Graphic novels mix literature, art
Everything’s a graphic novel nowadays.
Batman, Superman, Johnny the Homicidal Maniac, you name it – if its monthly issues are collected into book form, someone somewhere is calling it a graphic novel.
And after “Batman Begins” finishes its first weekend at the box office (see page 22), you can bet the term will be parroted even more often.
It’s like that old Paula Cole song: Where have all the comics gone?
But suppose a graphic novel isn’t necessarily just any collection of single issue comics put together to make a narrative. Those were around for years before the term “graphic novel” was coined. Many fans call them trades, or trade paperbacks.
When comics legend Will Eisner invented the graphic novel in 1978, he intended to bring the genre into the realm of literature. As Eisner stated in one of his books on the medium, “Graphic Storytelling,” graphic novels raised the level of literacy above that of action-packed superhero books.
For example, if “Batman Begins” is a comic book flick, then a film based on a graphic novel might look and feel more like Richard Linklater’s “Waking Life.”
Why? Well, superhero comics are about flawed and often tragic individuals who combat their shortcomings by donning suits and kicking bad guy butt.
Graphic novels, however, are about you. Or maybe they’re about that depressed, waifish guy you always run into at the coffee shop.
They’re raw, personal, poetic, visually inventive and often autobiographical literary pieces, and they always pull for the underdogs in the most basic way possible – by telling their stories.
Now, once-campy superhero books have upped the intelligence level, and have grown darker and more complex in the wake of the movement. The line between graphic novel and superhero comic is blurred.
Heck, Barnes & Noble sealed the deal when it started filing every Spider-Man and Daredevil collection under that green “Graphic Novels” sign – it’s now the mainstream’s high-brow term for comic book.
So, to balance this week’s superhero hype, here’s a brief primer on the graphic novel’s past and present as defined by its name – a novel told in graphic form:
Early rumblings
Comics in the early 20th century grew from single-paneled social commentary – as in 1895’s “The Yellow Kid,” Richard Outcault’s strip often credited with inventing the modern comics medium – to narrative, multi-paneled books, such as Detective Comics, from which Superman was born.
Among hard-core fans and aficionados, perhaps the most name-dropped World War II era title is “The Spirit,” by Will Eisner, a weekly comic newspaper insert that followed a murdered private detective who returned from the dead to fight crime.
Eisner’s “Spirit” bore similarities to its superhero-driven contemporaries, but it had a depth and quality that many comics of its day did not possess.
With its literacy, “The Spirit” laid the foundation for the graphic novel, a fact most evident in the series’ correlation to James O’Barr’s 1989 half-lyrical graphic novel, half- superhero book “The Crow,” in which a man rises from the dead to exact revenge upon the gang of killers responsible for his death and that of his true love.
Before he died in January at age 87, Eisner brought The Spirit back for one final story as a guest in author-screenwriter-comics creator Michael Chabon’s “The Escapist,” giving one last breath to his most beloved character.
The birth of a genre
The 1960s and ‘70s found America obsessed with the visual.
Film was a lush and thriving art form. Visually psychedelic fashion, art and drugs were the norm. And kids weren’t the only fans of colorful comic books.
Americans were thinking hard and opening their minds to new experiences while simultaneously being depressed by tensions sprouting from the Vietnam War.
It was the perfect time to invent a new art form.
So Eisner dropped “A Contract with God” on the world of comics in 1978 and changed the genre forever.
Sans the “zap” and “pow” of superhero titles popular at the time, “Contract” told the story of immigrants in 1930s New York in what is considered to be the world’s first long-form piece of graphic literature.
Hence, the graphic novel was born.
This modern love
Three decades after Eisner’s seminal book, the graphic novel has changed the rules.
Comic strip stories don’t have to be about superheroes. They don’t have to involve the supernatural.
Heck, they don’t even have to offer any action. Need proof? Check out these books:
• Emo kids dig Craig Thompson’s autobiographical “Blankets,” an 800-plus-page, black-and-white rumination on romantic and teen angst, familial relationships and endangered spirituality.
• Marjane Satrapi’s two-part black-and-white memoir, “Persepolis,” tells the tale of a girl growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. The story is earning praise for its timeliness, storytelling and minimalist artwork.
• Art Spiegelman’s “Maus” is a must for any student of humanity. The book tells the horrors witnessed by the author’s father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Holocaust survivor. Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for this two-part series.
• Before he passed away, Eisner finished the final touches on his ultimate work, “The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was released in May. Known in part for his takes on Jewish life in America, Eisner propelled his legacy one step further in “The Plot” by telling the story of the most notorious anti-Semitic text in human history: “Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” which was used by Hitler to perpetuate the Holocaust.
And, as if bringing Eisner’s quest for literacy in comics full circle, esteemed novelist Umberto Eco wrote the introduction.