Complexity in the Comic and Graphic Novel Medium: Inquiry Through Bestselling Batman Stories

Complexity in the Comic and Graphic Novel Medium: Inquiry Through Bestselling Batman Stories PAUL A. CRUTCHER DAPTATIONS OF GRAPHIC NOVELS AND COMICS FOR MAJOR MOTION pictures, TV programs, and video games in just the last five Ayears are certainly compelling, and include the X-Men, Wol- verine, Hulk, Punisher, Iron Man, Spiderman, Batman, Superman, Watchmen, 300, 30 Days of Night, Wanted, The Surrogates, Kick-Ass, The Losers, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, and more. Nevertheless, how many of the people consuming those products would visit a comic book shop, understand comics and graphic novels as sophisticated, see them as valid and significant for serious criticism and scholarship, or prefer or appreciate the medium over these film, TV, and game adaptations? Similarly, in what ways is the medium complex according to its ad- vocates, and in what ways do we see that complexity in Batman graphic novels? Recent and seminal work done to validate the comics and graphic novel medium includes Rocco Versaci’s This Book Contains Graphic Language, Scott McCloud’s Understanding Comics, and Douglas Wolk’s Reading Comics. Arguments from these and other scholars and writers suggest that significant graphic novels about the Batman, one of the most popular and iconic characters ever produced—including Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley’s Dark Knight Returns, Grant Morrison and Dave McKean’s Arkham Asylum, and Alan Moore and Brian Bolland’s Killing Joke—can provide unique complexity not found in prose-based novels and traditional films. The Journal of Popular Culture, Vol. 44, No. 1, 2011 r 2011, Wiley Periodicals, Inc. 53 54 Paul A. Crutcher Validating the Medium and its Complexity It is not particularly difficult to see Versaci and other writers at the margins of literature (see also Beverly Clark 2003; Lawrence Sipe 2008; Maria Nikolajeva & Carole Scott 2006; Perry Nodelman 2008; Seth Lerer 2008) as on noble adventures, ill equipped, against insurmount- able odds. Advocating that the picture book be validated and put alongside Milton, for instance, elicits smirks or stone throwing. The ivory towers housing the literary canon, sculpting pedagogy, and safe- guarding all media do not readily see children’s and adolescent literature as complex, sophisticated, or worth critical attention. Versaci’s Graphic Language deals with the comic book’s descent into the juvenile, subsequent exclusion from Literature, and immediate exclusion from Art. In describing the reception today, he writes, ‘‘There are these who look at the medium and scoff at comics’ obvious inferiority to the novel or film’’ (6), that many hold an ‘‘assumption . that comic books are a juvenile medium that can only trivialize serious matters’’ (9). His de- fense of the comic medium relies on proving it not only as equitable to literature, art, and film, but also, and more importantly, as unique or superior to those media. To that end, Versaci claims that comics are ‘‘both surprising and subversive,’’ that the medium ‘‘challenges our way of thinking,’’ and that it does these things ‘‘in unique ways’’ (12). Comics ‘‘call attention to their own making,’’ and they have a ‘‘self- consciousness’’ not often found in literature or film (12). The comics medium goes beyond that reflectivity by promoting critiques of ‘‘how the world is represented in texts of all kinds,’’ largely because readers ‘‘see’’ and ‘‘read’’ comics in different ways than either literature or film, and, more generally, in ways ‘‘differently than we do either words exclusively or pictures exclusively’’ (13– 14). More specifically, Versaci constructs arguments that comics contain a ‘‘unique form of narrative,’’ and further ‘‘allow for additional methods of narrative that are highly sophisticated and unavailable in other media’’ (16). Part of that sophistication comes through ‘‘multiplicity of perspectives and layering,’’ or ‘‘smaller narratives within a larger one’’ (23). He further explicates those ‘‘layers of meaning’’ through comics’ ability to present more content at any singular moment than either literature, art, or film (16). Indeed, Versaci notes that comics ‘‘invite us to think more deeply about how literary merit is accorded and why this is a question worth pursuing,’’ something that goes beyond equality Complexity in the Comic and Graphic Novel Medium 55 and superiority, to a holistic critique (28). Versaci explicitly intends for Graphic Language to frame comics as subversive, as a subversive critique, and through instantiations, like subversive journalism. He writes that comics provide in the latter case a ‘‘viable vehicle for subversive and even incendiary political messages’’ (27). In one of the case studies provided in Graphic Language, Versaci claims that the political comics of the 1940s and 1950s were ‘‘more visually and politically sophisticated than war films of the same era’’ (27). In perhaps more intuitive claims, he states that ‘‘the very nature of the medium allows comic book memoirists to explore various issues of self-representation in ways not fully available to writers of prose