Graphic Novels: a New Literary Genre in the English-Speaking World

ISSN 0258-0802. LITERATŪRA 2009 51 (4) GRAPHIC NOVELS: A NEW LITERARY GENRE IN THE ENGLISH-SPEAKING WORLD Milda Danytė Vytauto Didžiojo universiteto Humanitarinio mokslų fakulteto Anglų filologijos katedros profesorė Although different forms of popular cul- comics in general in the last two decades. ture are now taken much more seriously In North America, it has only been since by specialists in literature, most current Art Spiegelman’s graphic novel Maus won research remains at the level of historical the most prestigious of American literary surveys or thematic studies. The lack of awards, the Pulitzer Prize for literature in useful critical methods becomes apparent 1992, that English-language criticism of when one attempts to analyse a recent phe- comics of all kinds has burgeoned. Spiegel- nomenon, the graphic novel. This term was man’s text is about the Jewish Holocaust; first used in 1978 by Will Eisner, to iden- it established the notion that comic-book tify his comic-book collection, A Contract forms could also deal with serious and with God (Arnold, 2003). Steve Roiteri even tragic themes. has defined the graphic novel as “a stan- The marketing of this new literary gen- dalone story in comics form, published as re in the English-speaking world has been a book” (Roiteri, 2003). This distinguishes helped by the success of the Japanese ver- the graphic novel from the comic book, sion of graphic novels, the manga, among which is actually a short magazine, usually Western consumers. As Sharon Kinsella about 32 pages in length, published as a what is a new form in North America, the serial with a soft cover and on cheap paper. book-length illustrated narrative, has been The comic book has always been a very extremely popular in Japan since the 1960s inexpensive product aimed primarily at among readers of all ages (Kinsella, 2000, children and adolescents, though not read 43). The styles of illustration developed by exclusively by them. manga artists were then imitated in Japa- The graphic novel of recent decades, nese animation films which have gradu- on the contrary, is an expensive publica- ally entered the Western market. In turn, tion on fine-quality paper; it may be soft or this has sparked interest among younger hard-covered. Its prospective buyers may Western readers in the manga themselves, be teenagers but are more usually adults. so that since the 1990s many manga have This shift in audience reflects a rise in been regularly translated into Western cultural status for the graphic novel and languages. In North American bookstores 101 today, both Japanese manga and Western specific components such as speech-bubbles graphic novels are usually displayed in a (1999, 264). single section. It is over the question of speech bub- The aim of this article is to look more bles that many cultural historians of the closely at some recent graphic novels pro- comics are divided, with some insisting duced by American and Canadian artists, that any cartoons in which the speech-texts considering what critical approaches best are placed at the bottom of the frame rather illuminate both the genre as such and the than in bubble-like circles connected to the specific narrative style used by each ar- character who is speaking cannot be called tist. First, however, the Western comic- comics. The issue takes on a nationalist fla- book genre itself needs to be presented, as vour, with the American David Carrier, for its narrative style provides the visual and example, claiming that the 1897 American literary context out of which the graphic The Yellow Kid is the first true cartoon strip novel has grown. Second, a brief review (2000, 3–4), while a British critic, Roger of current theoretical approaches to co- Sabin, gives preference to the British tab- mics will be given. The third section of this loid series Ally Sloper, published from article is devoted to a closer study of four 1884 (1996,15). Thierry Groensteen ar- different graphic novels, Art Spiegelman’s gues that the cartoon strips produced in the Maus (part one, 1986; part two, 1991), Joe 1830s by the Swiss artist Rudolphe Topffer Sacco’s Palestine (2001), Chester Brown’s clearly precede any English-language co- I Never Liked You (2002) and Gregory Gal- mics (2000, 105–114). In any case, all lant’s It’s a Good Life If You Don’t Weaken historians of comics agree that forms of (2003). popular visual art that tell a story using a sequence of frames which are accompanied comics: an introductory history in some way by a text can be found since There is considerable disagreement among the early days of printing, but that it was historians of popular culture about the the development of much cheaper photo- origins of present-day cartoon strips and graphic processes in the nineteenth