Maybe you think of yourself as being not so much a "graphic novel" kind of person. But then you watch a movie based on Watchmen or Persepolis or V for Vendetta and you're told that the source material is even better, so you pick one up. Or a friend presses a book by Carla Speed McNeil or Jaime Hernandez or Joe Sacco into your hands, saying, "No, really, I think this is something you'd be into."
However it happens, you start reading, and you realize before long that you're in the presence of something really special -- these plotlines are taking you places of an entirely different scope than those visited by mainstream prose fiction. And you consider: These are nothing like the comic books I read as a kid.
And they truly aren't. Thanks to accidents of economics, flashes of artistic inspiration, and flukes of both government and culture, comics have really "grown up."
The comic book was originally conceived of and executed as entertainment for children. If it aspired to be art, that was fine, as long as those aspirations didn't interfere with the holy trinity of quick, cheap, and strong. They were ten-cent blurts of low-brow bliss, and they had to compete for space on newsstands with the pulps and glossy magazines marketed to adults, so they had to push really hard to fire up kids' imaginations
Over the course of the '40s and early '50s, American comics pretty much stuck to their niche: kid stuff. But then came the blood-spattered comic book series "Crime Does Not Pay". Here's when America freaked out.
Spurred on by a book titled Seduction of the Innocent: The Influence of Comic Books on Today's Youth, a national moral panic arose over the idea that comics were leading to feral teenagers running wild in the streets.
In 1954, the U.S. Senate held a series of hearings about comic books and juvenile delinquency. To save itself, the comics business created its own censoring agency, the Comics Code Authority. Cops and judges had to be represented positively and other clauses banned vampires and werewolves, "suggestive posture," unusually concealed weapons, the words "horror" and "terror" in titles, and "depravity" in general. Pretty lame, right?
And so it happened that the American branch of the comics medium, going through a difficult but promising adolescence, was marched straight back to its childhood room, sedated and infantilized. Imagine if every movie released in the U.S. between 1954 and, say, 1985 had to be rated G, and you'll see the problem.
Even so, American comics kept evolving; there were a handful of gifted, prolific writers and artists who were happy to work within that G-rated framework. The era when the Comics Code was at its peak of power was also the era when Spider-Man, The X-Men, and Iron Man first appeared and when Jack Kirby unleashed the spectacular visions of his "Fourth World" stories.
By the mid-1960s, however, countercultural waves infiltrated all of American society. The first issue of Robert Crumb's hilariously obscene Zap Comix had a little Code-shaped seal on its cover that read "Approved by the Ghost Writers in the Sky." This new generation of comic book authors simply didn't care about "respectability" or newsstand sales.
Soon the Comics Code turned out to be an option rather than an obligation. The artists associated with Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly's art-comics magazine RAW got a toe-hold in the fine art world, which had previously always treated comics as kitschy raw material at best. The legendary cartoonist Will Eisner popularized the term "graphic novel" with books like A Contract with God. And soon, independent comic companies bypassed newsstands altogether, selling their serials directly to stores that specialized in comic books.
By the end of the '80s, the Comics Code was pretty much vestigial. Its seal of quality had effectively become a seal of mediocrity. Gradually, one publisher after another abandoned it. This past January, when DC Comics and Archie Comics both gave it up, the Code officially died.
While there are still comic books that cater to children - such as Bone or Naruto or Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- the ones that have really made their marks on the literary world and greater society at large are those that were written for the really big kids. Who would say that Watchmen, V for Vendetta, Sin City, Ghost World, and American Splendor aren't exquisite works of literature?
Comics were so looked down up when I was a child (60's -- we had just passed the "burning" stage, at least) that the imaginative opportunity they provided was looked upon with probably more contempt outside the industry than within it. Myself, I know they got me reading voraciously -- and though I read well above my grade level, I was often sent to the dictionary to look up a word. If for no other reason, I believe comics were a huge boon to literacy even then. Since then, they have only become broader and deeper, and more daring. And better for more mature readers.
=Back in the day, Classics Illustrated comic books provided many a middle-school student with a
colorful and easy to digest version of the great works of literature: "David Copperfield," "Tom Sawyer," "The Red Badge of Courage," etc.
="CI" was ideal for book report assignments--the "Cliff Notes" of their time, but with pictures. And, some of the panels approached "art" in their skill. I still remember the striking portrayal of Bill Sykes' murder of his girlfriend in "Oliver Twist," all bloody reds and white, gnashing teeth.
=Today, of course, new editions of Classics Illustrated could feature "modern" authors: Fitzgerald, Hemingway and Faulkner, and even current "classics" of popular fiction.
I bet nostalgic adults, as well as lazy students, would buy them in droves!
And yeah, they do use classic authors and early 20th century authors and I've even seen a version of Marcel's Proust's "In Search of Lost Time."
And if you still think that comics are for "lazy" readers you’ve missed the point of this article. Try reading “Maus: A Survivors Tale” or "Asterios Polyp” or "Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic" and come back and make that claim. I dare you.
/Proud to be a female comic book nerd
No spandex big boobed women on our covers.
No foil logo alternate cover limited editions to manipulate the marketplace.
Just classic literature with new artwork by the best in the field.
