How Comic Books became part of the literary establishment
If you think you’re not the sort of person who reads comics, you will a) be heartily sick by now of words like “graphic novel” and “Watchmen” and b) be feeling, perhaps, a bit left out. Publishing houses such as Jonathan Cape and Faber & Faber run flourishing lists of graphic fiction, and the comics shelves in Borders and Waterstone’s continue to grow. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis outstripped Harry Potter to become the best-selling novel in Foyle’s bookshop last year. Independent creators devise and publish their own work for free to devoted fans on the internet. And there are agencies in Hollywood that specialise in pitching graphic novels to the film studios.
But comics continue to divide opinion. I have several friends who will read anything as long as it’s a comic, and several who will read anything as long as it isn’t. I started in adolescence, puzzling my way through imported copies of MAD magazine before moving to 2000AD, the seminal British science fiction comic in which luminaries of the form such as Alan Moore, Neil Gaiman and Grant Morrison cut their teeth. But I know plenty who began as adults with George Herriman’s Krazy Kat strips, beloved of Picasso and E E Cummings, or who picked up Watchmen on special and found something, well, special.
Like science fiction, this is a medium with its roots in pulp and the alternative: for every scholar who attempts to trace the history of sequential art back to pre-Columbian parchment or the Bayeux Tapestry, there will be 50 diehards who claim it all started with Superman. Like science fiction, comics have spent a long time keeping their distance from what is seen as the mainstream of literature: both disciplines have had their moments of self-consciousness and post-modern reflexivity, and have begun a cautious rapprochement with the mainstream.
Each has been integrating for some time. Jeanette Winterson, Margaret Atwood and Marcel Theroux are among the writers who have profited recently from the realisation in publishing that people will buy science fiction if you refrain from putting a spaceship on the cover.
Comics, meanwhile, have profited from the canny coinage “graphic novel”, designed to imply an intellectual and narrative heft greater than that of simple strip cartoons, although most creators and fans disdain the term. When told that he wrote graphic novels rather than comic books, Neil Gaiman wrote bemusedly: “I felt like someone who’d been informed that she wasn’t actually a hooker, she was a lady of the evening.”
The central misconception around comics is the idea that they’re a genre, not a medium. The roots of 20th-century popular comics may well be in genre fiction: we’re all familiar with the zap-pow-whoppery of early superhero comics, whose campy cadences were deftly caught in the old Adam West television adaptations of Batman, and with the use of “comic-book” as an adjective synonymous with primary-coloured morality and cartoon violence. But although superhero stories are still as active a part of the comics medium as its other ancestor, the “funny papers” strip cartoon, many creators and artists have devoted years of energy and talent to guiding the medium out of its generic constraints.
What Scott McCloud, the critic and cartoonist, attempted to categorise in Understanding Comics – perhaps the medium’s best work of literary criticism, and itself a comic – as “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response”, now comprehends a rainbow of genres: history, criticism, biography, crime, sci-fi, romance, memoir, the classics, literary fiction, blogging, pornography and more. All in words and pictures.
Let’s start with biography. In the run-up to the recent American presidential election, much ink was spilt over the publication of two biographies, of Obama and McCain, in comics form. It appears that the concept isn’t as up-to-the-minute as it might appear, however. Google swiftly throws up a comic-strip biography of John F Kennedy, published in 1961 for circulation to US embassies abroad and thoughtfully scanned for posterity.
Spain Rodriguez’s recent graphic biography of Che Guevara, in words and pictures that are hectoring and feverishly antic by turns, gives a better picture of the magnesium blaze of Guevara’s life than either of Stephen Soderbergh’s jumbled and laden biopics. The flourishing tradition of autobiography in comics can only be hinted at here: the places to start are Satrapi’s Persepolis, about her childhood in Iran, and Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home, an extremely funny and sensitive story about her upbringing in a funeral home and her self-discovery as a lesbian.
Reportage, too, is a rising genre in comics, helped by the fact that a sketch book may be tolerated in places and under conditions where a camera would be smashed. The American journalist and cartoonist Joe Sacco’s furious collections of dispatches and colour pieces from Palestine and Bosnia, published as Palestine, Safe Area Gorazde and The Fixer, have won their author an American Book Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship and the comics world’s most reputable prize, the Eisner Award. Meanwhile, the peerless Canadian cartoonist and animator Guy Delisle has published three collections, from China, North Korea and, most recently, Burma, that give a personal, peculiar and hilarious picture of life as a Westerner under the most repressive of regimes.
Like many relatively young disciplines, the format is still developing its own critical vocabulary. How do you talk about the strange splitting-up of time, the possibilities for representing simultaneity or implying progression, that a panelled grid of related images suggests to a viewer? Understanding Comics is an invaluable primer to the medium, as well as a brilliantly argued piece of criticism.
