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Underground > Comic Books >

Comics and books - both made of paper....

  
  

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grant
18:39 / 29.04.05
Harvey Pekar can stand toe to toe with Bukowski any day, maaaan.

Even if Crumb is illustrating *both*.
 
 
eddie thirteen
01:00 / 30.04.05
The snobbery does feel a little thick in this debate, what with the abundance of lit'ry, writerly writers being mentioned in contrast to people who are "of course" merely commercial hacks...although I'm willing to bet many more of us have read a comic by Morrison than a novel by Philip Roth; make of that what you will. To me, the debate thus far seems (as someone else observed) stacked in such a way that it's really a question of fantasy fiction vs. "literary" fiction, which not only is a debate that rankles in its simplicity -- surely not all fantasy writers are hacks (although a lot of them definitely are), and I would hope we can agree not all "literary" writers are of equal merit (and if you extend the definition of "literary" to everyone who's not writing genre fiction, I mean goddamn can we point to some hacky ass hack motherfuckers) -- but also takes us far afield of whether novels are somehow inherently mo' better than comics.

Doubtful. Perhaps proportionately, there are more good novels out there than good comics, but that's a matter of what's being done with the form, not the form itself. Not to mention that quality -- as was more than beaten into my head in another thread -- is a sticky and subjective thing. I mean, I've been taught by people who really *should* know better than me that Willa Cather is just inherently better than 90% of the 20th Century's "best" (there's that subjectivity again!) novelists...so why would I rather read the newest Astonishing X-Men trade than The Professor's House? I mean, am I just a fucking mongoloid or what? You know, um, that's rhetorical, but still...namecheck dead chroniclers of lonesome introverts who strove and failed to get their dicks wet two hundred years ago all you want; most of us are more likely to go home and watch Blade Trinity than we are to chill with Dostoyevsky's greatest hits. In your heart, you know it's true. We approach one work with a different personal itch to be scratched than we do another...more of us, I think, look to satisfy a need for escapism than we do to respond to a clarion call to peer into the bleak ennui that lies at the heart of the human experience (I dunno about you, but that's not really something I need to *read* about); but either way, it's not a failing of Hellboy: Wake the Devil that it's not Light in August any more than Stevens' "Thirteen Ways of Looking at a Blackbird" fails for not being The Exorcist, or Edvard Munch fails for not being Ice Cube.

Put another way, who on earth would expect the experience of reading a mainstream superhero comic to be anything like reading Philip Roth? It's not Rolling Rock's fault you took a sip expecting a dry martini, man. Does that cheap beer taste better or worse than the last cheap beer you guzzled? And, to flay and pour salt on the metaphor, is it really the fault of cheap beer that you've lost the taste for it?

If prose seems more substantial, it's probably because it *is* more substantial -- an 300-page novel is much denser than (most) comics, takes much longer to read, and requires more effort on the part of the reader. Then again, a sitcom requires virtually no effort on the part of the audience at all and is over is less time than it takes to read many comics, and your involvement with a Matisse can be over in a glance. Does that make "8 Simple Rules" better? I would posit that it's probably better than the average painting of Jesus on black velvet, but I don't know that that makes the sitcom an inherently more worthwhile medium than painting.

Bah.
 
 
slinkyvagabond
20:06 / 02.05.05
Yeah, well there is snobbery about these kind of things - that was my point earlier: fantasy fiction is seen as less worthy somehow than what is termed 'literary' fiction. This doesn't mean that it is. I can think of several fantasic fantasy writers....anyway, most of this kind of labelling is slightly redundant. I mean, The Time Traveller's Wife is lightish reading to me; Richard and Judy seem to think of it as literary. I think Ursula LeGuin is genius; someone else might think aliens and intergalatic federations are strictly for children and trekkies. So many writers use fantastical elements in their work and do not get labelled fantasy or sci-fi: Angela Carter, JG Ballard, Pynchon, Sax (so I hear) - these are nebulous terms...plus fantasies, imaginings are part of human life. Why shouldn't they turn up in all genres of fiction? We're not all bloody Hemingway fans.

