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For
most of the history of American comics, storytellers have had to structure
their tales in episodic chunks of narrative, their plotlines unfolding in
serialized chapters from month to month. This was due to the nature of magazine publishing and the requirements
of the marketplace, conditions which inadvertently influenced the medium in
significant ways. As with pulp sci-fi or
detective periodicals such as Astounding Stories or Detective Fiction,
publishers and the reading audience alike tended to favor brief, cliffhanging
narratives full of colorful, often lurid characters. Stories in the comics resembled soap operas
or radio plays more than novels, a condition we still see in most mainstream superhero
comics being published today. These
sorts of episodic stories are not really supposed to end, like Pachelbel’s
Canon or The Beatles’ Hey Jude, they’re designed to go on forever and
ever.

 
There
is some debate about which book actually qualifies as the first true graphic
novel. Will Eisner’s A Contract With God
is often sited, a book that’s a collection of short stories about normal people living in a
New York tenement building. These
beautifully drawn stories are written with a subtle, literary flavor which
still resonates today. This is probably
the true mark of literary quality — if a work can seem living and vital every
time you re-read (or in the case of comics, every time you re-view). If that work can somehow continually enrich
the person reading it again and again at different points along the walk of
life, it becomes a priceless thing, like an old and continually surprising
friend. For the decades preceding
Eisner’s attempts, "comics" as a storytelling medium relied on either
the daily newspaper pages or the monthly comic book format for its stage. Whether in the hands of a great artist or a
tired hack, the stapled newsprint pamphlet was the staple of comics
storytelling. An artist like Milton
Caniff could develop long and rather complex adult-oriented storylines in his
strip Terry and the Pirates, and his work — along with Windsor McCay’s Little
Nemo In Slumberland and a few others — is still held as a high water mark in
20th century cartooning. In Europe and Asia, there were longer narratives, and
some stories (such as Cendres and Pellos’ Futuropolis or Osamu Tezuka’s Adolph) resembled prose literature in
their tone and content, however these were largely unknown outside of their
home countries but to a handful of world travelers and professional artists
for years and years. It has really only
been for about a single generation — maybe since the mid 1980s — that the long
format "graphic novel" has been a viable storytelling vehicle for
people who want to tell stories in the comics medium, and only for that same
amount of time American readers have had wider and wider access to the entire
body of what I call "world comics"– graphic stories from around the
globe. Today’s young reader has access
to virtually the entire body of comics history, stretching from Japan to Europe
to the cave-spelunking past of America’s many venerable traditions.

 
Each
facet of the comics medium is important and deserves its own special
consideration, but it’s the writing in comics I’m thinking about right
now. I often wonder why we don’t see
more literary quality in the comics being published today, why we don’t have a
John Steinbeck or Robert Penn-Warren in our medium, authors who can unfold a
filigreed theme across an extended storyline and touch on that ineffable shade
we call "the human condition." Where are our Sam Hamiltons, our Willie Starks, our Jack Burdens, our
Cal Trasks? It may simply be that good
writing is rare. It is also entirely possible that most comics creators are
simply unconcerned with developing literary themes in their work, favoring
instead sweeping epics of good versus evil, populating their paper worlds with colorfully costumed heroes and villans
invested with very little psychological complexity or self-awareness. It may be that most people who are attracted
to the medium want very little more out of life than to draw pretty pictures,
tell exciting, splashy stories, and get paid for it. There is certainly nothing wrong with those interests
(I wholeheartedly share them myself), but every time I finish what Hemingway
might have called "a damn good book," I can’t help feeling there is
always a need for more and better writing in the comics. When it comes to comics, the equivalent of a
fine literary writer would have to be someone (or someones) with the implicit
vision of a poet, who sees and feels life and knows how to code it into visual
storytelling through comics’ special melange of prose/dialogue and persuasive
drawing. It seems to me a poorly drawn
but well written story is far better than a well drawn, poorly written
one. When we’re lucky, as in the case of
Gipi’s Notes For A War Story, we have both together, at once. That should be our ideal, then. More stories with better art and better
writing, always and forever more. Whether it’s a serious meditation on the private life of a family or a
madcap ruckus with kooky talking animals, all I care is that it’s a comic story
which is done well and it has lasting impact — that’s the literary quality I
want to see in a comic.

 
For
my upcoming projects Battling Boy and Total THB, I’ve been really thinking
about the freedom made possible by the extended graphic novel format. It is significant to note that we’ve reached
a point in the history of comics where an author can more-or-less work
completely outside of the monthly serialized periodical format, with its
inherent page strictures and narrative conformities. Nobody said it was easy or could come without
paying your dues, but you can do it all the same. So long as you have something valuable to say
and the talent to put it on paper, you can do it. It is no longer necessary to constantly
invent some new cliffhanger every 24 to 32 pages to keep the readers coming
back month after month, it is no longer necessary to come up with endlessly
hyperbolic cover designs to entice new readers, no longer necessary to truncate
extended scenes of character development for lack of space on the page. These
are all common characteristics of the monthly comic book publishing format
which many of us struggle with all the time. Now, thanks to the vigorous interest in manga on the part of new readers
and the on-going assault comics is making on the whole of contemporary pop
culture, cartoonists are able to approach new comics in the same way authors
like Tom Wolfe or Kurt Vonnegut would’ve approached their latest novel. Readers crave good stories, and probably
beyond that, deeper meaning. There seems
to be a real psychological need for art — for all the arts. Art offers us a reflection of interior
ourselves, through the eyes and hands and words of another. Through meaningful art, we consider ourselves
and our very condition of being human, and in the process, gain more insight
into our true natures as living, sensing creatures living on this planet of
ours which we call Earth. Comics has
stepped out of the wide shadows of film and illustration, and is now invited to
stand on its own, an infant medium full of potential and power. We are being invited to share our stories on
a world stage, however long or short our stories might be. We’ve got a lot of work to do, let’s show
them what we’ve got.

[UP NEXT WEEK: DANICA NOVGORODOFF]