It is well over a decade since Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer prize for Maus, his work on the Holocaust - the first comics artist to be so recognised. The event marked the arrival of the “graphic novel” as a literary form to be noticed. No longer would comics struggle to be taken seriously - or so it seemed.
Maus wasn’t the first graphic novel and clever, subversive adult comics have a long history. But the Pulitzer inspired others and proved that comics that appealed to a wide readership didn’t just have to be about Spandex-clad superheroes delivering the planet from sinister eggheads. They could be more ambitious, more grown-up, worthy of critical attention.
But comics are labour-intensive and, intermittent waves of hype notwithstanding, only in the past few years has a substantial amount of high-quality material become available in mainstream bookshops. Heavyweight literary publishers are now turning out graphic novels and specialist imprints are springing up alongside influential independent outfits such as Fantagraphics and Drawn Quarterly.
There is still plenty of dross out there - as in any medium - but serious graphic storytelling has reached a turning point. For the first time it is starting to deliver on its early promise. This vivid form is pushing back its limits; it is as fresh, experimental and risk-taking as any kind of literature.
Comics now feature in Granta and The Guardian, and august US publications such as The New York Review of Books and The New York Times have turned their critical attention to the form. The London Review of Books was among the first publications to carry strips from In The Shadow of No Towers, Spiegelman’s reaction to the events of September 11 2001 and his take on the “war on terror”. It was a brave subject for Spiegelman, a Manhattanite, to take on at a time when many conventional writers seemed paralysed. The work was provocative enough for it to fail initially to find an outlet in the US.
The willingness to take on big issues may be one reason why critical hostility to comics has lessened. Spiegelman and others have shown that a popular medium can examine serious subjects and real events without trivialising them.
But the main factor may simply be volume - there is now so much interesting material out there that it has become difficult to ignore.
”Graphic novel” is a clunky and imprecise way of describing anything from non-fiction memoir, biography (Maus, for instance, recounts the life of Spiegelman’s father) and visual reportage to long-form fictional narratives. In the 1980s, publishers seized on “graphic novel” as a useful marketing term, as the focus of the stagnating US comics industry shifted towards the lucrative adult market - it sounded respectable.
As well as the debut of Maus - a minority interest as comics go - the era saw new, darker takes on classic superhero myths aimed at adults, notably Frank Miller’s disturbing Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen, by the British writer Alan Moore. Some of the new wave of adult-oriented material was original and good, but much of it was not. Previously published monthly-issue comics would often be bundled together and sold as a graphic novel, even if the parts made a discordant whole. But whatever the merits of the term - and many authors still prefer comics - the changes of the 1980s allowed the emergence of a new kind of comic: longer, more ambitious, and created by writers and artists who were treated like auteurs.
Last year, an issue of McSweeney’s Quarterly pulled together a selection of the work of some of the best comics artists around today. It was able to include authors as diverse as Chris Ware, Jaime Hernandez, Daniel Clowes and Joe Sacco, all of whom have broken new ground in the way they marry words and pictures.
Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth won the Guardian First Book Award in 2001. Clowes’ Ghost World was recently made into a film. All use smart narrative and visual techniques to explore themes and subjects previously restricted to the traditional literary novel.
Sacco is a journalist who has won plaudits for his hard-hitting graphic reportage from the Bosnian war and the Palestinian conflict. He has a shrewd eye for the type of characters who converge on war zones - including himself. Sacco draws himself as a questioning presence in his own work, honest about some of the compromises reporters make.
It has taken time for a critical mass of such work to accumulate. In a bid to speed up that process, Art Spiegelman initiated the project that saw Paul Auster’s short novel City of Glass rendered in graphic form. The book has recently been published in the UK, a decade after its US release.
In his introduction to City of Glass, Spiegelman says that the goal was not to create a dumbed-down “classics illustrated” version but a visual “translation” worthy of adult attention.
Auster’s novel, part of The New York Trilogy, is a tricky work. It tells the tale of Daniel Quinn, a writer whose routine is interrupted one night by a telephone call from a distressed man asking for a private eye called Paul Auster. What ensues is part Chandleresque detective yarn, part reflection on identity and language.
Posing as Auster, Quinn meets his caller, Peter Stillman. This damaged man spent his childhood locked up in isolation by his unhinged academic father as part of an experiment to rediscover the original language of innocence, spoken before the expulsion of man from Eden, when “a thing and its name were interchangeable”. After several years in an institution, the father is to be discharged and Quinn agrees to shadow him around New York to protect the son.
Artists Paul Karasik and David Mazzucchelli translate beautifully the noir-ish imagery of the original book, but also play inventively with the comics medium. The result goes beyond the literal illustration of Auster’s original text. At different points in the story, the lines of the panels become the panes of a window on the page, or delineate the bars of a prison cell. Images are cleverly juxtaposed. Symbols and abstract patterns appear and disappear as the story unfolds, in particular the disturbing motif of a roughly scrawled child’s face. The speech balloons depicting Stillman’s odd, distorted articulation twist like tornadoes.
