Will Eisner - Michael Schumacher [116]
Whatever the graphic novel is to be [or is], it seems to me that it must incorporate these two essential aspects of comics art if it is to be of the same species. The graphic novel may have other characteristics as well, but speech balloons and narrative breakdown seem to be vital ingredients: concurrence and action, and timing. Without these traits, the graphic novel will simply be something else—another kind of graphic story, surely, but not of the same order as the comics.
This explained some of the technical aspects of the art, but it still did not address the elements of story. What distinguished the graphic novel from a comic-book-length story? Or even a comic strip story that continued from day to day, week to week, until a story had been told?
Stephen Weiner, author of Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel and coauthor of The Will Eisner Companion, conceded the difficulty of defining the graphic novel, especially as it evolved over the years, with the appearance of graphic memoirs, graphic nonfiction, graphic adaptations, graphic novellas, and graphic story collections. For the sake of simplicity, he defined the graphic novel in a way that covered all of these books under a single umbrella.
Graphic novels, as I define them, are book-length comic books that are meant to be read as one story. This broad term includes collections of stories in genres such as mystery, superhero, or supernatural that are meant to be read apart from their corresponding ongoing comic book storyline.
Michael T. Gilbert, a comics writer and historian, took exception to the belief that Eisner was the creator of first graphic novel, a distinction he was willing to give Arnold Drake, coauthor of It Rhymes with Lust, which appeared in 1950. Gilbert agreed, however, that the issue was one of definition.
“Eisner is credited with the modern graphic novel,” Gilbert said, “but it depends on how you define modern. It it postwar? Is it eighties? I could make the argument that any of the Classics Illustrated comics were graphic novels, by any reasonable definition. A Contract with God is all related short stories, with similar themes, but that doesn’t make it a graphic novel, and it certainly doesn’t make it the first graphic novel.”
The essays, books, articles, arguments, and discussions at comics conventions invariably focused on the contents of the graphic novel when trying to define it, trace its history, and assign Eisner a place in contributing to its existence. N. C. Christopher Couch, a former editor in chief at Kitchen Sink Press, dealt with Eisner on a practical level, but his back round as a professor at the University of Massachusetts and his work as coauthor of The Will Eisner Companion placed him in the position of seeing both sides of Eisner, the artist and businessman, in relation to his work as a graphic novelist. Couch was not prone to quibbling over who came first—even though his editor at DC Comics insisted that the subtitle to his Will Eisner Companion include the phrase “Father of the Graphic Novel”—and he, as much as any of his colleagues, understood the difficulties of defining the form attributed to Eisner. In Couch’s opinion, Eisner’s familiarity with the mechanics of publishing, and his belief in the necessity of changing the physical look of his graphic novel, was a major contribution to the form.
Eisner was one of the few people in comics who had actually worked in trade publishing. At American Visuals, Eisner had produced hardcover books for the educational market on several topics, including one on space and rocketry. He had played a variety of roles, as coauthor, designer,