Here at Rat’s Reading, we (meaning me) consider graphic novels
to be reading only in a very narrow sense of the word. We wouldn’t call watching movies reading, and so neither can we call graphic novels literature.
This is not an uncommon viewpoint, though you’ll probably find this view to be more prevalent with a previous generation. I’m fully part of Generation-X. I came of age in the 1980s on MTV and comic books. My beloved comics collection still rests in my closet in boxes and mylar, though it hasn’t grown in years. MTV has fallen by the wayside as well. Reality shows took it over. Then they took over MTV-2 as well. I think they show videos on MTV-13 now.
Graphic novels don’t let me use my imagination to draw up the world. In one way they are much shorter than words. A typical graphic novel has but a few pages worth of actual story. Pride and Prejudice could not be told in graphic novel format without leaving out 95% of the story. But graphic novels more expansive than words as well. The pictures go on much longer than the story; a picture is worth a thousand words as the saying goes. In one panel, a Swamp Thing graphic novel can do more to convey a scene than could an entire book devoted to the same subject.
But that’s a problem with me. I want to imagine the story. It’s my story. Not the author’s. Really. The author merely gets to put ideas in my head. I want to run away with them. I don’t get to do that with a graphic novel. Much like a movie version of a book puts into place a billion of the more visual pieces of a story that had been left to the readers’ imaginations, so do graphic novels. I want complete control over the visual, even to the point where I can ignore an author’s description. It’s so much harder to do that when the visual is put before me.
I can understand why an artist would want to create a graphic novel. By creating this way, he gets to impart far more of the vision inside his head than a writer would. The artist has far more control over the work than a writer does. The reader (using the term loosely) doesn’t get to imagine things the way he wants to.
Author David Louis Edelman wrote something in his blog about his new book cover recently that I think illustrates my point about how much control a writer has over his audience.
Once again the illustration doesn’t quite match up with the vision I had in mind. I never provide a detailed description of hoverbirds in the books, but I’m pretty confident I never implied they were supposed to look like the cover of Led Zeppelin’s first album. And if that’s Jara standing there, she doesn’t have the mass of curly dark hair and Sephardic features I described in the book. (Nor could I ever picture her wearing a slinky dress and a flower in her hair.)
His intentions for his story, his world, and his characters are not accurately depicted on the book cover itself! (He doesn’t care, he likes the cover anyway. And he’s right, it’s an awesome cover.) Someone read his book (or skimmed it, I don’t know) and got a very different impression of what the world of Infoquake was like. He may even have purposefully decided to think of it in opposition to some of the actual description! David Louis Edelman wasn’t really the owner.
Try and do that with a graphic novel! When you do that with a graphic novel, it’s more like a musician who reimagines a song and performs a cover version. It’s perfectly allowable, perfectly legitimate, but qualitatively it’s very different from reading.
I don’t want to leave the impression that I don’t think graphic novels (or other forms of visual storytelling for that matter) are a worthless worthwhile form. Indeed, there is much to commend those who create stories using the form. However, it’s not a substitute for reading. The written word is a different form.
More than once I’ve read a news story where some school district tries to be innovative by using comic books to promote reading. I don’t think these attempts ever work in the long run. That would be like showing movies as a way to stimulate students to read. Students don’t get infused with a latent desire to read after this. They develop an appreciation for cinema. Similarly, students being taught using graphic novels develop an appreciation for that form. They aren’t infused with a desire to read Moby Dick or Ulysses. Bad example: nothing can infuse anyone with a desire to read Ulysses.
These are separate forms, and there isn’t a lot of crossover between the two. No more than the crossover between cinema and literature. Some prefer one form over another. Me, I’ll always prefer the written word sans extensive graphics over the more visual forms of storytelling. Not to exclusion, but definitely a strong preference. Is that an offensive opinion? Perhaps. I’ll sleep well at night though.
Bring on the flames.
Photo by Flickr user Newton Free Library used under a Creative Commons By-Nc-Nd 2.0 license.
8 Jan 08 7:02 pm – Edited to correct worthless to worthwhile. I got myself confused by using a double-negative. I should know better. Normally when I edit prior to posting I try to convert such things to positives for the sake of less confusion.
