Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative Author(s): Hillary Chute Source: PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 2 (Mar., 2008), pp. 452-465 Published by: Modern Language Association Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/25501865 Accessed: 09-09-2015 15:46 UTC Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at http://www.jstor.org/page/ info/about/policies/terms.jsp JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact [email protected]. Modern Language Association is collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to PMLA. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 192.65.245.60 on Wed, 09 Sep 2015 15:46:59 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions PMLA the changing profession Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative COMICS?A FORMONCE CONSIDERED PURE JUNK?ISSPARKING IN TERESTIN LITERARY STUDIES. I'M AS AMAZED AS ANYBODY ELSE BY THE HILLARY CHUTE an comics boom?despite the fact that Iwrote English department dissertation thatmakes the passionate case that we should not ig nore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of com ics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in literary studies may think themoves obvious: making claims in the name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out our (the term doesn't settle comfortably into grammar; nomencla ture remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped we its object or properly posed its project. To explore today's comics need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the com categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on ics?and specifically on what Iwill call graphic narrative?is gain ing traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid one word-and-image form inwhich two narrative tracks, verbal and one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in time through the space of the page, through its progressive counter point of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames) narra alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its tive scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal?or use one simply to illustrate the other?but is rather prone to pres a ent the two nonsynchronously; reader of comics not only fills in the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive back-and-forth of reading and looking formeaning. Throughout this essay, I treat comics as a medium?not as a lowbrow genre, which is atten how it is usually understood. However, Iwill end by focusing tion on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics. HILLARY CHUTE ?sa junior fellow ?n liter I'm interested in how comics considers the ature in the Harvard Society of Fellows. particularly problem of because own work has centered on what She iswriting a book on contemporary representing history my graphic narratives by women. the comics formmakes possible for nonfiction narrative, especially 452 2008 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA This content downloaded from 192.65.245.60 on Wed, 09 Sep 2015 15:46:59 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 12 3.2 HillaryChute 453 a on the ability of comics to spatially juxtapose in 1964 newsletter circulated tomembers of y fi and and futuremo the Amateur Press and the term (and overlay) past present Association, ? ments on the I'm interested in was borrowed Bill in y page. Further, subsequently by Spicer s? how comics modes of historical and his fanzine World. think 3 expands Graphic Story Many W personal expression while existing in the Will Eisner invented the term because he used 3* CTO field of the How does contemporary it in a more commercial context, to sell A Con popular.1 o comics histo tract with God to A series approach devastating public (1978) publishers. 0 ries?Why do female artists blur the distinc of four serious, linked vignettes chronicling tion between "private" and "public" histories? the sordid circumstances and assimilationist com a 5* The aesthetics and narrative impact of desires of immigrants in Bronx tenement in 3 ics that address history are a large focus of the 1930s, A Contract with God was the first a MetaMaus, a book by Art Spiegelman about book marketed as "graphic novel."3 the thirteen-year process of making his Pu Decades later, we find "graphic novel" litzer Prize-winning Maus: A Survivors Tale, sections in many bookstores. Yet graphic I am to a which helping edit. novel is often misnomer. Many fascinating works grouped under this umbrella?includ ing Spiegelman sWorld War II-focused Maus, Overview which helped rocket the term into public consciousness?aren't novels at all: are Three journals have devoted special issues to they graphic narrative. Art Spiegelman recently rich works of nonfiction; hence my emphasis taught a seminar at Columbia University here on the broader term narrative. (Indeed, called Comics: Marching into the Canon. The the form confronts the default assumption as a Norton Anthology of Postmodern American that drawing system is inherently more Fiction includes comics. Outside the academy, fictional than prose and gives a new cast to graphic narrative is coming to the forefront what we consider fiction and nonfiction.) In of literary-critical and cultural conversations: graphic narrative, the substantial length im a Time magazine, mainstream barometer, plied by novel remains intact, but the term named Alison Bechdel's graphic narrative shifts to accommodate modes other than memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic its fiction. A graphic narrative is a book-length best book of 2006?the same year Houghton work in themedium of comics.4 Mifflin, which publishes the Best American There are many formats for comics, series, inaugurated the first Best American which all carry unique cultural baggage. The Comics volume. The New York Times Maga comic strip, which emerged in the United a cover zine, in article in July 2004, asserted States before the twentieth century, ranges that this "new literary form" is "what novels from less than one page to several pages or used to be?an accessible, vernacular form more. This is a comics segment that can be a with mass appeal" (McGrath 24). minimal unit or what we might think of as a a more common Graphic novel is much short story. The comic book, which emerged and term than in recognizable graphic narrative.2 the 1930s, is typically thirty-two pages long as a Graphic novel?which took shape market and either is a collection of comic-strip stories a ing term?has specific history in the second or ismade up of one sustained story, often an half of the twentieth century. Part of the impe installment in a series (see Lef?vre).5 (Comics tus came from a vital underground publishing inhabits all kinds of serial forms and contexts, that wanted works with or community greater fromweekly daily strips tomonthly comic in the medium of comics: impact the first books to serial characters represented across use public of the phrase, by Richard Kyle, was formats; I argue elsewhere that the comics This content downloaded from 192.65.245.60 on Wed, 09 Sep 2015 15:46:59 UTC All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions 454 Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative PMLA ? a page itself is material register of seriality, a McCloud defines comics as: "juxtaposed .2 on in narrative architecture built the establish pictorial and other images in deliberate se Hm ment of or deviation from regular intervals quence, intended to convey information O im of As a form, comics differs from the and/or an aesthetic in the a space.) produce response since cartoons are im cartoon, single-panel viewer" (Understanding 9). ("Before it's pro c ages. While both forms often involve a similar jected," McCloud notes, "film is just a very w s: visual-verbal punch, comics, usually unfold very very very slow comic" [8].) The weight over frames, carries a different on sequence here allows McCloud to w ing multiple placed narrative push than a cartoon does. Yet com track a prehistory including pre-Columbian ? ics authors are still routinely called cartoon picture manuscripts, the Bayeux tapestry, ists; in fact, the historical definition of cartoon and "The Tortures of St. Erasmus" (1460), continues to resonate with authors who em among other seemingly unlikely cultural an brace the mass reproduction of comics?the tecedents. Writing in 2001, Robert Harvey aspect of the form that keeps comics from be disagrees with McCloud's notion that comics ing considered "fine art." Cartoon comes from do not have to contain words (see also Smol the Italian word cartone, meaning cardboard, deren, who rejects sequence as the defining or and denotes a drawing for a picture design property of comics and analyzes the "swarm intended historically to be transferred to tap ing effect" in single images from illustrated estries or to frescoes (see Harrison; Janson; Bibles and Bosch and Brueghel up through Harvey, "Comedy" and "Describing"). Yet, as children's books). Harvey counters, "It seems Randall Harrison points out, "with the com to me that the essential characteristic of ing of the printing press, cartoon' took on an comics'?the thing that distinguishes it from other meaning.