Conversely, why don't comics embrace more genres? I mean, I know they do, but the majority of mainstream comics still focus on superhero style antics, or if they don't they certainly feature a good measure of beasties, demons and gods, enough to get categorised as 'fantasy' if we are going to use those terms (which I do, for ease of communicationa dn because I am no longer 15 and getting furious about 'labelling, man'. The fire has died. Sigh.). I know that in France, for an example of a European country, and of course, Japan, they have comics which cover a far wider range of genres and themes. It is completely possible - Scott McCloud again goes on rather tiresomely about this potential in his Reinventing Comics (the follow on from Understanding... It's pretty useless, except as a history of early '90s comics) - that they encompass more than monsters and heroic mutants. One might say that this is because that kind of action based story line suits the visual medium, keeps it exciting but if cinema can manage the artistic, the contemplative than I think comics can too. Again, a skillful artist can make a 'quiet' story visually engaging.

And that's my 2 cents. Again.
 
 
Simplist
22:25 / 02.05.05
I've long found this perennial debate to be mismatched--in terms of actual narrative density, the modern graphic "novel" is much more analogous to the literary short story than the literary novel. You simply don't have the narrative space in a 120-page comic for the kind of intricacy and detail that can be put into a 450-page novel. Rather, you have approximately the options available to the writer of a 30-50 page short story in terms of reading time, plot complexity, character depth, etc. Only rarely does some self-contained work of graphic literature--really approach anything comparable in form to what we usually think of as a novel. Moore's "From Hell" comes to mind, but even feels more like more of a novella--rendered in prose it would be maybe 100 pages.
 
 
eddie thirteen
01:01 / 03.05.05
I'm not so sure I can run with the From Hell thing. I think it's a bit more complicated than that. The 100-page novella you're describing kind of exists right now -- it's the screenplay for the feature film, which is a hugely simplified version of Moore and Campbell's original story. I hated that movie the first time I saw it, because it seemed like such a watered down, Hollywoodified reiteration of something that had worked just fine the first time...and while I still think that's true, I've come to appreciate the film on its own merits -- that is to say, as a better than average potboiler, steeped with intriguing historical references and excellent performances that the material (the film's version of it, at any rate) probably didn't really deserve. And the reason why I was able to let go and appreciate the film for what it was was that I had to acknowledge that (a) a faithful adaptation would have required the movie be six hours longer, and (b) certain things (the last chapter; Gull's treatise on London) probably wouldn't have worked at all in a film.

They might have worked in a novel, but doing everything Moore and Campbell did on the comics page in prose may well have resulted in unreadability. I'm thinking here about all the Victorian London detail that Campbell's able to work into the (undecompressed!) panels of the book...a novel that detailed would be a hell of a thing to slog through, but as a comic it breezes by. You can slow down and soak in the atmosphere or just read straight through, depending on your inclinations as a reader or whether it's just too damn miserable to go outside that day or what have you. The detail's take it or leave it, but it *is* there, and I'd say From Hell is one of the few comics I've read that's at least as substantial as the richest fiction. You'd lose a lot if it were made over into prose (although you might reap different benefits from it, too).
 
 
at the scarwash
04:24 / 03.05.05
Something that comics achieve that novels can't is the (and I'm having some difficulty textualizing this concept, so bear with me) the juxtaposition of narrative threads and storytelling conceits right there in front of you. Think of the Black Frigate in Watchmen, or (again Moore) the use of musical notation in the "This Vicious Cabaret" in V. Novelists have experimented with similar techniques for most of the last century, but the visual nature of their usage in the comics medium has a much more direct impact. Text can't help but be linear, so parallel narratives and the like must be collated and experienced through memory. Having instances of these devices layed out graphically, so that one's peripheral vision is constantly at the mercy of the artist allows for an immediacy lacking in prose. And whether this immediacy is taken advantage of by a smartypants comics genius like Moore, or just a unintentional side effect of mass-production oriented hack artists, I'd say that it is a fundamental experience of the reading of comics--there is a visual gestalt that a reader is immersed in during the consumption of the text. To return briefly to Klarion, the color scheme and layout, the movement and rhythm of the lines are fundamental to the experience of reading it.