century comic books. Much depends on how the that made it economically practical to sell cartoon strip, which is the building block magazines with many illustrated stories used to construct both comic books and (Sabin, 1996, 12–14; Carrier, 2000, 2–6). graphic novels, is defined. Klaus Kaindl’s Although comic strips and often comic definition is usefully neutral in tone: books have appeared all over the world, Comics are narrative forms in which the sto- they have not entered the cultures of all ry is told in a series of at least two separate countries to the same extent. While Bel- pictures. The individual pictures provide con- gium, France, the United Kingdom, the texts for one another, distinguishing comics United States and Japan have been major from single-frame cartons. Comics involve linguistic typographic and pictorial signs and producers of comics, many other countries combinations of signs as well as a number of have functioned more as importers. 102 Since the early twentieth century many focuses on the way in which it brings to- daily newspapers in Canada and the Uni- gether different kinds of visual and literary ted States have carried cartoon strips on a discourse. He calls it a “poetic experience” daily basis. Being part of daily newspapers (Delannoy, 2002, 35) and uses the Ba- gives comic strips a paradoxical status in khtinian concept of polyphony to analyse the culture of these countries, as Carrier the different levels of response it evokes observes, for while they have one of the from its readers (Ibid., 71). largest markets for any form of popular No English-language criticism of this culture, they are read quickly and then length on any single work or artist has yet thrown out with the newspapers that print appeared, but in recent years American them (2000, 63–65). Carrier places co- and British critics have moved away from mics into the cultural category of works historical surveys and thematic catego- which straddle traditional generic bounda- rizations to look more closely at the spe- ries: they are in-between works which are cific nature of comics and graphic novels. viewed as either irrelevent or transgressive Using theories drawn from narratology by the cultural elite (Ibid., 66). In an inte- and film criticism, Scott McCloud empha- resting way, this sense of marginality has sizes the need to focus on the interaction become one of the attractions of the comic of picture and words. McCloud’s book, book. Sabin calls comics “a private rea- Understanding Comics (1994), is itself a ding space for children, a place where they comic book with a caricature of its author could negotiate adult power and authority” leading the reader through the intricacies (1996, 28). of terminology and analysis. Like David Carrier (2000, 4, 29), McCloud argues that current theoretical approaches to comics bring together word and picture in comics and graphic novels a form of discourse that is unique and de- mands new methodologies of analysis. He Outside of the English-speaking world, the also suggests that the radical simplifica- primary critical approaches to comics have tion of the human face used by some of the been based on structuralism and semiotics. most successful comic-book artists, allows Umberto Eco was already writing with in- a process of “universal identification” to sight and sympathy about popular Ameri- take place between the reader and the char- can comics like Superman or the Charlie acter so that “We don’t just observe the car- Brown series as early as 1963 (Eco 1994). toon, we become it” (McCloud, 1995, 36; French criticism has also been dominated italics in original). In this way he accounts by semiotics; this is the approach taken, for the addictive kind of relationship many for example, by Pierre Alban Delannoy readers develop with comic books. in Maus d’Art Spiegelman: bande dess- Another critic, Robert C. Harvey, agrees inée et Shoah (2002), the first book-length that the feature that distinguishes com- study of a graphic novel. Delannoy, places ics from other narrative forms lies in the the novel in its cultural context and then mutual dependence of word and picture, 103 although, in his opinion, it is rare that a co- frame or even the page, thus heightening mic strip “exploits to the fullest the spe- the dynamism of the actions that are being cific character of the art form” (Harvey, depicted (Ibid., 56–59). 1994, 9). In part, Harvey states, this de- Thus the greater respect for comic-book pends on the category of comic strip that narrative in recent years has been accom- is in question. In those sub-varieties in panied by the appearance of a more flexi- which a long narrative is being told, pic- ble critical language. Many critics not only tures often become static while the number borrow terms from literary or film studies, of words in each frame grows.

Load more