American Born Chinese creator Gene Yang responds to Wired columnist Tony Long, who said ABC shouldn’t have been nominated for a National Book Award:
I just wanted to get all that out there - I know it’s not germaine to the issues Mr. Long raises. Here’s how I understand his argument:
1. Sequential images (comics) and prose are different.
2. Prose is an inherently superior medium. (And more difficult to create than comics.)And here’s how I respond: #2 is just plain stupid. Different media have different strengths. There are some things that comics is better at, and some things that prose is better at. Try writing prose instructions on how to put together Ikea furniture and tell me how it goes.
Pwned. He goes on:
#1 is much more intriguing. It seems like a true statement, and in many ways it is, but prose has its roots in sequential images. The two aren’t as separate as they might seem. Many written languages (Chinese, for example) still bear a lot of the artifacts of their pictoral ancestry. Are works created in Chinese less literary than works created in phonetic languages simply because Chinese is more pictoral? How about works created in ancient Chinese, in which the characters clearly resemble what they represent?
November 3rd, 2006 at 7:21 pm
Pwnd.
November 3rd, 2006 at 9:10 pm
Do any pictorial languages (ancient or modern) allow for dynamic layouts as a matter of course? Or the juxtaposition of dialogue, instead of having a specific structure for indicating it (i.e. an equivalent of “[person] said, ‘…’”)? I’d be genuinely curious. I imagine that if any ever had such a comicky structure as opposed to one more typical of a prose language, it’s fallen far out of use by now.
I think there’s a lot more bleed than Mr. Long is allowing, but I think Mr. Yang is giving it something of either a reductio ad absurdum, or a misreading.
November 4th, 2006 at 7:47 am
JK, where can I find Yang’s comments online (I mean the original, not just what you quoted)? You don’t have a link here.
November 4th, 2006 at 8:13 am
It’s the second link — the phrase, “over at the First Second blog.”
November 4th, 2006 at 2:35 pm
Hi Elayne: I had the links right next to each other, so they probably looked like they ran together. I’ve modified it to hopefully make it easier to get to Yang’s comments.
November 5th, 2006 at 7:34 pm
And they say lighting doesn’t strike twice. First Yang gets the Book Award nomination, then thanks to the Luddite he becomes a cause celebre for the emerging graphic novel form.
Lucky sonofagun. I’d be upset except that his book is excellent and by all accounts he’s a nice guy.