Reading Graphic Novels

Achim Hescher

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9783110445398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literatur
• Subtopic: Comics & Graphic Novels Literaturkritik

Distinguishing the graphic novel from other types of comic books has presented problems due to the fuzziness of category boundaries. Against the backdrop of prototype theory, the author establishes the graphic novel as a genre whose core feature is complexity, which again is defined by seven gradable subcategories: 1) multilayered plot and narration, 2) multireferential use of color, 3) complex text-image relation, 4) meaning-enhancing panel design and layout, 5) structural performativity, 6) references to texts/media, and 7) self-referential and metafictional devices. Regarding the subcategory of narration, the existence of a narrator as known from classical narratology can no longer be assumed. In addition, conventional focalization cannot account for two crucial parameters of the comics image: what is shown (point of view, including mise en scène) and what is seen (character perception). On the basis of François Jost's concepts of ocularization and focalization, this book presents an analytical framework for graphic novels beyond conventional narratology and finally discusses aspects of subjectivity, a focal paradigm in the latest research. It is intended for advanced students of literature, scholars, and comics experts.

1Introduction

In the last ten to fifteen years, no book format other than e-books has had a bigger boom than graphic novels, which have recently also started to come out in electronic form. It has even been argued that graphic novels have ensured the survival of bookstores in the electronic age (cf. Platthaus 2010). However, the popularity of graphic novels has certainly not been solely due to clever marketing ploys. After the void left by literary postmodernism (in verbal narrative fiction, that is), graphic novels have been the field or genre most prone to experimenting with form(s) and subject matters. If I apply paradigms such as ‘historiographic metafiction’ or ‘self-referentiality,’ for example,1I find postmodernist features in graphic novels of the 1980s and 90s, when postmodernist narrative fiction was still in fashion, as in Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen (1986–1987), Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s From Hell (1999), Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986/92), and in Marc-Antoine Mathieu’s Julius Corentin Acquefacques, prisonnier des rêves (6 vols., 1990–2013). But even nowadays, works like Bryan Talbot’s Alice in Sunderland (2007), Mana Neyestani’s Une métamorphose iranienne (2012), or Chris Ware’s Building Stories (2012) are strikingly self-referential in their makeup: Talbot and Neyestani frequently employ metalepsis, which has also been found in the exemplarily postmodern novel by John Fowles, The French Lieutenant’s Women (1969); and Ware’s Building Stories, coming in a box as a loose leaf or booklet collection, strongly remind me of B.S. Johnson’s ‘book in the box’ The Unfortunates (1969), which, like Fowles’ novel, has also been viewed as exemplary of postmodernism.2 And as an experiment with layout, Ware’s Building Stories may be traced back to Julio Cortázar’s postmodern trailblazer Rayuela (1963), in which the author suggests two different orders to read the individual chapters. In this respect, postmodernism has survived in the graphic novel – in fact, the graphic novel openly celebrates the revival of postmodernism, as in City of Glass (2004), Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli’s graphic adaptation of Paul Auster’s eponymous 1985 novella.

A considerable share of graphic novels are autobiographically motivated. The so-called graphic memoirs (see chapter 3.3.3), however, are not just graphic autobiographies; they rather thematize the making of the work itself and/or the factuality and fictionality of the self and other, as seen in Lynda Barry’s One Hundred Demons (2002), David B.’s Epileptic (2005), Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home (2006), Julie Doucet’s Ciboire de Criss! (1996), Fabrice Neaud’s Journal (1996–2002), or Lewis Trondheim’s Approximativement (1995). Not every graphic memoir, though, is self-referential or metafictional, as Ulli Lust’s Heute ist der letzte Tag vom Rest deines Lebens (2009), Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2000–2003) or David Small’s Stitches (2010).

