Must I Paint You A Picture?
The Sunday New York Times Magazine from July 11 features a very long and generally well-informed article by Charles McGrath on the current state of the graphic novel. This is one of a growing number of articles to appear in the last several years, taking note of the increasingly serious literary and artistic ambitions of sequential art (e.g., comic books).
McGrath touches all the familiar high points – Crumb, Spiegelman, Chris Ware, Joe Sacco, Alan Moore (although he conspicuously leaves out the historically-imposing godfather of the genre, Will Eisner) – and name-checks the requisite sources of intellectual authority on the new medium (e.g., Michael Chabon, Scott McCloud, Gary Groth). His thumbnail sketches of the creators are generally interesting and occasionally informative, and his assessment of the work is informed and respectful.
What’s troubling about this piece, however, is the central thesis that graphic novels are threatening to supplant prose fiction, and are emblematic of a dumbing-down of our culture. McGrath begins:
…Someday the novel… will go into decline -- if it hasn't already -- and will become, like poetry, a genre treasured and created by just a relative few. This won't happen in our lifetime, but it's not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be.
It might be comic books. Seriously. Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal -- and if the highbrows are right, they're a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit. [emphasis added]
This presumption of tension between illustrated narrative and traditional prose underlies most of the article, even as McGrath expounds knowingly and (a bit too) authoritatively on the unique aspects of sequential art as its own medium. Perhaps he feels he must take this tone when explaining graphic novels to the overwhelmingly prose-literate and, McGrath seems to presume, skeptical readers of the New York Times Magazine. Whatever the case, this idea that prose novels are somehow threatened or in competition with graphic novels is completely artificial and spurious, and the condescension this artifice carries with it really discredits a lot of otherwise-intelligent analysis. The novel has followed its own historical arc of development and decline, same as poetry and theatre. Graphic novels are eminently worthy of examination and critique, but on their own merits, not as a subplot to the demise of prose fiction.
The other main weakness to McGrath’s piece is his selection of examples. On one hand, he cites an admirably broad range of creators, from the semi-mainstream Alan Moore to underground and alternative figures like Crumb, Spiegelman, Dan Clowes and Charles Burns. This accurately represents the peaks of the medium to a non-specialized audience, but does so by giving a museum-level rather than street-level view. Clowes, Ware, Sacco and most particularly Spiegelman are among the most self-consciously “arty” figures on the scene, and, as such, most recognizable to the readership of the New York Times. But the richness and vitality of the current renaissance in sequential art is coming from those just below the surface, whose work doesn’t grace the New Yorker or the cover of McSweeney’s Quarterly. For example:
- Eric Shanower’s epic history of the Trojan War, Age of Bronze, whose second volume (of a projected 7) is just about to hit the street. Exquisitely drawn and thrillingly-told, Age of Bronze is also a meticulously-researched work of history and scholarship. The bibliography alone runs to 5 pages.
- The ongoing “Alec McGarrity” series by Eddie Campbell (The King Canute Crowd, How to Be an Artist, The Three Piece Suit, and 2002’s After the Snooter): poignant snippets of autobiography, told with wry humor in Campbell’s compellingly-minimalistic penscratch. Campbell also illustrated Alan Moore’s grim and exhaustive study of Jack the Ripper, From Hell.
- Vox, an accomplished and unpretentious collection of literary-oriented short stories by Leland Purvis. Also, from the same publisher, The Castaways by Rob Vollmar and Pablo G. Callejo, which tells a Depression-era story of a young boy on the road.
- The Treasury of Victorian Murder, an ongoing series of beautifully-drawn and amusingly-told true crime stories from the 19th century by Rick Geary.
- Guy Davis's staggeringly-imaginative and intricate costume-drama The Marquis, lavishly illustrated and set in a dreamlike alternate universe of gothic spires and Venetian carnival masques.
I could cite dozens more examples as well. Needless to say, McGrath needed to pick and choose who and what to discuss in his article and couldn’t mention every noteworthy title and creator on the market. But it is disappointing that he stuck so exclusively to the blindingly-obvious and highly-celebrated (while at the same time completely ignoring Eisner). To my admittedly sensitive ear, this smacks of East Coast bias and too much reliance on self-serving sources within the tightly-knit New York alternative comix community.
There’s certainly nothing wrong with the folks he cited. It’s just that, by choosing those particular examples, McGrath unwittingly reduced the great diversity of subject-matter, tone, artistic style, sensibility and sociology of the serious sequential art movement to its most stuffy and pretentious. Even Alan Moore, who is emphatically not stuffy, is featured in his role as eccentric auteur (From Hell, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, Watchmen), when in fact, he is currently writing and supervising an entire line of extremely enjoyable mainstream superhero comics (Tom Strong, Promethia, Top Ten). This streak of wide-eyed fanboyism has always tempered Moore’s otherwise-forbidding persona and made him even more unusual in the comics world. McGrath ignores it to fit his “literary” narrative, at the expense of the fuller picture.
This literary fixation also causes him to downplay the role of the art. At one point, he opines:
There is also little of that in-your-face, cinematic drawing style developed by Stan Lee, Jack Kirby and other pioneers of the action comic. Most of the better graphic novelists consciously strive for a simple, pared-down style and avoid tricky angles and perspectives.
This is, of course, absolute garbage, even within the limited set of examples he’s chosen. Robert Crumb is a consummate draftsman, as different from Kirby as could possibly be imagined, but just as spectacular in his own way. I doubt there’s anything he couldn’t draw convincingly. Ditto Dave McKean and Bill Sienkiewicz, two tremendous talents not mentioned in McGrath’s article, who are among the most flamboyant visual artists working today in any medium, but chose to do most of their work for comics. Even Chris Ware has considerably more range than is evidenced by his constipated and tedious “Jimmy Corrigan” work. His recently-released sketch-diary, The Acme Novelty Date Book, is full of interesting and challenging art, “tricky angles” and all.
In summary, McGrath seems uneasy with the visual quality of sequential art, and at every opportunity chooses to discuss it from the comfortable perspective of literature and narrative. That’s fine and worth doing, but not in a piece whose length and authoritative tone suggest that he’s painting a comprehensive picture. It’s good that the Times sees fit to run these kind of stories despite their flaws. Someday soon, I expect they will get it right.
4:13:53 PM 
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