This morning’s USA Today reminded me about a new trend — or is it? — I’d like to call the “hybridization” of the graphic novel. Perhaps, a more accurate description, rather than hybridization, might simply be a graphic novel as seen through the eyes of publishers in the literary world. These books obviously have far more words than images in them, but there’s no mistaking the fact both are intrinsically linked, hence they are, in my mind, graphic novels.
Still, if you’d asked the average comics fan who wrote or drew the last graphic novel he or she read, I’m pretty certain Jonathan Santlofer or Brian Selznick wouldn’t be among the names.
And, for those curious individuals like me and you who are watching how the graphic novel has morphed over time from reprint collections of old superhero comics, to original superhero graphic novels to substantial graphic novels about subjects other than Spandex folks, particularly in the past decade or two, perhaps we SHOULD be paying more attention to them.
Pardon the digression, folks…
Think you’ll like the story behind how author and artist Jonathan Santlofer sees his newest book — Anatomy of Fear: A Novel of Visual Suspense — as “a bridge” between graphic novel and prose, incorporating 100 sketches in his 368-page book about a talented and highly successful police sketch artist who matches wits with a vicious murderer who makes portraits of his victims before he kills them. (Check out a video preview of Anatomy of Fear at Santlofer’s Web site.)
If you don’t fancy crime stories, perhaps Brian Selznick’s The Invention of Hugo Cabret, a 533-page children’s novel inspired by the first science-fiction movie (that’s as big a tome in heft and substance as Craig Thompson’s Blankets) with 300 pages of illustrations may be more up your alley. From the Amazon.com reviews, apparently, it’s a good read for kids, young and old…
April 5th, 2007 at 9:40 pm
I’d also suggest taking a look at “Slow Chocolate Autopsy” by Iain Sinclair and Dave McKean. It’s largely prose with interjections told through comics. (Weren’t there also a few Cerebus storylines that were largely illustrated prose with comic endcaps?)
I just picked up Hugo Cabret; it’ll be interesting to see if this literary hybrid is a catching phenomenon, or merely a few people doing some experimentation.
April 7th, 2007 at 9:24 am
I have to agree with Wayne. My novel IS intrinsically linked to graphic novels. I was a total comic book kid; it’s how I learned to read. I had stacks of comic books six and seven feet tall filling my bedroom. When I went to college my mother threw them all out! I can hear you screaming. I did too. I’m still not quite over it. (At the same time she gave away my Lionel trains!!)
Anyway, I went to college to study art and wanted I’d be a “cartoonist” but ended up a painter. I did okay until all of my artwork burned in a gallery fire in 1990. After that I started writing. It wasn’t until my 3rd novel, The Killing Art, that I figured out how to add artwork into the novels. With Anatomy of Fear it simply became part of the process. I’d write, then draw, back and forth. My hero, Nate Rodriguez, is a police sketch artist so it made perfect sense.
I’m doing a second Nate Rodriguez novel, but then I want to do a real graphic novel. It’s my dream. It will be like going back to my roots and I can’t wait.
Anatomy of Fear is a hybrid, but what makes it special is the drawings. The interesting thing about a hybrid is trying to see what you can say in pictures versus words. Like the writer in USA TODAY said, the writing was leaner because I was able to move the plot with a picture.
Thanks to Wayne for getting me to say aloud that I am definitely going to do that graphic novel!