memoirs,’’ something that can be seen quite readily through a graphic novel like Miss Re- markable and Her Career (26). Finally, Versaci juxtaposes Art Speigel- man’s Pulitzer Prize winning Maus with the literature and photography of the Holocaust: Using the comic book form allows Speigelman to approach this difficult topic in ways unavailable to those recounting their Holo- caust experiences in traditional prose, and [. .] Speigelman uses comic book art to rethink what has become the Holocaust’s de- fining—and silencing—representational feature: its photographic images. (26) McCloud’s seminal Understanding Comics should be included in any serious discussion of the complexity of the comics medium. McCloud writes, ‘‘I realized that comic books were usually crude, poorly-drawn, semiliterate, cheap, disposable kiddie fare—but—They don’t have to be! The problem was that for most people, that was what ‘comic book’ meant!’’ (3). In his effort to validate the medium, McCloud sees it metaphorically as a ‘‘vessel’’ which visibly holds more actors and content than would exist in or be necessary to compose literature or art, if not film (6). He highlights the irony that there’s been ‘‘critical ex- amination’’ of all mediums, including literature, music, theater, art, and film, but not of comics (6). In a claim not echoed by Versaci, McCloud discusses the ways comics can uniquely engage all five senses. In probably the most original and oft-cited McCloud point, he argues that no medium can present time in the myriad ways possible through comics. For McCloud, single comic frames may or may not depict singular moments, illustrators can adjust time through spacing and framing and detail, comic pages can exist in multiple temporal places 56 Paul A. Crutcher at once, motion can be represented in comics as vividly as in film, and more. Ultimately, in a claim that neatly summarizes Versaci and other scholars, McCloud argues that the medium ‘‘offers range and versatility with all the potential imagery of film and painting plus the intimacy of the written word’’ (212). David Peterson, creator of Mouse Guard, worked to validate comics through ties to various mythologies, and, like McCloud, to early civ- ilizations and the earliest mediums for communication. In addition to the nonlinear narratives and the profound malleability of time, Peter- son forwards the idea that comics are unique to literature and film in the use of texts, fonts, sound elements, images, and more, all to create a unique and sophisticated balance. He argues that comics are in ‘‘pitch’’ format (the movie storyboard format expected when pitching an idea to a studio, precisely how Berger saw Morrison’s script for Arkham Asylum 2004). Following implications from others (including Versaci), Peter- son also posits that comics are more direct than literature and film, the latter almost always needing to go through multiple layers of revision before consumption (films, e.g., suffer through translation from prose to screenplay, screenplay to a comics-like storyboard, and on, including actors’ interpretations of scripts and characters). Peterson’s most strik- ing point came through his experiences with comics in education, in situations where teachers have looked beyond stigma to use comics to connect with reluctant readers, for instance, or to develop the story- telling and predicting literacy abilities of developing readers. While filmmakers and novelists may evoke ‘‘essence’’ from a fixed and definite moment captured on film or in prose (i.e., ‘‘Photographer Captures’’), Versaci, McCloud, and Peterson argue that comics ultimately do more and evoke more. Wolk joins them, and adds new perspectives to this discussion of the complexity of comics: The most significant fact about comics is so obvious it’s easy to overlook: they are drawn. That means that what they show are things and people, real or imagined, moving in space and changing over time, as transformed through somebody’s eye and hand. [. .] Film and photography intrinsically claim to be accurate documents, even when they’re not: they always have the pretense that they are showing you something you would have seen exactly the same way if you’d been present at the right time and place. (118, emphasis in original) Complexity in the Comic and Graphic Novel Medium 57 Many scholars and writers also discuss the communities of comic scholars, creators, and fans. Wolk and Peterson explicitly discuss what might be termed the fourth dimension—the social spaces that add an additional point in the argument about the complexity of the comic. Both Wolk and Peterson introduced this dimension through The Simpsons’ Comic Book Guy, a character Matt Groening has purportedly identified as ‘‘every comic-bookstore guy in America’’ (‘‘Comic Book Guy’’ n. pag., emphasis in original). Versaci details the rise of the independent and dedicated comic book shop and the view that comic book readers are juvenile, immature, socially or psychologically mal- adjusted, but he does not experience how those two phenomena in- tersect, because his comics arrive on his doorstep via Amazon, and he consequently does not meet Comic Book Guy.

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