It was doomed to fail and the financial backers of the company made sure of it with a lot of hanky panky that landed them in court sued up to their ass.
The CI brand is now held by a rights brokering lawyer in Chicago who wants to be a tag-along producer on everything he controls including the old First Comics material.
Transmetropolitan
Elfquest
300
Just a few of the finest US 'grown-up' comics not mentioned above. Cerebus is my personal favorite, as this comic introduced me to 'non-superhero' comics at the ripe old age of 12. Being primarily a bookworm at the time, I convinced my local library to carry each graphic novel (up to Flight, which had just been released). It went over quite well - it took me 6 months to work my way through the waiting lists for them all.
One of the most captivating summer days of my childhood was the one where I found the first Elfquest graphic novel at the library and sat outside reading it while I waited for my parents to pick me up. It was one of the most immersive reading experiences of my life--and I've always had a gift for suspending my disbelief and sinking inside of something, so that's saying a lot.
Thanks for bringing up an awesome memory from my youth!
...And now I just realized I can still remember all of the lyrics to the Mercedes Lackey-penned album of Elfquest songs. Oh, the nerdshame...
Bone belongs in the list of "exquisite works of literature" as surely as those others do. It's an incredible series that is truly meant for all ages.
The second epiphany was the realization of how self-centered we are as Americans, to have been around comic book fans as long as I had while not hearing one word about such a vast industry actually made me angry. I read where sales of American comics have fallen dramatically, today about 6 million comics a month are sold, not much more in 1985. There were WEEKLY comics in Japan that sold three million issues on a regular basis, and still are.
Things have changed somewhat of course. Manga and anime are much better known now, due to dedicated fans who showed that they can be profitable here (and of course thanks to George Lucas; the popularity of Star Wars led to a lot of sci-fi anime shows being released in the US as the sci-fi genre emerged). But the American industry is still dominated by superhero comics, for some reason they just can't let go. I hear DC is rebooting practically its entire run. Marvel reintroduced old characters in "alternate" universes. I'm not saying all these stories are bad, but there's still only so far you can go with a single genre. It's time the American industry grew up. Get rid of the flimsies. Start writing larger stories, and encourage more stories on other subjects. You can still do the superhero stuff, I suppose, but diversity will save the industry. Because once the movie fad dies out, that's the end for American comics.
From the perspective of a manga fan, comics differ in the following ways:
1) Much less story, per $, per month, or by almost any other measure.
2) It's a tiny set of genres marketed to a fairly narrow set of demographics. While this plagues the English Manga market to some degree, it's still much broader than the comic market, and if you can read Japanese, the market is very broad indeed - I think it's broader than our novel market in the U.S.A.
3) They're in color.
1) Depends on the book, and certainly not always true.
2) While the marketing for comics may not be great in America, it occupies far more than a "tiny set of genres". It sounds like you don't actually know much about how the American comics industry has developed over the last 25 years.
3) Not all of them. There are many black and white American comics.
If you haven't been to a comic shop since 1985, I could see how you might think that comics are a very limited medium, but if you walk into one today, you'll see that there is much more variety than you seem to think.
Could you point to, say three (or more) different comics that illustrate the breadth of modern comics?
The only development I've noticed recently are more biographical/psuedo-biographical comics, but I'll grant that I may have missed a major development.
I had two epiphanies the day I first walked into a comic book store in Misawa. The first came when I was hit with what a REAL comic book industry looked like. In America, comics have been, and for the most part still are, a genre. The Japanese industry was a medium, with stories on every conceivable subject. Imagine, for example, if every TV show was a police drama and nothing else, and suddenly you find a network that has comedies, science fiction, documentaries, historical dramas, almost any kind of show you can imagine. That's how I felt, when I first came across comics like "Touch" (a drama about high school baseball) or "Maison Ikkoku", a standard romantic situation comedy. (continued)
But two of those three aren't comics (at least in their original form). Naruto is Manga (which is at best a cousin to comics), and Diary of a Wimpy Kid is a novel.
BTW, There are still many kids titles that the author did not mention...Just about every Disney or Archie title is meant for kids, and there are some good ones from the "big two" as well. I don't know all the titles off-hand, but if you go to your local comic shop, I'm sure that a clerk would be happy to point them out for you.
...and by the way, a small amount of manga is from the U.S.A.
I mean, other than the fact that they both use words and images, I don't see much similarity. Between, say, manhwa and manga? Sure. But until fairly recently, there was little cross-pollination between manga and American comics.
I've been to a number of local comic shops in the past decade, and I've purchased a comic within the past year. That said, I've spent far more money on manga on the average month than comics in the entire past year.
Joe Hill's Locke and Key is really something amazing to behold. Unbelievably creative and intensely emotionally resonant, with fascinating, believable characters that range from children to adults. Plus, the artwork is gorgeous. It's made me cry over and over again, it's given me chills over and over again. Go read Locke and Key. Whatever your age, go read it.
Now that comics have tailed-off a bit in their sales, they have found a new (and very profitable) venue to reach those same (yet much older) readers.
We are still looking for our favorite superhero to save the world, but now we find our defender of American justice on the silver screen.
Where are the dynamic duo "budget crisis man" and "truth-detecting boy"?