At the Waterstone’s bookshop in Notting Hill, the graphic-novel display table
has been abandoned because it had the highest theft rate of any department.
In New York, the poet and critic Peter Schjeldahl noted that the
graphic-novel sections in bookshops are easily identified by “the young
bodies sprawled around it like casualties of a local disaster”. And in The
Simpsons, Comic Book Guy is the most alarmingly inadequate of all
Springfield’s inhabitants. There is, it seems, still something a bit iffy,
not quite right, about books of illustrated stories.
This is odd, because graphic novels are now more respectable than they have
ever been. They win literary prizes — Art Spiegelman’s Maus got a Pulitzer —
and mainstream accolades — Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was transatlantically
chosen by many critics as one of the best books of 2006. They are becoming
starry, too: Posy Simmonds is doing a graphic-novel version of A Christmas
Carol, and Vic Reeves one of Three Men in a Boat. And they are made into
movies. A sequel to Frank Miller’s wild, violent Sin City is in production,
and Miller’s 300 is now a film. It’s not just action-packed titles that are
making it to the screen: Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis: The Story of a
Childhood, is to be filmed, as is the US best-seller Cancer Vixen, a graphic
novel by the New Yorker cartoonist Marisa Acocella Marchetto, with Cate
Blanchett mooted for the main role.
Furthermore, graphic novels sell. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan sold 17,500 in
hardback in the UK, and Joe Sacco’s Palestine 28,000. This is more or less
exactly the same range as any new book by big, acclaimed writers of
“literary” fiction. Occasionally, they break through: Raymond Briggs sold
200,000 copies of Ethel & Ernest.
First, one rather banal reason for such success must be mentioned — Chinese
printers. A few years ago, it became radically cheaper to print in China.
For graphic novels, this was a turning point, as they are expensive to
produce. The Jonathan Cape boss Dan Franklin, the form’s leading British
publisher, estimates that Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, with its fabulously complex
and beautiful images, would have had to be sold at between £30 and £40 if
printed in the West. Thanks to China, it sells for £18 — a lot, but not
vastly out of line with a conventional hardback.
Bottom-line issues aside, what is going on? Paul Gravett sighs when I ask him.
The rise of the graphic novel to literary respectability, he points out, is
a story that is run every few years. In fact, the form just carries on,
whether being noticed by people like me or not. Gravett is our leading
authority on these books. If you want to know what to read and how to read
it, his Graphic Novels: Stories to Change Your Life is the place to start.
But there is something different about this phase, which suggests that these
books have finally got under the skin of the mainstream. Having immersed
myself in them for a few weeks, I can safely say they got under mine.
So, what are they? There are almost as many versions of the history of the
graphic novel as there are graphic novels. They may be said to be one of the
earliest creative forms,dating back 20,000 years to the cave paintings at
Lascaux, which do, indeed, seem to tell a story in pictures. More
conventionally, they may be seen as about 300 years old, with Hogarth’s The
Rake’s Progress as the supreme progenitor. The late Will Eisner, and a few
others, said that graphic novels began in 1978, with the publication of his
A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories.
But the most balanced view is that, in the West, the modern illustrated story
was born in the 19th century, with comic strips appearing in both Britain
and America that were, frequently, turned into books. In the 1920s, a
francophone version appeared in the form of bande dessinée ,
best known to us via The Adventures of Tintin and Asterix. In the East, the
Japanese manga tradition goes back to the 18th century. It exists today both
as a parallel to American comics and as an erotic form. For me, its supreme
expression is Hayao Miyazaki’s Spirited Away, the greatest cartoon film I
have ever seen. In the 1930s, DC Comics and its rival, Marvel, were founded.
They created the most common mainstream view of the comic as a wild fantasy
land of superheroes and sci-fi epics. They influence even the most
sophisticated of the “respectable” literary graphic novels — though this is
often denied. The truth is that Marvel and DC, through Superman, Spider-Man
and Captain America, and through superb creative editors such as Stan Lee,
invented much of the visual language. Even a work as sophisticated as Jimmy
Corrigan would not have been possible without the age of the superheroes.
As a consoling aside, the superheroes, after a long decline, interrupted by
the occasional big movie, are making a group comeback. American comics now
have a running story about a government attempt to get all resident
superheroes to register. The resistance to this move is led, slightly oddly,
by Captain America; the supporters are led by Iron Man. I’m with the Captain
on this one: a registered superhero doesn’t seem right. Further group action
is signalled by the announcement of a movie called Justice League: The New
Frontier. The Justice League of America, a DC invention, includes, among
others, Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman and Green Lantern. They are, indeed,
indestructible, and now they are unionised. I hope it is not a last stand.