Or maybe that's all obvious and I'm an idiot.
 
 
The Falcon
15:14 / 03.05.05
Anyway, sometime Barbe-fave Johnathan Fortress of Solitude Lethem is reviving Steve Gerber's Omega the Unknown for Marvel.
 
 
Solitaire Rose as Tom Servo
05:31 / 04.05.05
I'll start up a new thread about this later, but I think that ANYONE other than Steve Gerber doing an Omega the Unknown series is amazingly stupid.

I think that is something that keeps comics back in a lot of ways...how characters, no matter how personal, can be handed off from one creator to the next, sometimes in the middle of stroies (although this is pretty rare these days). I doubt anyone would consider a "Rabbit" novel by someone picked out by the publishing company that publishes John Updike's novels would get anything other than scorn and ridicule, although novel characters (usually in fiction that has passed from a person to a business concern) have continued from writer to writer, it's pretty rare that any of them are considered more than hackwork.

So, as I think about this, I think one of the quality gulfs is the fact that comic characters are, by and large owned by people other than the creators.
 
 
Sax
08:37 / 04.05.05
Not sure if this adds anything or not, but lifted from Alan Moore's Writing For Comics:

"Comics are also viewed in literary terms, in an effort to draw comparisons between comic sequences and conventional literary forms. Thus, the comic book "short story" is modeled closely upon the classic formula of writers like O. Henry and Saki, with the surprise payoff in the last panel. More inanely, comics work of more than 40 pages is automatically equated with a novel, once more suffering badly from the comparison. With the best will in the world, if you try to describe the Dazzler graphic novel in the same terms as you describe Moby Dick then you're simply asking for trouble. As opposed to films without movement or sound we get novels without scope, depth or purpose. That isn't good enough, either."
 
 
yawn - thing's buddy
14:30 / 04.05.05
you could compare storytelling ability across a variety of mediums.

but that's about it.

for example, many writers, pop stars and filmmakers (all storytellers) consider alan moore to be a great story teller - but they don't necessarily think he is a better novelist, lyricist or scriptwriter than they may consider themselves to be.

and

the vast majority of comic book production processes CAN have effective parallels drawn with the rudimentary production processes of film. Despite dismissive comments about the comic-film relationship by morrison and others - it is still the closest match of the other mediums in relation to mass market comic book production. ‘script and story board’ being not that far removed from ‘comic script and drawn page’. And it is still the medium that mass market comics look to for inspiration. Also, many comic book writers think of their stories as films which they then capture within the comic book medium. Let’s face it, fanboys go wild for x men the move, but not so wild for x-men the pop song, or even xmen the novel.

curiously, of the few novels that have been converted into the comic medium, city of glass by mazucelli, after auster's novel, is considered to be AS GOOD AS the novel.

i don't think so , personally - but this adaptation is generally considered succcessfull, at least compared with those classic illustrated horrors of the early 90s - moby dick by sienkiwicz etc.
 
 
grant
20:22 / 04.05.05
Despite dismissive comments about the comic-film relationship by morrison and others - it is still the closest match of the other mediums in relation to mass market comic book production.

Yeah, as I was trying to put it earlier -- it's basically the same language as film, but with a different way of dealing with time.

I think that "peripheral vision" thing that was mentioned earlier is part of the same deal -- it's like a film viewed from another dimension, where you can sort of absorb the whole story and then reassemble various bits in a different order, like snapping bits of one sub-plot into a single narrative thread, or making linear sense of the all-at-once action pages in, oh, We3 (bullets everywhere!) or Lone Wolf and Cub (swords faster than eyes!).

Comics are films with layout. The only thing that comes close would be split-screen films, and those tend not to work terribly well because you can really only process one screen at a time.

Novels can't even do that -- they have to describe the shot, then piece together the dialogue separately. You're forced by the narrative to process information at an artificial rate, rather than the visual-immediate(eye)/dialogue-secondary(ear) way we process real life.

Maybe comics more closely model short-term memory, while film models immediate experience and novels model long-term recollections. Not sure about that.

-----

For the record, I've read Phil Roth and not been that impressed. Ralph Ellison would probably make better comics. (Not that the two are that comparable, but what the hey.)
 