Comics have various ways of showing the passage of time. The tight, regular panels in City of Glass lend a steady rhythm to the story, breaking up towards the end as Quinn begins a descent into madness and loses track of days and months. It is a very different experience to reading the novel, and in some ways a more moving one; the bold black-and-white drawings illuminate as well as illustrate the text.
Graphic storytelling is put to a different, didactic use in The Plot, the last book written by Will Eisner, one of the legends of American comics, before he died earlier this year. In 1978 Eisner produced what is often considered the first graphic novel, Contract with God, but he first became famous for his strip The Spirit back in the 1930s.
Eisner was the man who popularised the term “sequential art”, seeking recognition for the form in which he worked. In his influential books on the craft he highlighted the emergence of the longer and more complex narrative and more sophisticated subjects.
The Plot, completed shortly before his death early this year, unravels the convoluted origins of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the still widely circulated forgery that purports to be a Jewish plan for world domination. The Protocols were plagiarised at the end of the 19th century from the Dialogue in Hell Between Machiavelli and Montesquieu. An older political tract written by the French satirist Maurice Joly, it does not refer to Jews. Eisner traces the history of the Protocols from Russia under the reign of Nicholas II, the last Tsar, through to the present day.
For Eisner, the son of Jewish immigrants to America, this was a very personal work. While many scholars have exposed the fabrication of the Protocols, Eisner wrote that the acceptance of graphic narrative as a vehicle of popular literature presented an opportunity to deal with the subject in accessible language.
He is not just telling a story; he is demanding something else of the medium: that it educate, take on anti-Semitism and set out substantive proof of the forgery. As he notes in the book, numerous editions of the Protocols still sell in bookshops around the world, and they live on through the internet.
It is a laudable but difficult undertaking. The Protocols were brought to life against a complex historical backdrop, and Eisner, in aiming for a popular readership, was forced to use some awkward expository dialogue. While Eisner’s genius lay in the interplay between his words and his artwork, there is a tension in The Plot between the factual requirements of investigative journalism - names, dates, places, sources - and telling a story that keeps the audience gripped. He has, necessarily, left out some of the historical context and concentrated on the large cast of individuals involved, but the volume of information still makes the book a demanding read.
In one section, Eisner abandons images almost altogether to present a 17-page series of panels setting extracts of the text of the Protocols alongside selections from the Dialogue in Hell, inviting a comparative analysis of the passages. This makes its point - the similarities between the passages are obvious - but the lengthy sections of text and the quantity of data do test the graphic format. It is nonetheless an intriguing book, masterfully drawn.
Marjane Satrapi, an Iranian living in France, is one of only a few well-known women working in the comics medium, and she presents a different mode of visual journalism. Embroideries is her follow-up to Persepolis, the surprising and original two-volume memoir that told of her Iranian childhood and experience of the 1979 Islamic revolution. (Persepolis has now sold close to half a million copies around the world, a notable achievement for a graphic novel.)
A group of privileged Iranian women, hosted by Satrapi’s grandmother, meet for tea and bawdy gossip about sex, marriage and men. “To speak behind others’ backs is the ventilator of the heart,” as the grandmother puts it. She dispenses shrewd advice; her eyes, languorous from opium use, have helped her to marry three times.
One of the women tells the story of her ill-fated engagement, aged 13, to a general of almost 70, another of the time her husband of just a few days ran off to Europe with her expensive jewellery, gifts from the guests at the wedding. They joke about the fashion for nose jobs and breast enlargements and plastic surgery to restore lost virginity - the “embroidery” from which the book takes its name.
Satrapi’s drawings are sparing and highly stylised; she is able to render nuances of expression with simple, bold strokes. In Embroideries, she abandons the conventional panels of a comic book for a looser, freer arrangement of illustration on the pages. The stories are wittily told and show a side of life in Iran that is all but unknown to outsiders.
Satrapi first became famous in her adopted country, published there by l’Association, a pioneering collective of French comics artists. The French devotion to bandes dessinees in all their manifestations means smart comics artists like her have long been feted.
They may well now be on their way to greater acclaim elsewhere. With any luck, the best of the crop of graphic novels will finally make the move from the poorly lit shelves between science fiction and horror to the front of the bookshop.
THE PLOT: The Secret History of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion
Will Eisner
W.W. Norton $23.95, 160 pages
EMBROIDERIES
Marjane Satrapi
Jonathan Cape £12.99, 144 pages
CITY OF GLASS
Paul Auster, Paul Karasik, David Mazzucchelli
Faber and Faber £8.99, 144 pages