Like graphic memoirs, reportage comics (also called travelogues or graphic journalism) are concerned with fact and fiction and display an explicit awareness of the problems at work in their narratives. Thus, Joe Sacco’s Palestine (1993–2001) and Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier’s Le photographe (2003–2006) make an increased use of irony, employ eye-catching layouts, and incorporate different media like photographs and contact prints. Although cartoonistic images seem at first to jar with the journalistic demand for objectivity, upon closer inspection, they allow for a critical presentation of ‘facts’ and the involvement of the journalists’ self in their presentation: Sacco, for example, drawn like a Crumbian underground hero, makes ironic and sarcastic comments about himself, his desire for fame, and his journalistic methods; also, he uses a layout that is reminiscent of a storyboard and underscores the subjectivity involved in the choice of his material; Guibert, Lefèvre, and Lemercier also occur as drawn characters, whereas the Afghanis, objects, and the (beautiful) countryside are often shown in photographs or on a strip of contact prints. The mixing of the different media and their layout on the page seem to highlight the dubiousness and difficulty of the journalistic undertaking, and it seems at times that Le photographe is at least as much about the author Didier Lefèvre himself as about his mission in Afghanistan. The crossing of genre borders (from graphic journalism to the graphic memoir, as in Sacco and Lefèvre, from the postmodern superhero story to the apocalyptic novel in Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen, or from graphic metafiction to graphic intermedial fantasy as in Mathieu’s Julius Corentin Acquefacques) is a specific feature of the graphic novel that has made it interesting to a new and growing audience apart from adult males that have outgrown the comic books of their youth.

Only a couple of years ago, insisting upon the comic book/graphic novel distinction was widely looked at as pedantic (and, although the winds have changed, it is still partly frowned upon). Starting around 2010, the term graphic novel has increasingly figured in the titles of articles, monographs, and essay collections. Before, with few exceptions, graphic novels were either tacitly subsumed under comics, or they were simply not subject to investigation. This considered, Roger Sabin’s Comics, Comix, and Graphic Novels (1996) and Hans Baetens’ The Graphic Novel (2001) must be looked at as pioneers in the field.

In general, the classification terminology is oriented toward comics and implies that graphic novels are a subcategory to them. Chapter three starts out with the first criteria brought up to distinguish graphic novels from comics, that is length (which concerns the page numbers in traditional American comic books compared to their Franco-Belgian peers), serialization (many but not all graphic novels first appeared in installments before they were rounded up in one volume), seriousness or authenticity (regarding the subject matter, for example, in autobiographical works), the cartoonicity of the characters, and, last but not least, complexity (which has been referred to aspects of form and the subject matter). In the end, however, these criteria have proved as too blurry and therefore inappropriate to uphold viable pertinence: there were always too many ‘exceptions’ from the rule, if the rule is to be the distinguishing criterion. Take the serialization issue: a good many graphic novels first came out in installments, and many others were immediately published in book format. An ‘either/or’ decision for or against membership in the category ‘graphic novel’ on the basis of serialization would be dubious. And take length: where is the cutoff point? Are Karasik and Mazzucchelli’s City of Glass and Jason’s The Left Bank Gang (2005) not graphic novels because of their relative brevity (though they do exceed the Franco-Belgian 48-page limit)? Here again, as with respect to other possible distinguishing criteria, an either/or seems out of place. Reflections of this kind led me to the conclusion that firstly, there should not be one single major criterion but several distinguishing criteria and secondly, those criteria should be graded to be of critical pertinence.

In fact, precisely because it was less precise than the other criteria brought up in the critical literature, complexity seemed most promising, presupposing that it was, first of all, graded, and that it came with a clear-cut set of subcategories graded in their own right. Such a terminological construction can only be realized in a prototype approach, which admits “fuzzy boundaries” (Dittmar 2008: 25) in – and overlap between – the categories and which is based on a well-defined set of core features to be completed by peripheral distinguishing features. A prototype approach thus admits categorizations based on ‘both ... and’ as well as ‘x rather than y’ in addition to ‘either/or’ decisions. Moreover, it has one more considerable advantage: unlike classical categories, it is not exclusive regarding whether an object is or is not a member of a category; its flexible categories thus forestall the necessity typical of classical categories to add new categories over time when a new object does not fit in the old ones. In other words: it provides systemic stability.

