From January 26 to 29, thousands will gather in Angouleme story, France to celebrate a specific type of storytelling. It’s call bandes dessinees in France, or drawn strips. In America, it’s harder to know what it should be call. It was once called comic books, cartoons, or the funnies, which are silly names for childish entertainments. We now call it graphic novels with some people scowling at the pomposity of the name.
I have seen the incredible growth of graphic novels as both a creator and an academic. They are now exhibit in museums and stacked on bedsides tables. There are some odd dances of nomenclature that we still have to do just to talk about them https://107.152.46.170/togel-online/bandar/kicau4d/.
A Story Told With A Picture
It is very common to tell a story using a photograph. People will instinctively think of adding another picture to the one that doesn’t tell enough.
This is evident in Neolithic cave paintings and Egyptian murals, Greek pottery, Renaissance altarpieces, and Greek pottery. It can also found in folk traditions. On a trip to Peru I was able to see lintel beams with courtship stories painted on them. There are academic forms like the Japanese scrolls emaki and there are acts that are unique to each other, such as Charlotte Salomon’s painting of her autobiography Life or Theatre?
This storytelling approach is most famously use in the late 19th-century when James Gordon Bennett, a newspaper publisher, want to showcase his new colour lithography presses. A number of artists given free reign to create a New York Herald children’s supplement. After some quick experimentation, they came up with a set of conventions that allowed them to tell a cohesive visual story on a newspaper paper. Before, word balloons, motion lines and visual onomatopoeia were all used. They were all used before, but they were now standardize into a familiar format: the comic strip.
Comic strips have been associate with low-brow, preliterate content since their origins as children’s comics. Sometimes artists had higher artistic or literary pretensions, and would try to find a better name for their work. People began to use terms such as picto fiction, sequential arts and graphic novels in the 1930s.
Why not? Great works can be create from both the written word as well as the representational image. Combining the two should result in great works. It was natural to search for a better name for comic book, since it had too many associations with childhood and cheap newsprint.
What Name Can Signal Respectability?
Graphic novel is a term that describes a long-form comic with literary ambitions and quality production. It was popularized in 1980s after Art Spiegelman’s Maus success. Spiegelman wanted to use the term commix to refer to his work, which would have paid tribute to the 1960s underground comix while emphasizing the mixed parts of this mongrel medium, such as high and low culture, word, picture, art, and commerce.
The graphic novel, much like the horseless carriage, made it easier to grasp a new concept by comparing it with something you already knew. Publishers and booksellers quickly adopted it. It sounded decent.
After Maus, there was briefly a surge in mainstream publishers interest in graphic novels as literature. But it failed to last. It was impossible to produce enough material to replicate the success of Maus. There are millions of unfinished manuscripts scattered around the globe. It is not enough to give a cartoonist more pages. This requires the conscious development of a complex set of skills. Another generation was needed to reach the critical mass of creators required to maintain a vibrant graphic novel market.
The 2000s saw a second wave in graphic novels. This was led by Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, the smartest boy on Earth. But Ware was joined by a wealthy cohort. Publishers began to look beyond comics and started looking for non-literary graphic novels. They also looked for autobiographies Satrapi’s Persepolis, adaptations of Paul Auster’s City of Glass, visual essays, journalism Sacco’s Safe Area Gorazde, and personal stories Karasik’s and Mazzucchelli’s Persepolis. This was the time that comics’ most beloved child, the superhero, reached the big screen.
Comics The Case For Comics Story
Comics have gained the popular and critical respectability that they sought, but many people have started to criticize the title graphic novel, finding it just as restrictive and prejudicial as the comic book.
The term graphic novel is no longer used to describe a particular format but can now be used to refer to all types of comics. It can be confusing. Graphic novels are, by and large, nonfiction. Popular are autobiographies. They aren’t novels, which is to say they don’t really count as novels. What do you call pages or pages that are only a few paragraphs? One magazine wanted to refer to its comics section as graphic shorts. This sounded like a pair cellophane hot pans.
I am less concerned about the jargon of the term as a creator than the expectation it can create namely that long-form comics are novelistic. The novel is one way to create an extended narrative. It does not take into account the strengths of text. This approach may not work for storytelling that is visually oriented. A comic creator might be better off structuring her story like a dance, a puzzle box, architecture, or song. Comics are able to draw on their own history and build their own models, rather than looking at others. This is what makes a comic a mature medium.
What do we call this medium? While there is no perfect medium, comics might be the best. This is how most creators refer to their work. Although it doesn’t possess the same polysyllabic splendor of graphic novels, there are so many exceptional works of literary and artistic merit that we might be able to let the work speak for themselves.