Audio Interview with Stephen Weiner author of The Rise of the Graphic Novel
Ironic that a leading champion of the graphic novel would be a librarian: an articulate, committed knowledgeable librarian. Stephen Weiner is Director of the Maynard Public Library in Massachusetts and author of, among other books, 101 Best Graphic Novels and Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: the Rise of the Graphic Novel. Stephen provides here a concise description and history of the Graphic Novel, the role it can play in helping young people to read, its increasing popularity, and the inherent quality of Maus and other leading titles. In fact, he’ll go to the mat defending the literary merit of the best graphic novels against anything written in the 20 Century. We met and spoke in Montreal last month at the Blue Metropolis Writers Festival.
Please listen here:
Copyright © 2006 by Nigel Beale.
Podcast: Play in new window | Download
June 1st, 2006 at 2:52 AM
I am a recent graduate of Rice University with a B.A. in English, and I would like to lend my support to the statements Mr. Weiner makes regarding the virtues of the graphic novel/comic medium. It is unfortunate that today, twenty years after some of the most sophisticated and challenging works of that format emerged, the comic industry is only beginning to receive the serious treatment it deserves from the arbiters of high culture. It is true that, largely for commercial reasons, the comics began as a “low” medium and that it took several decades before visionaries such as Wil Eisner began to recognize the awesome potential brought about by the marriage of text and static images. During that time the majority of comics produced were aimed at juvenile audiences and, unsurprisingly, filled with juvenile ideas. Scott McCloud, however, in his groundbreaking monograph “Understanding Comics” admonishes critics to recall that there is a distinction to be drawn between form and content and that we cannot judge a form purely on the basis of its often uneven contents. After all, how many traditional books written this year will be dismissed by most serious readers as amateurish, sensationalist, or simply bad writing? The vast majority, I suspect. And yet, nearly all of those will soon be swept into the dustbin, while the gems will survive. This is no less true of comic books than of regular novels.
Comics are often described as an emerging art form, most often by those who have only recently been made aware of the sophistication, both technical and creative, that the medium has achieved. Those who have followed the industry, however, know that the format’s true artistic renaissance began in the mid-eighties with the publication of “Maus”, “The Watchmen” and Frank Miller’s “The Dark Night Returns”, followed closely by the appearance of “The Sandman”. When one considers that art historians conventionally date the birth of the modern comic to 1897, the medium’s creative output in the span of scarcely more than a century appears truly staggering. Already, the comics have produced a canon of titles that most thoughtful people would regard as unqualified literary masterpieces. I wonder if the novel could claim the same so shortly after its introduction. Remember that it too was once stigmatized, labeled as trash and morally stultifying, and that it also saw its share of growing pains and unfortunate missteps by less-than-ambitious practitioners before it truly came into its own.
With all their richness, why does the stigma against comics persist? I believe the cause stems from critics who, preferring contempt prior to investigation, regard the medium as simply being too easy. And they do have a point; the process of reading a comic can be less taxing than reading a novel, although a quick glance at a book like “Jimmy Corrigan” reveals formal experimentation that I regard as being on par with the high Moderns such as Joyce and Woolf. But just because the form is easier to ingest does not mean that the work of digesting its contents is any less difficult. I have encountered in the pages of comic books ideas that are as challenging and as rewarding as anything between the covers of a pure-text novel. And after all, why should literature be spinach? Even a giant such as “Remembrance of Things Past” does not take its strength from its length or obscurity, but because of the magnificent consciousness that it contains.
Indeed, the great virtue of the comics is the graphical element that drives them. In your interview, you ask Mr. Weiner if a more high-concept graphic novel contains more text than a comic. I do not wish to be rude, and I hope I may be forgiven for resorting to cliche, but the principle that a picture tells a thousand words renders the question ridiculous. Why should there be more text, when a single frame will do the trick? Economy, after all, is one of the rarest literary gifts. Whom do we admire more, the author who goes on ad nauseum to get a point across, or the one who possesses enough skill and elegance to express that same thought or emotion as thoroughly and powerfully in a single sentence? Even for a comic book artist, that economy is not an easy skill to master. He must be as fluent with the narrative language of his medium as an author is with the written word. The impact, however, can sometimes be even more striking.
