Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [115]
Eisner is often credited with inventing the term graphic novel, but in reality, he was neither the inventor of the term nor the first to publish one.
“I thought I had invented the term,” Eisner admitted, “but I discovered later that some guy thought about it a few years before I used the term. He had never used it successfully and had never intended it the way I did, which was to develop what I believe was viable literature in this medium.”
In years to come, when book-length works of sequential art expanded in scope to include biography, memoir, history, and other types of nonfiction, the term graphic novel would be dismissed by comics artists and writers, who complained that it limited the understanding of their work to a convenient label. Eisner himself, who experimented with the form over the next three decades, called it a “limited term,” although his preferred “graphic literature” or “graphic story” came across sounding a little too academic for bookstore owners and readers alike, just as the term sequential art would rub some readers the wrong way. Eisner would never like it, but Oscar Dystel probably spoke for a majority of editors and readers when he told Eisner that the graphic novel, regardless of the new terminology, was ultimately a comic book.
Comics scholars, like their counterparts in prose fiction, will always haggle over the definitions, composition, inner workings, and merits of the works spilling off bookstore and library shelves. If nothing else, it gives them something to do—topics for lectures, panel discussions at conventions, books and magazine articles, and late night barroom debates. Literature has rigid schools of criticism that go in and out of vogue, as well as intellectuals and self-appointed arbiters of taste who are all too pleased to announce, with great fanfare, the writers and books one simply has to read. When A Contract with God came along, comics were too young for such a history, but they were working on it. The graphic novel gave critics, historians, and social observers a virgin field to explore, chart, and plow.
First came the issue of definition. The term graphic novel was unheard of when Eisner published A Contract with God in 1978, so defining it was open to debate. Was it held to a prose novel’s standards? Was it, as Art Spiegelman once said, a big comic book that needed a bookmark? Storytelling and sequential art went back a long way, at least to the days of ancient Egypt, when stories were told in hieroglyphics. For all anyone knew, sequential art dated back to the cave drawings. No one argued that these early literary permutations should be considered novels, graphic or otherwise. Eisner had tossed out the term without giving it a lot of thought and attached it to a collection of longish stories as a means of announcing that this was serious work (as opposed to the superhero stuff on the comics market), but the immediate effect was confusion.
Robert C. Harvey, a comics scholar with a doctorate in English and a sideline career as a freelance cartoonist, joined a number of historians when he traced the modern graphic novel back to as early as 1827, when Swiss artist Rodolphe Töpffer combined words and pictures in his satirical tales. In his 1996 book, The Art of the Comic Book: An Aesthetic History, Harvey repeated one of Töpffer’s statements about his work, which seemed to offer one definition of the graphic novel:
The drawings without their text would have only a vague meaning; the text, without the drawings, would have no meaning at all. The combination of the two makes a kind of novel.
Harvey accepted this only to a point. Since Töpffer pre-dated the comic strip, he had nothing to which he could compare his work. Later comic strip artists such as C. W. Kahles (Hairbreadth Harry) and Alex Raymond (Flash Gordon, Prince Valiant)