Just as literary adaptation provided an important stage in the commercialisation of film, so a growing number of prose classics are being adapted into the medium of comics. Self Made Hero is a London-based publisher currently making strides in the field with a collection of titles based on the great works of Western literature. Its list includes a series of Shakespeare adaptations, aimed at attracting younger readers with the vivid stylings of Japanese manga – there’s a memorable Othello set in an alternate-world Venice, with Roderigo as an anthropomorphised wolf and the Duke as a three-eyed oracle – as well as several aimed at an intellectual adult market. Chantal Montellier’s pen-and-ink take on Kafka’s The Trial takes place in a baroque world of candlelight and rain as dancing skeletons caper in the margins, while the Polish-British illustrator Andrzej Klimowski, who counted among his fans the late Harold Pinter, turns in a dark and teasing adaptation of Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita.
Literary fiction is alive and well in comics, providing some of its most exciting work. The terse, short fictions of Adrian Tomine, which represent Californian alienation and New York anomie in clean-cut, perfectly contrasted black and white, have the deft ear for dialogue and situation of a Raymond Carver story. Meanwhile, Rutu Modan, an Israeli author, writes and illustrates barbed fictions that perfectly capture the sheer weirdness of contemporary Israel, from the bombs to the bourgeoisie. In Britain, Posy Simmonds’s dry and perfectly observed Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe (the former based on Flaubert, the latter on Hardy’s Far from the Madding Crowd) skewer middle-class infidelity and literary preoccupations with a stiletto wit belied by her charming watercolour illustrations.
The rise of public interest in comics is being reflected by increasingly adventurous decisions from mainstream publishers. Dan Franklin, the publishing director of Jonathan Cape, balances a list that includes big sellers such as Satrapi and commissions for newer writers such as Hannah Berry, whose noir-tinged debut Britten and Brülightly was signed to Cape the year after she graduated from Brighton Art College. And stalwarts of British comics such as Brian Talbot and Raymond Briggs are preparing new work: Briggs’s Ethel and Ernest, based on the story of his parents, has sold nearly a quarter of a million copies for Cape and is being considered for film adaptation, while Talbot’s marvellous and recherché Alice in Sunderland, a book in which local history meets the cabinet of curiosities, has only whetted the appetite for a sequel. “I’m a literary publisher,” says Franklin. “I don’t publish anything that doesn’t satisfy the criteria I’d be looking for in a novel.”
Perhaps the last word should go to Ed Brubaker, the American comics writer behind series such as Criminal, who sought recently in an interview to explain the success of his work in Hollywood. “The reason is if you look at the generation now in power in the entertainment industry, they grew up with comics as serious stuff,” he said. “The geeks have won.”
The Top Ten Comic Books
Understanding Comics: the Invisible Art, by Scott McCloud
Peerless comic-about-comics, the medium’s first serious example of literary criticism and a valuable and often very funny work of popular aesthetic philosophy.
Exit Wounds, by Rutu Modan
This tremendous work of fiction perfectly captures the gloss and grime of Israel in peace and war. It has a dark wit and a distinctive look.
Burma Chronicles, by Guy Delisle
A personal chronicle of Delisle’s time under the Burmese dictatorship with his wife (an aid worker) and young son.
Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi
A mordantly funny chronicle of the author’s childhood in pre- and post-revolutionary Iran.
Promethea, by Alan Moore
A beginner’s guide to the history of occultism in the form of a feminist superhero epic, incorporating some of the most adventurous narrative and didactic techniques in contemporary comics.
Sleepwalk, by Adrian Tomine
Ice-cool vignettes of disenchanted urban life, some with memorable stings in the tail, by one of comics’ most exciting young creators.
Achewood, by Chris Onstad
Hands down the funniest web comic, an extravagant tale of oversexed cats, retarded otters, robots and the like, with dialogue that rarely ventures far from comic genius. Updated twice weekly, and free to read online, it has people cackling and rolling in their office chairs.
The Invisibles, by Grant Morrison
A full-time mental series about a band of time-travelling British anarchists seeking to avert the annihilation of world consciousness. Incredibly clever, totally barking.
Krazy and Ignatz, by George Herriman
The inimitable ancestor of contemporary alternative comics: the perennial love quadrilateral between a cat, a mouse, a dog and a brick. One of the most good-hearted and amusing works of mortal man.
Alice in Sunderland, by Bryan Talbot
Centuries of local history, John Lennon, Alice in Wonderland, George Formby and the Empire Theatre in Sunderland. Glorious, panoptic and precise; one of the oddest and cleverest comics there is.
The Telegraph, e graças à Safaa no Twitter ;)
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