In Maus, Art Spiegelman's landmark graphic novel and two-part autobiographical retelling of his father's survival of the Holocaust, the pairing of images and words creates a uniquely stirring tale. Using striking visual shorthand to encapsulate his narrative, Spiegelman casts Jews as mice and Nazis as cats, while still portraying the horror of the tragedy with unflinching honesty. Due in large part to the influence of Maus , which won a Pulitzer, graphic novels had infiltrated bookstores and libraries by the end of the millennium. Acquiring a knowledge of comic books in any breadth requires submersion or at least toe-dipping into a deeply rooted subculture of trading, specialty stores, fanatic collectors, and general fandom. To collect a shelf's worth of graphic novels, however, one can merely browse one of the newer areas of the local bookstore.

The term "graphic novel" is generally understood to be a comic work bound as a regular book. Almost all, even today, have been published as a series of comic books before being collected into book format. They are more episodic than we expect "novels" to be today, but the differences between graphic novels and mere comics go deeper than semantics or length. Unlike most comics, which can span dozens or hundreds of issues collected in sequentially-numbered, bound editions, graphic novels tend to be self-contained stories.

In his inventive, demanding Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid On Earth , Chris Ware presents a whole new kind of reading experience. The story spans several generations of Corrigans who are, in various ways, emotionally stunted. The 36-year-old Jimmy Corrigan, who ends the bloodline, is under his mother's thumb and emotionally too much a "kid" to grow up and deal with his estranged father's reappearance. The characters' flights of imagination, their histories and dreams, and the development of Chicago are all embraced by Chris Ware's wide artistic vision. Jimmy Corrigan is a cult hit on college campuses, and for good reason; constantly ironic, full of awareness of its own opacity and heavy on innovative storytelling methods, it is notable above all else for its formal qualities. Uniquely, it requires the reader to learn its language as he or she goes along. Included are blueprints for paper structures like mini movie projectors, one page of snapshots of Chicago at different stages with relevant information printed on their backs, and an information brochure that includes a "Technical Explanation of the Language" the book uses, as well as an "Exam" to be taken before reading. (Question 1 of the exam, for example, asks whether "You are a. male. b. female" and, underneath in tiny letters, adds that "If b. you may stop. Put down your booklet. All others continue.")

But even when he uses a more straightforward style, Ware is far from a traditional storyteller. Most graphic novels use separate panels to add time and sequence to their illustrations, but Ware often departs from this default in favor of delving, perhaps, deeper and deeper into one scene (one panel portrays a house, with interconnected panels that take us inside the house to a desk drawer and beyond) or deeper and deeper into a character's life history (a drawing of Jimmy's mother might connect to one in a sequence of tiny panels from the embryonic stage to elderly womanhood). This exhilarating and inventive form sometimes obscures the story, and that's not always a bad thing. Despite its hyperbolic (and, of course, ironic) title, Jimmy Corrigan chronicles the lives of terribly, desperately ordinary and sub-ordinary men. When Superman appears, fulfilling the super-heroic expectations of a comic book, he is actually suicidal, representing a bleak message about the capabilities of human men. However, in its jumps between generations and in its deft portrayal of characters' interior lives, Jimmy Corrigan tells a story worthy of the word "novel." It is a unique reading experience, and moreover, represents the quintessence of a new artistic vision of graphic novels.

Blankets (2003), a beautifully-told and memorably comprehensive coming-of-age tale, advertises itself on the front cover and title page as "an illustrated novel by Craig Thompson." Many artists are wary of the phrase "graphic novel," but Thompson's work indeed represents a full-fledged novel-length story. Unabashedly autobiographical, it chronicles a strict religious upbringing in the Midwest , with leaps and crises of faith, a first love, and an angst-ridden relationship to art. Thompson's artwork is crystal-clear and expressive, the visual equivalent of poetry. He portrays his own skinny, teenage body with lively, self-deprecating humor, and brings love interest Raina to life with adorably imperfect grace. In the flights of imagination taken by so many of the younger characters, or in showing Craig's wonder at the beautiful snowy scenery around him, Thompson's artwork is lyrical and lucid. One of the highlights of the book is a six-page wordless sequence showing Craig and Raina's bond as they wake up early together and head out to play light-heartedly in the snow.

This "illustrated novel" is often at its best, indeed, when it is all illustration. Sometimes, indeed, Thompson writes very movingly, in particular when he describes the pangs and exhilarations of first love. But Thompson's prose often veers into preciousness when it describes the Midwestern surroundings. "At night, lying on your back and staring at the falling snow, it's easy to imagine oneself soaring through the stars... And then the sense of space, of depth, is lost as the snowflakes fall into a pattern," Craig thinks at one point. The one failing of the novel is its reluctance to let the illustrations "speak" for themselves. But this intimate, enormous, warm-hearted, snow-covered work is an illustrious example of novel-like, comic storytelling and, moreover, is also worthwhile reading for a mainstream audience. It contains nuanced explorations of religion and love, and even elements of a bildungsroman , as Craig, the character—along with, perhaps, Craig Thompson, the writer—comes into his own as a comic artist.

La Perdida (March 2006), Jessica Abel's second graphic novel, represents almost complete independence from the underage demographic so long associated with both comic books and graphic novels. The story of a young woman whose desire to live a true Mexican life leads her to lose herself in a dangerous social crowd is gritty, complex and adult. Despite the youthful naïveté of the half-Mexican, American-raised heroine, Carla, the story is for fully mature audiences, calling to mind Maus (with anthropomorphic mice and all). About the ex-lover whom she visits in Mexico , Carla muses, "He doesn't go for crunchy ethnic wannabes. But the sex was good, and strings-free, since we both knew he was leaving."

La Perdida muses on the problems of exile, of translation, of radical activism. Like Blankets , it contains nothing of the hyperbolic, mythic or heroic. Unlike Blankets or Jimmy Corrigan , it contains little room for flights of imagination. Instead, it takes us to the heights and depths of Mexico City : from parties to la Plaza de las Tres Culturas, from drug lords to corrupt policemen, and to aloof cliques of American expats. Illustrations are dense and textured, adding to the frenetic, dangerous feel of the city as Carla experiences it. Abel's artwork, though it is generally unadventurous in composition and style, leaves nothing to be desired in terms of technique and emotional impact. Though published in serial form originally, La Perdida comes together seamlessly as an entire novel and, read from start to finish, is a smoothly-integrated blend of words and pictures that work together to tell an adult-oriented story of suspense and intrigue. In its very maturity, however, it lacks the magic and the child-like sense of wonder that so many graphic novels retain as artists turn their eyes out upon the world.

Perhaps, in order to gain a sense of graphic novels in their larger context, we should return to Chris Ware and the robust self-examination constantly appearing throughout Jimmy Corrigan . According to a fictional newspaper article in the information brochure, comic strips are merely a marketing ploy: "Certain publishing houses are... test-marketing carefully demographed entertainments, and then strategically aiming them at a less-educated and/or intellectually blunted segment of the consumer pool... 'Dumb people are eating it up,' says our researcher." Yet in another section, he presents a completely different argument, a "theoretical framework," for his art form. "The paramount end of all aesthetic pursuit is the securing of a method for reproducing human experience in all of its complexity... we may view the language of the comic strip as the culmination of over two thousand years of civilized endeavor." Ware's own book, along with Blankets and La Perdida , demonstrates how robust and versatile this comic language really is in representing the great complexity of human life.

 

Kristen Tracey '08 is an English concentrator living in Winthrop House.