The Use and Abuse of Literature - Marjorie Garber [42]
Graphic novels, which trace their forebears not only to comic books and comic strips but also to the medieval woodcut, have been published in the U.S. and in Europe since the 1930s. The term graphic novel has been in use at least since the 1960s and became popular with Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978), in which the word graphic was intended to distinguish it not only from what we might call, in a back-formation, the verbal novel, but also from other kinds of graphic illustration, like—of course—comic books. These works were thus both graphic novels and graphic novels, depending upon what the selected comparison (or contrast) group might be. “The American graphic novel considers itself a literary genre,” wrote one scholar of the field, “a novel, not made by words, but by images, balloons, and captions,” so that “in ‘graphic novel,’ the important word is ‘novel,’ not graphic.”5 By contrast, he suggested, in the French-speaking parts of Europe, the emphasis is put much more on the word graphic, and the genre as a whole is regarded as a new kind of storytelling where a visual logic motivates both the plot and the narration. But as the form itself has internationalized, these distinctions may be seen to be breaking down.
Some authors of highly regarded graphic novels, like Art Spiegelman, the creator of Maus, a graphic novel about the Holocaust, also teach and write about the history of comics—or, as Spiegelman prefers to call them, comix. Maus, published in two volumes (Maus I: A Survivor’s Tale and Maus II: My Father Bleeds History) won Spiegelman a Pulitzer Prize in 1992 and was the topic of an exhibition. Spiegelman’s graphic novel about the World Trade Center bombing on 9/11, In the Shadow of No Towers, was published in 2004.
That Maus is a work of literature, whatever literature is thought to be today, is inarguable (though this will doubtless lead someone to argue it). Charles McGrath, in his account of the graphic-novel phenomenon, notes that the genre really took off in the 1990s. Books like Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth and Daniel Clowes’s David Boring have, says McGrath, achieved cult status on many campuses. “These are the graphic novels—the equivalent of ‘literary novels’ in the mainstream publishing world—and they are beginning to be taken seriously by the critical establishment. Jimmy Corrigan even won the 2001 Guardian Prize for best first book, a prize that in other years has gone to authors like Zadie Smith, Jonathan Safran Foer and Philip Gourevitch.”6 Such novels are, he thinks, especially suited for portraying “blankness and anomie,” “spookiness and paranoia,” and “cartoonish” exaggeration and caricature. “How good are graphic novels, really?” McGrath asks. “Are these truly what our great-grandchildren will be reading, instead of books without pictures? Hard to say.” But the genre has gained enormous respect and corresponding review attention.
In a pun that comics and graphic novel writers were quick to exploit, the word gutter, a technical term for the space between the panels of a comic strip (as well as for the blank space between two facing pages in a printed book), came to emblematize both the supposed low origins of the genre and its defining formal characteristic. The graphic novel is a growth stock in both the publishing and the academic worlds, the topic of much discussion and of several critical anthologies. The trade paperback version of the collected Watchmen comics written by Alan Moore and drawn by Dave Gibbons was marketed as a graphic novel and appeared on Time magazine’s “All-TIME 100 Novels list” of the “best English-language novels from 1923 to the present,” together with works like All the King’s Men, To the Lighthouse,