There’s No Such Thing as a Graphic Novel

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[From the drawing board of Cyril Pedrosa]

That was probably a bad way to start my blog
entry. I already regret it bitterly. I would’ve been better off talking about
the arrival of spring or rambling about French trains. Telling you that I’m
uncomfortably seated on seat 27, aisle side, heading towards a small town on
the Atlantic coast of France where, with the pretext of signing some copies of Three
Shadows at the local bookstore, I’m mainly hoping to stretch out as much as I
can the pleasure of having lunch at a restaurant facing the port, praying that
they’ll still have some room for smokers on the terrace…

But what can I say, I got myself stuck in this
argument about graphic novels being non-existent.

Before Three Shadows came out in France, I was
a comics artist in the specifically European sense of being an author of bandes
dessinées. For most people, especially in France and Belgium, that would mean
that you tell stories in 46-page oversized (8¼” by 11.7″) hardcover
books produced on high-quality paper with beautiful colors, and that the main
purpose of these stories is to entertain readers.

And for a long time I too believed that my job
consisted of telling colorful and entertaining stories in that format of
46-page oversized hardcover books. Perhaps it was because I had fond memories
of escaping as a kid in the pages of Asterix, Le journal de Mickey or Gaston
Lagaffe, or because my studies were in totally different fields (mathematics,
advertising and animation), but whatever the excuses the sad truth is that,
when my first books came out, I hadn’t given much thought to the form of
comics.

I had no particular viewpoint, so I focused on
my drawing, wanting to make it as pretty and attractive as possible, but with a
hint of originality that would mark my territory and create a style of my own.
I produced books the way a carpenter might produce chairs, with a love of good
craftsmanship. In the eyes of my French-speaking peers, I was a comics author,
since I published nice attractive books in the format I’ve just described. But
I saw myself more as an illustrator of comics, something in fact quite
different, though I didn’t realize it fully at the time.

But as I worked on my first books based on
scripts by my old friend David Chauvel, I was carefully following the work of
Blutch, Joann Sfar, Lewis Trondheim, David B, Nicolas de Crécy, Emmanuel
Guibert, and many others, and I had to admit to myself that I was an idiot — a
nice, friendly idiot, I hope, one who worked on his books with care and diligence,
but an idiot nonetheless.

Those talented, thoughtful, inventive people
had an artistic maturity far greater than mine. They burst out of established
forms and came up with a wealth of innovative ways of drawing and radically new
subject matter. In the end their books changed my life. They managed to make me
understand that comics are a language, a language with rules that you can and
should break, and in which you can and should invent your own words, your own
syntax. A language that can encompass everything, as long as you take the
trouble to think things through until you find the form, new or old, that suits
what it is you want to express — a
language that doesn’t want to be confined to any mold, like that damn 46-page
glossy hardcover format.

Since then, little by little, book after book,
I try, with varying degrees of success, to be less an illustrator of comics
than someone who plays with the language of the comics medium. In that, I’m
convinced that graphic form has to contribute as much to storytelling as do the
well-known narrative tools of angles (close-ups, reverse angles and so on) or
the skillful use of ellipse. I think we need to subject our drawing skills to
intense questioning, not with the thought of “what’s my way of representing
reality?”  — which only points you to
something a bit vain, called a “style,” that’s usually nothing more than a
fancy name for our tics and bad habits in drawing — but rather “taking into
account my limitations, my tools, my knowledge, my ability to invent and improvise,
what would be the best way of representing reality in that scene, at that
specific moment, with that specific emotion?” That language, that subtle
interplay of forms, that delicate and invisible art of placing as much in the
empty space between two panels as in the panels themselves — called comics or bande
dessinée —  is something I treasure, and
it’s the only one I know how to use to tell stories.

Being an author of comics is just that:
telling stories through the use of that language. But it’s not less than that,
and I hold the language and those who use it with talent in very high esteem.

But in the past few years in France, as soon
as a book of bande dessinée is something other than the 46-page color hardcover
format I described, the book gets called a roman graphique, borrowing from the
US term of graphic novel. I don’t know who the clever marketing whiz was that came
up with the idea, but it’s clearly designed to lend a stamp of cultural
approval by associating with novels, i.e. with “serious” literature for real
readers, those with brains.

I can’t judge whether there’s same association
in the US, but in France the term is used very consciously, by publishers,
salespeople, bookstore owners, critics and even sometimes the authors themselves,
to highlight to potential readers that this book is a quality product that will
stimulate their neurons and not some trashy little comic book. Since Three
Shadows came out, I’ve been awarded, probably temporarily, the title of graphic
novel auteur. One reporter who interviewed me explained that the book had to be
a graphic novel, since its layout and number of pages gave it “the look of
a novel.” I replied that I could
show him some cookbooks that look a lot like Three Shadows, but nobody’s
suggested calling it a “graphic cookbook”!

Saying and thinking that gives the idea that
this constantly evolving language we use is not enough, that it isn’t rich and
elaborate enough, and that it needs some literary stamp of approval to have
full value. It’s true that it’s easier to say that than to explain how Chris Ware’s
Jimmy Corrigan is a “total comic,” to highlight the complex representation of
time in the work of Frédéric Peeters, to describe the interplay of abstract and
figurative representation in the books of Hugo Pratt, and so on. Yet these
“graphic novels,” as the term is used in France, owe nothing to the novel or to
literature. They are pure, and often beautiful, comic books: the language they
use, regardless of how inventive the forms used may be, is the language of
comics. That’s what gives these creative works their power, and that’s what
explains the very distinctive pleasure that their readers take in the process.

So, as far as I’m concerned, there are comic
books – good or bad ones, ambitious or mediocre ones, small, thick, large ones,
Japanese, Korean, Belgian or American ones. They might contain a lot of pages
or just a few, color, black & white illustration, paper cutouts, digital
pictures or whatnot. But all of them draw upon the same language, a language so
subtle that a number of readers will only stay in the doorway of those books
and won’t see the jewels inside.

But there’s no such thing as a graphic novel.

[UP NEXT WEEK: LELAND MYRICK]