means that not only is Fun Home a graphic novel, but so is Scott Pilgrim (or rather, it's a series of 6 graphic novels). And even then, I don't like using the term "graphic novel" because it seems so pretentious, and it's so often used to allow "highbrow" readers to distance themselves from something as lowbrow and plebian as comic books. I think that Jaime Hernandez's Love and Rockets stories are some of the finest storytelling in the entire world, but they are comics, published in serial form, and that in no way makes them less fantastic. And even the less "respectable" comics, like superhero comics, can be brilliant- just look at Alan Moore's run on Swamp Thing, or Grant Morrison's weird meta superhero deconstructions.
Writing True gets my goat because it's so condescending while referencing Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis and Art Speigelman's Maus and In The Shadow of No Towers- all amazing comics, and in fact deserving of the title of "graphic novel" because, like novels, they were published as single entities in book form, rather than serialized issues with a long-term storyline. These are important, serious stories, and if they were novels they'd be required reading in a nonfiction course. Instead, we get stuff like this:
"[Spiegelman and Satrapi's] narratives grip us the way powerful novels often do...Research, too, is often an important part of graphic nonfiction, as Ho Che Anderson points out."
Am I overly sensitive, or is that wildly condescending? As if comics can't grip us like powerful novels, as if comics don't require as much research as prose.
Earlier in the section the authors quote an interview with Spiegelman in the New York Times. The quote from the book is this:
"In an interview in the New York Times, Spiegelman explains why he chooses this format [comics]: 'After September 11, while I was living in a present that didn't seem to have a future, comics seemed central to me...So far it has been the painful realities that I can barely grasp that force me to the drawing table.' "
Of course he chose the comic book format. He's a comic artist. To my knowledge, he's never published any prose, so it's not like it was a stylistic choice. Would they ask why an essayist had chosen to write an essay, or a novelist a novel? The quote bugged me so much that I looked up the interview online, and surprise surprise, the book quoted Spiegelman out of context. Here's the actual question which I copy/pasted from the article:
"The last third of the new book reprints newspaper cartoons, mostly from the early 20th century. Won't your readers wonder why they are there?
Well, that's exactly the point of the book, thank you. After Sept. 11, while I was living in a present that didn't seem to have a future, comics seemed central to me. These were comics that were born on Newspaper Row, which is only a few blocks from where the towers were smashed down. I found a lot of comfort in them because they weren't made to last. Every one of these really beautiful things were made for a 24-hour news cycle."
So the ironically titled Writing True quoted Spiegelman out of context about a choice that would have actually been pretty interesting to hear about from a creative writing standpoint. I can't help but feel annoyed about the way this book treated comic writers/artists in this brief section. I realize not everyone can know everything about comics, especially if it's not their area of expertise, but come on. There's no need to write in such a condescending tone, and no matter what you write about, you do proper research.
I realize it's a really small thing in the grand scheme of things, but this is my passion, this is going to be my career, and I want it to have some legitimacy already. What the hell, guys.