In your interview, you ask Mr. Weiner to distinguish between comics and graphic novels. Personally, I reject the latter term entirely for reasons I regard as very important to the self-image of the industry. The split nomenclature implies a value judgment that is unfortunate and inappropriate for a mature art form. Mr. Weiner recounts the origin of the term graphic novel as an invention on the part of Wil Eisner to persuade a publishing house to print what they would normally have disdained as a mere comic. Ever since then, so-called serious works are graced with the more refined (read pretentious) title of graphic novel, whereas the less well-regarded books fall into the category of mere comics. What other medium has such a system for designating the quality of its works? A bad novel is not called something other than a novel as long as it fits into the established formal guidelines. When comic writers, artists and fans use the term graphic novel as a vehicle for gaining acceptance from a skeptical public, it is as though they are shamefully repudiating the origins of their medium, when in fact they should be embracing those origins as an indelible part of their artistic heritage. So, from my perspective, there is no difference between a graphic novel and a comic book. The only terms I use and accept are “good comic book” and “bad comic book”.
In response to the question you pose to Mr. Weiner regarding the use of comics as a stepping stone to “real” reading, I would like to offer the example of my own first contact with the medium. I grew up as the typical bookish kid, reading insatiably from the time I was four. I needed no special encouragement to engage a book and, around the end of high school, had what I regarded as a relatively mature literary consciousness. However, until I was seventeen, I had never picked up a comic book, as I had already internalized the prejudice that they were inferior forms of literature. It was then that a colleague of mine at the book store in which I worked directed me to “The Sandman”. The scales fell from my eyes as I devoured this most detailed, literate and thoroughly compassionate work. Even to my skeptical mind, Gaiman’s series of comic books demanded to be taken seriously. The comics were no stepping stone to me; indeed, I doubt that I would have been in a position to fully appreciate their merits had I not been gifted with an extensive background in traditional literature.
Fortuitous timing reinforced my devotion to the medium. That year, my senior year of high school, Chicago hosted its annual Humanities Festival, for which the directors had chosen the theme “Words and Pictures”. So many of the luminaries of the industry descended on the city a comics fan could be forgiven for feeling overwhelmed by the embarrassment of riches. Lectures, panels and interviews featured the likes of Neil Gaiman, Art Speigelman, Scott McCloud, Chris Ware, Michael Chabon (an author of novels who has dabbled in the comics genre and whose Pulitzer Prize-winning book “The Adventures of Kavalier and Clay” centers on comics creators) and Francoise Mouly (co-editor of Raw magazine and wife of Art Speigelman, currently art editor of the New Yorker). It was as though, for the first time, the pioneers of modern comics had dared to emerge from the world of conventions populated by the stereotypical unwashed nerd underbelly and show their faces in “legitimate” circles. To my mind, the event was a watershed, not only in the development of my own attitudes towards comics, but as a signal that comics were more than ready to take their well-earned place as one of, if not the most, vibrant and exciting narrative formats around. I still consider it a privilege to have been present.
In closing, I would like to encourage you, your readers and your listeners to keep an open mind regarding comics. If you have not already found a good entry point to the medium, I would recommend “The Sandman”. The first few issues/chapters are a little uneven, but I promise that the book hits its stride around issue eight and proceeds to tell what is quite literally the story of stories. If you are not in the mood for something so portentous, Jeff Smith’s “Bone” is a delightrul read that will amuse both young and more mature readers. I doubt that anyone can encounter both of those works and not be persuaded that comics deserve to be treated with the same dignity as any other literary form.
June 1st, 2006 at 3:02 PM
Dear Griffith,
Thank you for this wonderfully considered response. I will now read The Sandman.
June 7th, 2006 at 12:05 PM
That’s great news. Let me know if you like it.
June 19th, 2006 at 10:29 PM
[...] Over at Boneville, Jeff Smith directs us to this very interesting interview”> with Nigel Beal and Stephen Weiner about the rise of the graphic novel, and the literary merits of same. Don’t miss it. Um…full disclosure. Stephen Weiner listed A Distant Soil in his 101 Best Graphic Novels book, so I am favorably disposed to the guy anyway. [...]
February 21st, 2010 at 5:49 PM
[...] our panel, by the way, will be another old friend: N. C. Christopher Couch, co-author with Stephen Weiner of The Will Eisner [...]