Graphic Novels and not so Novelish Graphics
August 20, 2007 by mfearing
I’m going to be writing about Graphic Novels. What the hell do I know you ask. I don’t read too many GNs. A few here or there. But there is one I really love. It was sent to me by a friend in Europe who found the English translation. It is called Ordinary Victories, I think it came out in the US in 2005. Which would make sense, since I am always three years behind anything important going on…Anyway, it is by Manu Larcenet. It is not just good, it is great. Beautiful in it’s simplicity and literary and it creates hope for graphic novels in me. (by the way, I wonder if graphic novels in translation improve, as the authors has another writer ‘editing’ and helping the prose? One more set of eyes/ears in the translation?)
Most of the time graphic novels are badly written and the pictures add nothing. (unless it is a graphic novel about a big battle and the artist can fill the pages with decapitated heads. Now that’s a graphic novel!) A well written story doesn’t NEED pictures. It takes a singular vision to produce something well written where pictures add something and aren’t just distraction. Plenty of writers create short stories and novels that I could imagine working as graphic novels, though the pictures really wouldn’t add to the enjoyment of the work. Tony Earley, Tom Franklin, Paul Auster all have some material that I can imagine working in graphic novel format - BUT, the pictures wouldn’t add anything. You could say, they are so well written, they don’t NEED pictures.
When we talk about the modern graphic novel (and I only know the word as coming from Will Eisner in description of his work) we are not talking about the ‘illustrated classics’. That’s when you take a Readers Digest version of a classic work, and add pictures to get kids to read it. I am talking about a format where the pictures and the text work together to create a new work. One can’t be without the other. The best analogy is probably a good picture book. Where if you read the manuscript it would be almost meaningless without the pictures. Now that I think about it, some of the great comic strips also fall into this category of zen-like writing and art. I am also not talking about just a repackaging of a bunch of single issue comics into a hardback form so they can sell it in the big-box stores and charge more. For me , a Graphic Novel is a well written story that, for some reason, can’t be on the page without the art accompanying it. (Perhaps the best analogy is a song with lyrics. You can listen to the music and it hints at something, but if you read just the lyrics, they may leave you a bit empty. Combined with music, they add up to a greater whole.)
So why does Ordinary Victories work for me? I can’t tell you exactly. Isn’t that great? After all my shooting my mouth off, I am a little constipated when it comes to why it works, when it works. And I think, that is a sure sign that it works.
I won’t discuss color, or line, or composition or how he draws hands. Those are obsessions and technical. Like talking about punctuation when reading Dostoevsky.
I can list some things - his topics in the novel include the art of photography, the meaning of an image, the search for meaning in art and artist. So the visual component translates well. The writing is good enough, and the characters interesting enough, that without question the manuscript could be developed into a short story and have great impact. His drawing is elegant, not overworked, but truthful and its simplicity does not make ‘logos’ of the people and things.
Find, it, buy it, read it. It’s one of the best things I have read this year, and that IS saying a lot.
” I long confused the artist with his work. It was only to psychoanalysis, by successive stages, that I was able to seperate the two. You can be a great artist and a total asshole. You can do very beautiful things, while being rather ugly yourself. You can capture all the beauty of the world on paper, yet never be part of it. It’s strange: how can one be so surpassed by what one creates? But if the work is better than the artist, why doesn’t it improve him?…”
