Slashdot Mirror
NYT Magazine: Are Comics The New Mainstream Novels?
securitas writes "The New York Times Magazine cover story this week is a (typically) long feature about the rise of comic books and graphic novels into mainstream culture, with writer Charles McGrath (former editor of the Book Review) stating: 'Comic books are what novels used to be -- an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal ... perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.' McGrath cites the mid-1980s birth of a movement that began and fizzled with Maus (Art Spiegelman), Love & Rockets (Hernandez Bros.) Watchmen (Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons) and Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (Frank Miller). The current renaissance in graphic novels include non-fiction Palestine (Sacco), non-fiction Persepolis (Satrapi) which has sold 450,000 copies, Ghost World (Clowes), American Splendor (Pekar), Road to Perdition (Collins) and Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the 2001 Guardian Prize for best first book and has sold 100,000 in hardcover. McGrath interviews Marjane Satrapi, Julie Doucet, Joe Sacco, Art Spiegelman, and Alan Moore, among others. The article also has a multimedia interactive feature with many of the graphic novelists (registration required) in the magazine article."
...for all your dumbed down graphic-novel reading needs.
Seriously, if you've never read it, it doesn't get more bloody or offensive than that... my favorite graphic novel by far.
Not only in Japan, but also in Western Europe - most notably in Belgium, France and the Netherlands - have comics been mainstream. Everybody in These countries knows Tintin and most take it serious. Other serious yet popular comics are the comic-version of voyage au bout de la nuit (journey to the end of the night) - the novel by Louis Ferdinand Celine and made into a comic by Tardi. Also in Holland have major novels been turned into comics.
No. Sure, I'm echoing an AC's sentiment, but here, I'm not being a jackass about it.
if Comics really were an influence in American culture, then why is the industry itself in the shits? If it wasn't for comicmovies, Marvel probably would've filed for bankruptcy AGAIN. I'm looking here and seeing bankruptcies in 1996 and 2002. That's not healthy under ANY measure.
Not just that, but I've been observing the comics industry, and I'm sorry to say that it's devouring itself alive. Alternative book saren't selling, so they have to really press on old, rehashed characters, which inturn turns off non-geek types who'd normally be turned on by alternative books.
They're playing only to thier base, which is getting smaller in terms of population percentages rather than try to diversify. I mean, I'd hate to say it, but the American industry could learn a thing or two about the Japanese industry. Not by using big eyes and other cliches(like Marvel did, fucking mangaverse bullshit), but rather, instead by trying to diversify the market to the point where there's a story for everyone, published in a cheap, easy to access form. Japanese monthlies are about 600 yen(about 5 bucks, I think, it's been awhile since i've priced the bigass phonebook style compilations, i'm probably off base here) and come with between 10-20 or so stories. Some publishers even run weeklies. In America, for about that much, you can get two seperate books which probably havee thick, and I mean THICK, continuity. And you're stuck with ONE genre. Super-hero action-adventure. Even though most compilations are typically gender/themed(Nakayoshi comes to mind, where SailorMoon and MKR was published), you tend to get a mix of stories.
Not to mention that those books play to only one group, and those are the comicbook fanboys. As much as comic books are for supposedly for kids, these days they're more for 15-20something fanboys who tend to do poorly socially(my crowd, I never got the whole comic thing though).
Non impediti ratione cogitationus.
It you liked The Smartest Kid On Earth, you should check out some of Ware's older stuff in The Acme Novelty Library as well. Those things are both hilarious and deeply disturbing at the same time.
They're worth it for some of the twisted advertisements on the edges alone. Also, I think every comic had these elaborate, workable 3D cut-out assemblable projects on the very edges. I guess they meant for people to buy 2 copies of each issue.
Happy people make bad consumers.
My attention span and imagination is limited by the number of colours in comics..
Heh. [sarcasm]Most comics nowadays are done in full digital colour (usually with Photoshop), so if you consider an attention span of the full CMYK range to be short, you've got high standards indeed...[/sarcasm]
(grrr..stupid bloody slashcode doesn't allow entities...I can't use angle brackets, dammit)
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
Good article in itself, but definitly flawed since it's not half of the story. You've got to look to birthground of comics, Europe, for the most interesting part of the story. Comics have been mainstream in Europe, especially in Belgium, France and The Netherlands, since long. Check out Lambiekhistory of Dutch comics and the The Comiclopedia.
Here's a review of Sacco's Palestine if anyone's interested.
Where 'Comic Books' are considered Geeky in the US, Manga is read by everyone from children to housewives to businessmen.
Well, Manga come with their own social baggage here (Tokyo) also: sure, readership cuts across social class, age group, sex, and educational level, but a manga is not a book, it's something you read when you're on the train or having a smoke on your break.
Frankly, people caught reading manga at their desks at work or in social situations are usually snickered at for being pedestrian or purposefully low-brow (much like the reception one would get reading a comic book in the US).
davejenkins.com |
Not just Dickens. 99% of what we consider to be 19th century classics were serialized in newspapers. All novels published by Balsacue, Dumas (son and pa), Jules Verne, Carl May, etc were newspaper serializations. Some of the characters (Grimo in the Three Musketeers) were brought in only to fill space as newspapers were paying per line. So there is nothing wrong in serialization and commercialization.
There is definitely something wrong as far as commercialization is concerned. There is definitely someting wrong in dumbing everything down and making everything at the intellectual level of a marvel comic though...
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
For those not very familiar with recent graphic novels (or have only heard of manga or the superhero genre) here's a great place to begin: Nowhere Girl.
I'd love to hear other Slashdotter recommendations!
You mean the Jodorowski that does movies too, right?
As well as writing comics, also makes fantastic movies.
Ive seen El Topo and Santa Sangre.Why, he was, at one point, commissioned to direct Dune .
I think what really hurt comic books in the USA was Frederic Wertham's infamous book The Seduction of the Innocent. The fallout from that book came within a hair's breadth of killing off the comic industry altogether in the USA.
If we did not have the crusade against comics caused by that book, it's likely that comics in the USA would be a hugely viable medium right now, with the level of popularity that you would get in Europe, where comics have a long and distinguished history, especially in France, Belgium, Holland and Italy.
I challenge the author of this article to read Nausicaa by Hayao Miyazaki and come back and say that graphic novels are dumbed down versions of novels. Nausicaa has the same feel and power as Tolkien's Lord of the Rings.
Some guy has actually assembled all the toys from the Acme Novelty Company comics!
http://www.niemworks.com/else/acmetoys.html
Never mind Neil Gaiman, who at least gets mentioned (although why the author mentions that Alan Moore has written a novel while ignoring the fact that Gaiman has written several novels, at least one of which was prominent on the best seller list of -- wait for it -- the New York Times, is a bit of a mystery); the real oversight is that the article does not, at any point, mention Will Eisner!
I mean, here's a guy who's been doing exactly the sort of storytelling that this article is about, for decades now. He is vastly prolific, still, despite being, well, really old, and is a towering and respected figure in the field.
Writing a long article about the rise of the respectable literary graphic novel without mentioning Eisner (who, after all, coined the term "graphic novel"!) is like writing a long article about the early evolution of the federal Presidency without mentioning George Washington.