Biff, pow, yadda yadda.
A good first effort, Mr. McGrath; I particularly like the group shot of some of comics’ eminences grises. There’s a couple of nuggets of genuine insight. Well done. Definitely a step up from “Bang! Zowie!”
But there’s still room for improvement:
- Your opening, for instance: the question of declining or expanding literacy is complicated enough at the present moment that fashioning from whole cloth a poetry-like decline of the novel in favor of comics makes you look a wee bit poltroonish. Also, if you’re going to cite highbrows that claim comics are “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit,” do be so good as to name them and quote them directly. Otherwise, the brickbats we’d throw at them for snobbish provincialism and sloppy sloganeering will end up aimed at you, instead.
- Also, try to be a bit more au courant in your examples. I think the last Broom Hilda collection was printed in the mid-’70s? Your point is taken, and could as easily have been made with Foxtrot, or Zippy the Pinhead. (We’ll let the manga punt slide: authorities within the industry can’t wrap their brains around this phenomenon, either, so expecting more from a source like the New York Times is, perhaps, unfair.)
- If you’re going to set up an equivalence between “graphic novels” and “‘literary novels’ in the mainstream publishing world” (scare quotes sic), take care that later quotes don’t directly undermine your point.
- Regarding the “minor flowering of serious comic books in the mid-80’s”:
This is, without a doubt, the single most breathtakingly heartbreaking summation of the comics industry’s boom and bust that I have ever read.But the movement failed to take hold, in large part because there weren’t enough other books on the same level.
- Kudos for noting Watchmen was drawn by Dave Gibbons. Points deducted for failing to note that From Hell was drawn by Eddie Campbell, The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen was drawn by Kevin O’Neill, and Lost Girls was drawn by Melinda Gebbie.
- Have you seen many Persian miniatures? Have you seen the art for Persepolis?
- “Many practitioners of the form” do not prefer the term “comix.” Art Spiegelman prefers the term “comix.” The man deserves our respect and admiration, but there are limits.
- His name is Scott McCloud. Will Eisner is the cartoonist who prefers “sequential art.” You mention neither Eisner nor Jules Feiffer, nor their seminal comics A Contract With God or Tantrum. This is inexcusable. Failing to note McCloud’s Understanding Comics is less of a crime—you’re dealing with the literature itself rather than the criticism of that literature (stop trying to join split hairs, you in the back)—but it is suggested that you arrange to have read a copy before next tackling this subject.
The graphic novel is a man’s world, by and large, though there are several important female artists (not just [Marjane] Satrapi, but also Lynda Barry, Julie Doucet and Debbie Drechsler). And to a considerable extent it is a place of longing, loss, sexual frustration, loneliness and alienation—a landscape very similar, in other words, to that of so much prose fiction.
This is a worthwhile insight, unless I’m misreading “the landscape” when I apply to it the conditions noted throughout the paragraph, and not merely those ascribed directly to “a place.”
Many more are set in the slacker world—the skanky Washington Heights neighborhood of Doucet’s My New York Diary, the coffee-shop Portland and East Village sublet of David Chelsea in Love, the diners, card shops and apartment complexes of Adrian Tomine’s West Coast—where people are always hooking up and breaking up and feeling both shy and lousy. It’s the pictorial equivalent of Nick Hornby’s High Fidelity.
This, on the other hand, is cheap and pandering. (Also, see above re: au courant.)
- Not every graphic novelist—to wed ourselves momentarily to the terminology out of necessity—has drawn stories about their masturbation, excessive or otherwise. (What works as a one-off joke should not be stretched into a paragraphs-long case study.)
- Ghost World the comic was, indeed, better than Ghost World the movie. (It’s surprising how many people get that one wrong.)
- Become more attuned to the ironies within your own work: on the one hand, you have highbrows sniffing at comics as “perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit”; on the other, you speak with graphic novelists (still wed) who describe their art as “an incredibly inefficient way to tell a story,” and note of their working process:
“It involved maybe 8 to 10 seconds of actual narrative time,” he said. “But it took me three days to do it, of 12 hours a day. And I’m thinking any writer would go through this passage in eight minutes of work. And I think: Why am I doing this? Is the payoff to have the illusion of something actually happening before your eyes really worth it? I find it’s a constant struggle and a source of great pain for me, especially the last day when I’m inking the strip. I think, Why, why am I doing this? Whole years go by now that I can barely account for. I’m not even being facetious.”
- You have your reasons, yes, or rather there are reasons why it probably never occurred to you; nonetheless, I’m feeling parochial, and so I will dock you for not mentioning Grant Morrison when you name-check Alan Moore and Neil Gaiman.
