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Graphic Novels vs Novels now with 100% more opinion
Squirrel Ninja
Registered User regular
Registered User regular
First I apologize for the last post I didn't realize it was best for me to give my opinion's straight away, but I'll do that this time.
It's been said that what can be said in prose can be said better in prose. While reading Fahrenheit 451 yesterday a few passages in particular made me think about this question. The first in Beatty's monologue near the end of the first section "More Cartoons in books. More Pictures. The Mind drinks less and less. Impatience.", and later in Faber's little speech "It's not something thats in books that you need, it's some of the things that were once in books. The same think could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected threw the radios and televisors."
Recently graphic novels as a medium have grown to gain more respect Watchmen was placed on time magazines list of 100 best English language novels and others, such as Frank Miler's The Dark Knight Returns, have garnered critical acclaim. Other forms of graphic storytelling such as comic books and manga, however, get less attention. While comic books may have more rough to look threw, stuff like DC's Sandman comics and Jeff Smith's BONE highlight the potential hidden gems. Manga also has many very impressive writers amongst it's ranks. Arakawa' Full Metal Alchemist and the Manga version of Evangelion are as filled with powerful imagery and though provoking plots as many novels available today.
It's my opinion that Graphic Novels could be taught in schools in the future. Prose will never be replaced and the classics will remain required reading, but right now the really interesting new stuff is coming from the minds of the artists and authors of Graphic Novels, and I see no reason why they shouldn't be held in the same regard as only written word.
Agree or Disagree?
It's been said that what can be said in prose can be said better in prose. While reading Fahrenheit 451 yesterday a few passages in particular made me think about this question. The first in Beatty's monologue near the end of the first section "More Cartoons in books. More Pictures. The Mind drinks less and less. Impatience.", and later in Faber's little speech "It's not something thats in books that you need, it's some of the things that were once in books. The same think could be in the 'parlor families' today. The same infinite detail and awareness could be projected threw the radios and televisors."
Recently graphic novels as a medium have grown to gain more respect Watchmen was placed on time magazines list of 100 best English language novels and others, such as Frank Miler's The Dark Knight Returns, have garnered critical acclaim. Other forms of graphic storytelling such as comic books and manga, however, get less attention. While comic books may have more rough to look threw, stuff like DC's Sandman comics and Jeff Smith's BONE highlight the potential hidden gems. Manga also has many very impressive writers amongst it's ranks. Arakawa' Full Metal Alchemist and the Manga version of Evangelion are as filled with powerful imagery and though provoking plots as many novels available today.
It's my opinion that Graphic Novels could be taught in schools in the future. Prose will never be replaced and the classics will remain required reading, but right now the really interesting new stuff is coming from the minds of the artists and authors of Graphic Novels, and I see no reason why they shouldn't be held in the same regard as only written word.
Agree or Disagree?
Squirrel Ninja on
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Too much emphasis is placed on age in my opinion, Dickens pretty much wrote soaps (and badly at that) yet because he did it so long ago they count as 'classics'. I can understand studying them more from a historical point of view, whether looking at people's perception of society in the Xth Century or following the evolution of literiture...but I think too much of this gets confused with the books themselves being good. To use a scientific example, the Origin of Species is incredably important but its not something you would ever expect to actually study other than in its historical context.
That said, I agree that GV are a formidable medium with all the potential to be just as worthy an art form as traditional novels and literature, even if that potential is rarely realized today. That said, the main benefit of graphic novels is also the main downside. By explicitly showing everything that's going on, they both stifle the creative imagination of the reader and remove a powerful tool available to authors: the ability to allow the reader to mentally "fill in the blanks" as regards visuals in order to let them establish the visuals in ways that resonate with him on a personal level. If, for example, a woman is supposed to be the most beautiful thing ever, a conventional novel can describe her in a way that allows the reader to create, in his mind, his own personal idea of an extremely beautiful woman. If you just see a picture of her, she might not be your cup of tea, which could possibly detract from the character.
Also, much better OP. Thanks.
However I think Graphics novels main problem lies in the fact that since there is no real underlying 'point' to studying english, the books chosen are going to be chosen because they fit a specific theme. Other than 'the evolution of the graphic novel', '21st century literature' and 'stories in other medias' the graphic novels are going to lose out to other books.
That said, has anyone done graphic novels of Shakespeare yet? They're missing a trick if they haven't since as plays they would be ideally suited to this form and would require none or very little editing to make them fit. Would be a good way as well for graphic novels to get their foot in the door as an acceptable medium for study.
