| The alternative comics world was in a bit of a tizzy recently – like it always is when it gets some favourable mainstream press coverage – thanks to a cover story in the New York Times Book Review dedicated to 2002's best graphic novels.
The reviews were written by noted music critic and novelist Nick Hornby (High Fidelity, About a Boy). Hornby had some positive words for the graphic novels he looked at, most notably Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons, but he stumbled across a problem that faces many book reviewers when they examine graphic novels, and one that many feel is holding the medium back from true mainstream acceptance – book critics don’t know how to review comics.
Hornby was wise enough to own up to his shortfall when he reviewed Eric Drooker’s Blood Song: A Silent Ballad, a beautiful but wordless political story about a woman driven from her home by war. Hornby said he didn’t know what to make of the graphic novel because he couldn’t read it like a typical novel or judge it esthetically like art. "Maybe we need lessons in how to read books like this," he wrote.
That’s something those within the comics world have been saying for years. When graphic novels are all-too-rarely deemed worthy of mainstream criticism – like Art Spiegelman’s MAUS or, more recently, Daniel Clowes’s Ghost World and Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth – they often fall to book reviewers who view them as literature because that’s the only way they know how to judge them.
Certainly the best graphic novels are on a par with the best literature, but they are a different medium altogether. By not acknowledging their unique qualities, comics are constantly being shortchanged and denied quality criticism, which robs creators of feedback and readers of accurate examinations.
Gail de Vos, a professor at the University of Alberta, says comics' lingering reputation as childish exists partly because most people don’t understand their unique qualities and inherent strengths.
"As a society, we are becoming more visual and I think comics can be an important part of that," de Vos says.
The real action in comics, as de Vos points out, takes place between the panels in the space called the gutter. Without understanding the importance of this blank space and the whole method of telling a story using sequential art, the understanding of comics is lost.
"You have to understand how the panels work and how the gutters work and all these other things you don’t think about when you’re looking at art," de Vos says. "Reading comic books can be very difficult."
Graphic novels are different from traditional novels in other simple but significant ways as well. They require a different investment of time, they have a different history and they have a crucial visual element. Some full-time comic reviewers actually think comics are more similar to film than literature because both are largely visual media.
In the academic world, there’s a movement afoot to lay out criteria and language that can be used to seriously examine comics. Modern comics are more than a century old, but viewing them seriously, like literature, really only came about on a mass level with the invention of the graphic novel in 1978, thanks to Will Eisner’s A Contract with God. The relative youth of the form means an a agreed-upon set of critical rules has yet to be formally developed, so academics have taken to the Internet to hash out the issue.
Several online discussion boards, most notably the Comics Scholars’ Discussion List based out of the University of Connecticut, gives scholarly types an opportunity to discuss comics and figure out how they ought to be examined and taught to students.
Certainly, teaching students how to read comics is important to their acceptance – students are taught to appreciate literature as soon as they can read – but de Vos says another important part of the issue is getting more people to read comics.
To a certain extent, it’s a chicken-and-egg kind of scenario – the only way comics will reach mainstream critics is if there is enough mainstream interest in them. To generate that interest, you need popular criticism. To get comics to that point, de Vos pushes libraries to stock more graphic novels because accessibility and cost are barriers for many people.
Others, however, think comics are lucky to be free from the confines of academic criticism and should remain that way – they believe that it prevents creators from being hemmed in, and leaves comics more open to interpretation by the reader. Comics critics are no more loved by comic creators than critics in any other artform. Daniel Clowes, for example, recently included a hilarious send-up of comics critics in the pages of his ongoing series Eightball.
But things may be changing. There have been so many memorable graphic novels and comics released in the past couple of years that the form may finally be accepted as art, and it is generating enough buzz to increase sales and mainstream press coverage. They did manage to grab the cover of the New York Times Book Review, after all.
Smart comic book publishers are looking past the shallow collectors’ market that built up and destroyed the big superhero boom of the ’90s and focusing on putting out books that are worth reading. And ultimately, that is the only thing publishers, critics and readers really need. |