- Given the context, you don’t need to explain what “a fair cop” means.
- Your point re: Blankets is well-taken, although you make precisely the same point a paragraph later, re: Adrian Tomine.
- Excepting (the astounding, the amazing, the incredible) Joe Sacco and Joe Sacco alone from your single paragraph summation of the strengths and weaknesses of the graphic novel makes you seem parochial, as if you’ve only read the books you’ve mentioned in this piece. It also lends too much emphasis to Sacco-as-exception, which is a recurring theme. The narrative that emerges—R. Crumb, social outcast and chronic masturbator, revives comics as a niche form of self-expression; many cartoonists who follow in his footsteps are also social outcasts and chronic masturbators; Joe Sacco is a well-spoken cartoonist with a comendable panoply of social skills; comics as a medium (or is it graphic novels as an idom? Or genre? Sloppy!), as practiced by these social outcasts, is not well-suited to lyricism or strong emotion, and does not take itself seriously (look at all those wanking jokes!); it therefore follows that only the comics of Joe Sacco, smooth, confident, jet-setting journalist that he is, are capable of proving this rule—this is just plain ugly, and detracts from the value of what has gone before.
- Admit it: you only read City of Glass because Paul Auster wrote the prose novel.
Oh, well. I was going to write of a critique of this article. Or, at least, I was telling myself I was going to. But now I don't have to! More time to read comics for me!
And besides, you did it better and from a better perspective than I could have.
Not that I couldn't have still written something, but this gives me a good excuse to cross something of my pretend to-do list.
Okay, eloquent on the subject of same-sex marriage AND a comic book enthusiast. I think I have found a new favorite blog!
While we're hairjoining and hairsplitting, I'm not sure that Ghost World (the brilliant graphic novel) would even have worked as a movie. Ghost World, the graphic novel, has a similar narrative arc to the movie, but the slow fraying of Enid and Becky's relationship comes off entirely differently given that Daniel Clowes casts himself as conflicted about his profession (both within GW and elsewhere in his work), the whole comics-as-cynical-nostalgia ploy is a frequent fixture in his work, Ghost World (like a novel or a Bob Dylan album and very much unlike a movie) is entirely the work of a single individual, and Enid Coleslaw's name is suspiciously anagrammic.
But yeah, the book was better.
I muddled my own point -- the fact of individual, rather than group, creation makes comic books of the type Clowes does seem qualitively different to me.
But isn't that the perennial dilemma of translating any singular vision to a more collaborative art, whether it's novels to movies or poetry to commedia del arte? —Heck, isn't that the perennial problem of translation, period? "First you replace the handle, then you replace the blade."
Meanwhile, Spider-Man 2 is hailed as the best superhero flick ever. Industrial collaboration translated to industrial collaboration. (Myself, I wonder what on earth HBO will do with The Poor Bastard.)
I liked both Ghost World movie and comic book. The latter was a revelation to me; the former was a lot of fun. I admit that I like the ending to the movie better than the comic book, because Clowes seemed to just throw together a dissolution without much coherence, as if he was just getting it over with. Everything before that was beautiful, though.
I admit it: I read Paul Auster's novel only because I read the Dave Mazzuchelli adaptation.
BTW—Great essay!
But isn't that the perennial dilemma of translating any singular vision to a more collaborative art, whether it's novels to movies or poetry to commedia del arte? —Heck, isn't that the perennial problem of translation, period? "First you replace the handle, then you replace the blade."
Which is why adaptions of truly personal works seldom seem to make ideal movies. I mean, great books seldom become great movies. I mean, I can imagine Raymond Chandler's The Maltese Falcon, and I think it would have been decent (though not, like Hammett's version, a great book) and led to a perfectly good movie, but L.A. Confidential wouldn't work at all without Ellroy's amphetimine madness, and the movie -- as impressive a job as the screenwriter did -- wasn't nearly as good as the book. The continuing debate about whether Lee or Ditko is the real father of Spiderman simply isn't imaginable for something like Ghost World or From Hell (sorry, Eddie Campbell). Auteur theory aside, a movie is a damn difficult medium to express one person's artistic vision.
One thing the essay got wrong is in the first sentence: the novel never replaced poetry, unless the reference is to oral composition. Homer and Beowulf went out when writing came in but printed prose narrative is as old as printed poetry. The notion that one medium replaces another is silly -- art technologies become obsolescent.
And it's good to take people to task for unthinking comments about "dumbed-down culture" and the like. It's more difficult to read comics than to read prose and, as you point out, far more difficult to produce a graphic, as opposed to a typeset, novel.