I think that graphic novels do produce good literary content, but the fact that some of it is sacrificed for the sake of artistic content will probably keep it out of English classrooms
Other than that, I still think the biggest thing hurting some acceptance is the adamant insistence that they are a mature form by the industry. Much how Tycho was amused how insisting you are sane usually calls that into doubt. Same thing happens here. Especially when you have otherwise wonderful stories (Sandman) that are still filled with sections where women are doing weird shit like slicing their breasts off.
Same questions could be asked about some Anime. I see that Tales from Earthsea is coming out soon. I guarantee you that I won't be able to convince too many of my friends to see it. (Though, every other Ghibli film they've seen they have loved.)
Just like cartoons, and video games. Anything that evolves from something for children must still be for children. I'll bet that a nude scene in a graphic novel would result in much higher levels of censorship/ratings than a similar scene in painting or sculpture.
Of course, you then gain the capacity to have beautiful pictures in lieu of beautiful writing, so it becomes more a matter of preference. Do you like visual beauty, or do you like linguistic beauty? I think GV as an artform will do best if it doesn't try to mimic literature, but rather works on its own strengths.
Now that I think of it, I think GVs share more in common with movies than with novels.
That's an interesting point, although I feel that something like Watchmen or Jimmy Corrigan probably wouldn't be very interesting in novel form.
It can be a useful tool though. Some authors are great visualistic writers, but can't write dialogue worth a damn. (Stephen King, I'm looking at you).
Now let's say you had someone like Tarantino write the dialogue for a graphic novel. That would be a very, very nice pairing. It also depends on the novels actual artwork, I suppose.
While there are many works that are enjoyed by both adults and children, there are undeniably some designed and marketed specifically for children. For example, compare My Neighbor Totoro vs any of the Pokemon movies. We're starting to see animated adult work become mainstream in America, such as A Scanner Darkly. But we need more authors willing to take risks before comics can become similarly accepted.
Writing is no more beautiful just because there's more of it. My only real experience with comics is Transmet, but that had much better writing than dozens of supposedly good novels read since.
I'm slightly disappointed at how badly Shakespeare the Graphic novel has been done really, a quick google search shows that they have always tried to adapt it in a wierd way - lets take Macbeth
and
Dragons? A Sciifi version? Just do the damn play! Romeo and Juliet was a bit better but again they couldn't resist updating the language as well to make it 'more accessable'.
Ironicly, the last thing I wanted as a kid was a childish movie. If you start reading good literature early, even without adult themes, you quickly get very bored with simplistic good/evil plots and "friendship conquers all" speeches in all art forms, not just books. Kids want to be treated like adults.
While I agree what you are saying, realize that most of America will look at Totoro and Pokemon as being in the same league. Why? Because they are both cartoons, and cartoons are for children.
Also, there are plenty of American animated movies. They are just usually seen as for the kids, but enjoyable by the whole family. (I'm specifically referring to Pixar and such.)
I'll use a movie to agree with your point:
I had never really seen a movie that broke the good wins vs. evil mold up until Se7en and 12 Monkeys came out (About the same time, too). I loved those movies because they were dark and they presented things in a completely new light.
So yeah, I don't think kids like things that are aimed at kids as much as people think.
No, but a GV obviates the need for much of what winds up being beautiful or awesome writing. Take, for example, the works of Douglas Adams. His best books are hilarious, simply because of his writing style. The movies made about his books sucked, because first, the things going on shift from absurd to stupid when you actually see them happening, and second, because people read his books for the writing, not the plot and characters. The best parts of both the HH movie and the HH miniseries were when they were just reading passages straight from the book, because it's the writing that was brilliant.
All of which is to say not that GVs are flawed or inferior, but rather that they're different. The OP seemed to be proposing GVs as a direct competitor with novels, or a replacement for them, when they're really completely different, and have very different strengths and weaknesses. The best novels would make lousy GVs, because the best novels tend to take advantage of the strengths of conventional writing. Similarly, good GVs would make shitty books. Imagine 300 as a novel. It'd suck. It demands a visual medium. Imagine House of Leaves as a graphic novel. It'd suck.
What do you consider an "adult" book, though? Where is the distinction between something aimed at a teenager instead of an adult? Is it always the content matter? Length?
I think that is what cracks me up about graphic novels vs comics. They are the same thing. Same with anime vs cartoons. There isn't really a subject matter that can be used to hold one apart from the other. The only difference is distribution method. (Or origin, for anime.)
In that vein, when will graphic novels grow up and be bought/sold as just another book?
Given that even most adults like simplistic good/evil plots and "friendship conquers all" speeches, I'm inclined to disagree with your generalization.
One could argue that a "graphic novel" is a distinct, singular story that's self-contained and not reliant upon another body of work, whereas "comic books" are the serialized things we're familiar with, where they're largely nonsensical when removed from their larger story arcs. They could be separated along the same lines as movies and television series.
