The Graphic Novel vs. The Comic Book
09.30.06By Collin DavidSee, I don’t collect comic books. I don’t live close enough to a comic shop to warrant hunting down the current issues of my favorite characters to keep up with the epic storylines that are happening. Comics also take up a lot of space, what with their fancy backing boards and protective mylar casings, and at $2.50 or more per issue, it’s not a cheap hobby. It feels more like having a pet or paying child support to an estranged spouse than a delight.
So, I collect graphic novels. It sounds fancy and hip, but it’s really just eight or so regular comic issues bound together into book form, like a mega-comic. There’s a scientifically tested probability that if you call them ‘graphic novels’ instead of ‘comic books’, your chance of scoring goes up about 15 percent. Also, showering will increase that percentage. Who’da thunk it?
Cram a year’s worth of drawn-out visual anticipation into a single volume for about 15 bucks and you have gold - the graphic novel. Sure, they’re about 8 months out-of-date as far as comic continuity goes, but they look a lot nicer on a bookshelf, and you can snag ‘em on Amazon or your local bookshoppe on the cheap. They probably won’t be worth more later, as some comic issues are, but profitability usually isn’t my main motive behind my interest in comics. My real motive is that I want to be Batman in more ways that I’m comfortable explaining and I’m trying to glean some of his tricks. So far, I’m up to ‘step one : become a billionaire’. I’m sure that the buttkicking comes somewhere after that, but I’ll skip the whole ‘getting a little boy to live with me and play dress-up’ stage.
In keeping up with the never-ending saga of the immortal Batman, I picked up the recent ‘Face the Face’ storyline, which collects issues 651 to 654 of Batman and issues 817 to 820 of Detective. It deals with Batman’s absence from Gotham, how a reformed Two-Face somehow protected the city while Batman was gone, and Two-Face eventually going crazy again upon batman’s return. While I still don’t understand how a non-physical villian character could defend Gotham city as well as Batman could, nor do I agree with the death of one of Batman’s more important and interesting enemies, The Ventriloquist, it represents an important part of the Batman canon. Ergo, I was obligated and compelled. Apparently, it was really interesting to watch play out over half of a year, but I got it all in one fistful.
See, DC Comics recently orchestrated an enormous, soul-shattering series of events that shook every DC hero and villain to the core. People dying, heroes disbanding and losing their powers, and generally depressing stuff flying all around. And then, they suddenly
flash-forwarded all of their stories to a point one year later, and since this past May, they’ve been explaining the bizarre changes and the missing time in a weekly series called ‘52’, which again seems to be building up into another insanely huge crisis. This too will be collected, eventually, and I’ll try to catch up again. If you’d like a good jumping-in point, I’d try the Identity Crisis collection, and for all of the obscure characters that will pop up, I’d also suggest the enormous DC Comics Encyclopedia. It’s a worthwhile book to have to address how the characters might be related, though since the events of the Crisis, it’s probably gone a bit out of date. Does it sound unnecessarily difficult and complicated to need to keep track of a comic story with an encyclopedia? You’re not the only one who thinks so, so DC Comics will publish a Companion to help understand these events.
Don’t let that stop you, though. There are plenty of non-hero related graphic novels that deal with all kinds of subjects, often biographically. Jeffrey Brown deals with his relationships with women in tiny vignettes, in tiny books. Craig Thompson chronicles his first true romance in Blankets, which is a charmingly semi-epic and emotional exploration into love that actually, physically broke my heart. It was messy. And then there’s books like Cancer Vixen and Mom’s Cancer, which visually deal with telling the stories of people battling diseases. The classic Maus and Persepolis intelligently deal with living in war-torn countries.
Being a ‘comic’ doesn’t exclude something from being an intelligently executed work of literature, which is still a dominant perception in America. The pictures aren’t included to simplify a story, but to amplify and describe, and more often than not, to engage a viewer who might not have otherwise been so attracted by a page of words. Even more dominantly than that, the creator probably just needed to draw. So maybe you won’t be able to sell it later at a higher price, they’re good reads - something my five-foot tall stack of them will attest to. Comics like Gaiman’s Sandman have won genuine literature awards, and this week saw the publication of the very first Best American Comics 2006, from the very reputable Best American series of books. And if there’s any doubt about where to jump in, start at the beginning.