 
STOATIE LIEKS CHOCOLATE MILK
12:45 / 05.05.05
There's also the point to be made that a still image (I'm thinking of We3 here particularly, because it's the thing I've read most recently that did this the most beautifully) is showing you one single instant in what, in film, could be an action lasting several seconds, from which the viewer picks the part he/she feels most moved by- in a comic the one instant chosen by the creator is laid out in front of you, for you to spend as much or as little time as you want picking out the details. (I know that's got nothing to do with books, but I think it;s an important distinction between comics and film which is often overlooked- I believe there's as much difference between the two forms as there is between either one and the written word).
 
 
ONLY NICE THINGS
13:35 / 05.05.05
For the record, I've read Phil Roth and not been that impressed. Ralph Ellison would probably make better comics. (Not that the two are that comparable, but what the hey.)

Ralph Ellison's Invisible Girl?
 
 
slinkyvagabond
16:21 / 05.05.05
Well, yeah. Comics are a more interactive medium than film because you can make choices about how long you want to concentrate on certain parts of the narrative (I include artwork in the term 'narrative'). You can also randomly flip through the book or look at the back page first, if you like, which I suppose is analogous to selecting certain scenes in DVDs or pausing at a particular frame. Furthermore, you have to provide the soundtrack, you have to imagine what happened in the space between the panels, you just have to work a lot more, even if you're reading at the lightest, most skim-the-surface level.
Someone or other, I can't remember his name but some talking-head involved in a 'are the words or the pictures more important to the reader' debate, suggested there's rather a parity between the two elements and that when one reads a comic, one doesn't necessarily pay more, or more sustained, attention to words or pictures but rather the eye skitters back and forth between the 2. Experience bears this out for me. It's quite mentally stimulating, even if the comic itself doesn't address particularly complex issues. I don't see comics as that easily absorbed precisely because they are stimulating and they do make you work far harder than watching telly, for example. Even the dimmest of comics takes more mental effort to engage with than, say, ITV News.
 
 
grant
17:42 / 05.05.05


Ralph Ellison's Invisible Girl?

Prize fighting for scholarships... with force fields!

Actually, I think I have that "Ellison=more comicky" rxn because he writes more allegorically. Make of that feeling what you will. That Sandman story about Element Girl, actually, seems to have a very similar vibe to Ellison.
 
 
PatrickMM
21:42 / 05.05.05
I feel like the best works, regardless of medium, are those that don't just tell a story, but tailor it to the medium they're telling it in. So, Magnolia is one of the most amazing films I've ever seen, but if it was a novel or comic, it would still be good, but it wouldn't be as good. That's because it makes such great use of what the film medium offers, namely the juxtaposition of images and music, and the use of visual parallels to connect the story threads. In comics, the person who consistently uses the medium the best is Alan Moore, and that might be why there are so many problems adapting his works to film. A book like Promethea, or Watchmen, makes such great use of the medium it would be impossible to replicate the experience in another medium.

The vast majority of works are just stories that don't really innovate in their chosen medium, or in the worst case, attempt to emulate the style of another, hence the criticism for stuff like Dan Brown.

My favorite work of fiction is The Invisibles, and that series did things that no film could do and that no book could do. Comics can convey information better than any other medium because you can take your time going through the work, and flip back to easily see what has come before. Also, it's a lot easier to make clear what's important in a comic than you can in a book. I read Philip K. Dick's VALIS, but the similar concepts were much better conveyed by The Invisibles.

Comics do have unique advantages, I prefer reading a comic to a prose book, but there are some stories that comics just can't do. However, I think comics right now could do with a move back to a more denser, novel inspired style, because just doing film storyboards, as the new 'widescreen comics' phenomenon of a few years ago makes books that just read too quick and don't make great use of the medium. I don't want to see a film on paper, when I could just as easily see a real film. I want to read something that uses the medium in a unique way, like Promethea, or more conventional stuff like Bendis' Goldfish.

So, one medium isn't inherently better than the other, but The Invisibles affected me and a lot of that is to do with the way it uses the comic book medium.
 
  

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