One could, but that would be dodging the fact that pretty much every famous "graphic novel" was originally distributed in comic form. In other words, comics are to graphic novels what the serial novel is to a novel. The only real difference is in distribution. (This gets equally amusing for those that are opposed to serialized novels nowdays, but absolutely love stuff like Count of Monte Cristo.)
Equally amusing to me, is how in general people love the serialized approach for visual media more.
It's not the amount of writing that's the issue; it's the nature of the writing. Graphic novels are not going to have very much verbal description, for instance, because almost all of the sensory (or at least visual) information is going to come from the illustration, not the captions or dialogue. This is a major loss for the writing, I think, because descriptive prose is where a lot of the beauty of the written word comes in. Prose's strengths in terms of description include its ability to use metaphor in a variety of novel and interesting ways and its power to stimulate the reader's imagination with just a few details (less is more). Those aspects would be, if not lost, greatly diminished in graphic novel form.
That said, I'm all for graphic novels being studied. But the are very different from prose novels. Honestly, you'd probably be better of analyzing GNs through the lens of film criticism than you would from literary criticism.
You could argue that the reason most adults like those simplistic plots is that they've never been properly introduced to more complicated stuff the way jgresham claims he was.
Personally I would class any book which describes, in explicit detail, scenes you would associate with an 18 rated movie, as an adult book. This does not mean this book should only be read by adults, in the same way that most of us will have watched an 18 movie before we were 18, but I wouldn't, for example, give a 10 year old The Wasp Factory.
There's a level of maturity based on the actual content (sex, drugs, violence), and a level based on the complexity and the themes.
It's also possible they were introduced to the stuff in a ham-fisted fashion that turned them off to it.
I was going to argue with you about that by saying "So I guess The Great Gatsby is a kid's book," and then I remembered that it has a pretty grisly scene of a woman getting run over by a car. So I tried to think of another book that would slide by with a PG-13 rating and realized most serious novels have a lot of scenes that are pretty graphic. We just don't notice them because they're written down and not shown.
Funny, that.
I'm inclined to think that such things are more about escapism than thought-provoking, but I take the point - it was a bit of a generalization.
I stand by the point about kids, though. When was the last time you saw a kid following his younger sibling around, trying to get involved and find out what he/she is doing?
Right. They weren't properly introduced.
While I want to agree with this, I just don't think there is ever going to be a good way of categorizing this stuff. Almost any attempt will lead us to a situation where either sex or language is the main determining factor. And, well, I don't want to deal with my entertainment of choice using either of those simply because they want to be considered adult.
But what does it mean to be properly introduced to something?
A recent example that would lend itself to this is ballet. Personally, I love the ballet. Have a blast every time I go. However, none of my friends do. Ironically, not even my girlfriend liked the ballet till recently. Are all of them simply lacking the proper introductions to it?
You can't just throw the complete works of shakespeare at a kid and expect them to be interested. Something quite short, but with some moral ambivelence, some humour and some grisly bits. I got started on greek and norse mythology when i was 7 or 8. Simple, short, and has the gods get violently drunk and fight and steal and generally piss everyone off a lot.
It's definitely possible they might not like ballet and never would. Just like not everyone is going to think Dostoevsky is the shit. All I'm saying is it's possible to refine your tastes for some things. And no, I don't know how.
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There's a lot of films which are definitly adult films, but aren't filled with sex and language. However, I wouldn't restrict any kid who could follow and understand them from watching them. I wouldn't expect a ten year old to be capable of following War and Peace, but if he could, I wouldn't stop him. I would stop him reading American Psycho, though.
I can (and do) agree with that.
However, it could be possible that people simply don't like graphic novels because they are an inferior medium. That I just don't agree with. (And, I guess I should stress that it is HIGHLY likely I'm just flat out wrong.
Anyway, to the point. What is considered a proper introduction to something? What does it take to get you to go back to something again for entertainment that novels have and graphic novels generally lack? I would have to say it is, for most people, a push by peers and society. I've loaned books from friends before, but none of my friends have any graphic novels. A few have read some of mine, but most of my friends are afraid of the image they'll have reading them in public. Is that a cause, or a symptom?
(Anyway, I look forward to reading what everyone's take on this is. I'm out.)
The best mother I ever knew didn't mind her six year old son watching video of the Americans going through the Nazi death camps at the end of the second world war. My friend who was living with their family and I were working on a video project for history class and when we asked if he should be watching it with us she didn't even have a doubt.
This family literally turned out the best, most solid kids you could ever imagine. Since then, I've had trouble believing in the supposed damaging effects of what kids watch.
Agreed, we shelter kid's far too much today.