Yet before that approach can take hold, the basic terms ‘format,’ ‘medium,’ and ‘mode,’ which have been so heterogeneously employed, need to be (re)defined. First, I take ‘comics’ to signify a medium rather than a genre. As a second step, I shall set up a general, prototypical, genre classification in which graphic novels figure as a (twice removed) subgroup of graphic narratives, the counterpart to verbal narratives (see chapter 3.3.3, Fig. 3.2). With this, I shall consolidate the graphic novel as a genre, that is a historical text group. To conclude chapter three, I shall assess what I think have been the most significant approaches to comics and graphic novels, historically and with respect to critical pertinence.

In chapter four, I shall elaborate on the process of narration in graphic narratives in general and graphic novels in particular. In comparison with drama and verbal narrative fiction, I hold that there is no narrator in graphic narratives unless it is marked on both the verbal-narratorial and the pictorial plane. Graphic narratives lack the mediating and transmitting communication system of verbal narrative fiction; there is no fictional entity that would solely bring forth the whole discourse of the work, that is, the verbal-narratorial and the pictorial track. As in drama, showing is the dominating mode in graphic narratives, despite the possibility of narratorial caption script. Showing here is defined as visual-pictorial in terms of the mise en scène and point of view. In graphic narratives, showing is set against seeing, which relates primarily to character vision and secondarily to what the reader-observers see (chapter 4.1).

Only recently have comics critics started to increasingly write about narratorial representation and particularly focalization. The latter, however, is too infused with connotations from classical narratology, which strongly stand against its application to the pictorial track in graphic narratives. To problematize the pertinence of focalization in practice, I shall demonstrate with examples from James Vance and Dan Burr’s historical graphic novel On the Ropes (2013) that focalization accounts neither for point of view switching nor for unattributable points of view and that the novel’s protagonist is not a narrator but a narrating character. As a result, I shall abandon the focalization concept from classical narratology and focus instead on the relation between ‘what is shown’ – the mise en scène and point of view – and ‘what is seen,’ or character vision, to the extent that it is displayed in the image (chapter 4.2).

The focus of section 4.3 is therefore on the pictorial track. When the point of view of an image is not attributable to a subject in the story world, it is referred to as an objective image; and if it is attributable, it is either subjective, as the point of view image, or half-subjective (such as, for example, the over-the-shoulder or reaction image). However, in half-subjective images (the great majority of comics images), the characters often see something else from what the implied observer (or projection center of the image) is supposed to see, and that in turn may be different from what the empirical reader-observer sees. I shall demonstrate these points in detail with a page from Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World (1993–1997, see chapter 4.3.1.2).

What is shown in terms of point of view is subordinate to the mise en scène, which pertains to the external communication system, or the artist-writer (team). That the mise en scène shows something else from what characters see, I shall demonstrate with examples from Alan Moore and David Lloyd’s V for Vendetta (1988–1989) and Moore and Gibbons’ Watchmen (see chapter 4.3.1). Montage and cross-cutting also pertain to the artist-writer and represent above all a specific case of showing in which point of view and character vision are of secondary importance. They add complexity to the pictorial track and the plot, either in the form of two parallel strands of action or two strands of action of which one is delayed in time so that the other anticipates the upcoming events. Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell’s historical novel From Hell (1999) contains examples of both types of cross-cutting (see chapter 4.3.1.1).

The crucial relation between what the single image shows and what the characters see is best accounted for in François Jost’s term ocularization and its subtypes: primary internal, secondary internal, and zero ocularization. I have extended the definitional scope of ocularization to include the parameters of the mise en scène such as angle, framing, lighting, coloring, etc. and the perspective construction, in other words everything that the image visually and pictorially displays (chapter 4.3.1.2).

Until now, the focus of investigation has been on the pictorial track. In chapter 4.4, I shall elaborate on the different types of text in the verbal track: paratext, narratorial captions, speech and thought balloons, sounds and lettering, texts in the story world, and tags. It is noteworthy in this context that all these types of text are to some extent pictorial, which is most obvious with regard to sound lettering or speech balloons.

At the beginning of chapter four, I put forth the thesis that graphic narratives lack the mediating/transmitting communication system reified in the fictional narrator, who solely generates the whole narrative. In subchapters 4.5–4.7, the question concerning the (im)possibility of a fictional narrator shall be readdressed, and reasons are given why teachers of graphic novels need not worry that their students draw biographical conclusions about author-writers. Apart from that, fictional narrators may exist in graphic novels under the condition that th...