The crucial point about both bande dessinée and the products of
Marvel/DC is their innocence. They embraced simple values and were always
safe for children. This is lost in the cultish darkness of later movie
versions of the superheroes, but was fundamental to their comic-book
incarnations. And in the attempt to break free from the restrictive demands
of innocence, the modern graphic novel was born. “Cartoonists were actually
expected to keep a lid on their psyches and personal histories,” Spiegelman
says, “or at least disguise and sublimate them into diverting
entertainments.” Yet it was a hard pose to maintain. Gravett points out that
even in the innocent comic golden age of the 1950s, there were “cracks in
the mask”. Charles Schulz’s Peanuts may have been innocent on the surface,
but beneath it was full of “inadequacy, disappointment and melancholy”. The
brilliance of Schulz was to do this so simply and so well that the anguish
and the innocence became the same thing — a very deep truth indeed. But the
cracked mask was ripped off and burnt in the 1960s. Robert Crumb, with
dazzling graphic brilliance, turned the world of Disney, DC and Marvel into
the world of sex’n’drugs’n’rock’n’roll. The new superhero was the
tripped-out freak who just kept on truckin’. And with the Fabulous Furry
Freak Brothers, Gilbert Shelton showed what the Justice League would have
become had they been introduced to a ton of weed cut with a truckload of
acid at a sufficiently early stage. From now on, there were no no-go areas
in the comic world.
Gravett identifies 1972 as the year in which the 1960s radicalisation of
comics broke through, with Justin Green’s Binky Meets the Holy Virgin Mary —
“an astonishing self-flagellation of Catholic guilt and obsessive-compulsive
disorder”. Spiegelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale, an agonised reflection on
the Holocaust, appeared in 1986. They established the new wave’s key theme:
confessionalauto-biography. With its strong adolescent following, the
graphic novel would centre on the exposure of the author’s self.
This remains a dominant theme in current works. Satrapi’s Persepolis is a
directly autobiographical account of the author’s experiences growing up in
Iran, through revolution, war and tyranny. Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen is
subtitled A True Story and deals with her experiences of breast cancer. It’s
Sex and the City laced with lethal illness. Charles Burns’s Black Hole uses
the Buffy the Vampire Slayer technique of externalising teen trauma as
horror. And Bechdel’s Fun Home — unquestionably the best graphic novel I
have read so far — concerns the author’s way of coping with her lesbianism.
The number of women who have taken to graphic novels is striking. Superheroes,
sci-fi and the Crumb-Shelton-Green phase were all essentially masculine.
Wonder Woman was a token, and not a very plausible one at that. But with the
form’s expansion, women have found that it works to expose deeper layers or
relationships, identity and history. In fact, many themes flogged to death
in the conventional novel are revitalised by the addition of pictures.
I find Bechdel the best. Graphically, she is genuinely innovative. Her use of
maps to show the geography of the action is quite brilliant. She is also a
gifted storyteller. Fun Home is replete with the deep narrative tension of a
very good novel. Ware is a more refined graphic artist, but Jimmy Corrigan’s
gloom is too repetitive and oppressive.
So, why is this rebirth of the serious graphic novel different? Because this
new wave arrives when the ascendancy of the image — presciently described by
George Steiner, in 1971, in his book In Bluebeard’s Castle — has begun to
dwarf the power of the word. The visual arts are booming. The screen fills
our lives through television, cinema and computers. Thanks to computers,
even when we are obliged to read words, we expect them to be arranged in
helpful modules, with plenty of graphics. The computer normalises the
graphic novel as a form. The graphical user interface may one day be seen as
the most important invention of our time. Through such devices, the imperial
image reigns and is, more successfully than ever before, invading the book.
Good thing, bad thing? Who knows? For me, these books are hard work. I can’t
relax into their images in my mind, as I do with a conventional novel. The
author’s versions keep dragging me back. But I guess they’re not for me.
They’re for the kids sprawling in the graphic-novels section.
They, and Comic Book Guy, own the image-soaked future.
Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s Cancer Vixen is published in paperback tomorrow by
Fourth Estate; Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is published by Jonathan Cape
www.bryanappleyard.com
