Comics have been popular in Britain since the 1930s – The Beano and The Dandy are probably the best known and longest-running series – and American superhero comics have maintained their place in popular culture through TV series and blockbuster films. Madelyn Travis charts the rise of graphic novels and surveys some of the best new ones for children.
Foreign comics, too, such as Asterix and Tintin, have achieved success in this country. While in the past, the popularity of comics was often accompanied by the assumption that they had no literary merit, in recent years the genre’s standing in literary circles has risen and now many book shops have whole sections devoted to graphic novels.
The term ‘graphic novel’ is sometimes used interchangeably with ‘comic’, but a comic book, at about the length of a picture book, tends to be shorter than a graphic novel. Comics can be found in a newspaper or in a standalone magazine, while a graphic novel is published as a conventional book.
Graphic novels are often more experimental in subject matter and are aimed at a wider range of audiences. What graphic novels and comics have in common is their format: the combination of images, words and panels is known as ‘sequential art’. Comics and graphic novels both use speech bubbles and thought balloons.
The sequential art format has been used in picture books such as Posy Simmonds’ Baker Cat and Michael Rosen and Joel Stewart’s Red Ted and the Lost Things, in wordless texts including Raymond Briggs’ The Snowman and Shirley Hughes’s Up and Up, and those with serious themes such as Briggs’ When the Wind Blows, about a nuclear attack, and Shaun Tan’s wordless story of immigration, The Arrival.
This seriousness can be what leads to a book’s classification as a graphic novel, for the term has the air of gravitas that ‘comic book’ lacks. Indeed, comic book artist Will Eisner’s book for an adult readership, A Contract with God (1978), departed too much from traditional comic book content to bear the same label and it is generally acknowledged to be the book that spawned the genre of the graphic novel.
The enduring appeal of Art Spiegelman’s Maus, published by Penguin in 1987 and reprinted several times, was an indication that the art form had the potential not just to be respected but also to reach a large market, although it took years before graphic novels moved from minority interest to mainstream success. Undoubtedly, the international success of Japanese manga was a factor in leading UK publishers to realise that graphic novels had great commercial potential.
The growing understanding that our culture is increasingly visual led educationalists to recognise the potential of graphic novels to entice reluctant readers and also to engage keen readers with their increasingly sophisticated narratives.
Graphic novels could also be seen by children as somewhat subversive: manga, for instance, is read from back to front and right to left, making the books seem impenetrable to many adults who pick them up casually.
Recognising these possibilities for child readers, children’s publishers have entered the market with enthusiasm. The most notable is Walker Books, who have brought out graphic novels for children across the age range including versions of Anthony Horowitz’s Alex Rider series and adaptations by Gareth Hinds of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice and King Lear as well as classic tales such as Outlaw: The Legend of Robin Hood and Excalibur: The Legend of King Arthur, forthcoming later in the year.
In addition, Walker publish the authentic Japanese manga series Vermonia for readers of eight and up and Andi Watson’s Glister series, aimed at girls of six and up. Watson has worked with Marvel and DC Comics and been nominated for the Eisner Award for outstanding work in the field.
One of the highlights of Walker’s list is Salem Brownstone: All Along the Watchtower, a black and white gothic fantasy with appeal to teenagers. It has garnered a host of accolades, including those from leading lights of the comics field as well as screenwriters and film directors, and been shortlisted for the 2010 Branford Boase Award.
Another standalone title for teenagers is Skim, a manga-style novel by Mariko Tamaki and Jillian Tamaki about a mixed race outsider in an all-girls school in Toronto. With its treatment of suicide and the hint of romance between the protagonist and her female teacher, Walker’s graphic novels editor, Lizzie Spratt, describes Skim as ‘groundbreaking’.
Spratt says graphic novels ‘have great appeal to the librarians and institutional market, simply for the reason they are upfront about otherwise potentially difficult areas, breathe new life into stories, and offer something new for fans. I believe that graphic novels are particularly effective at connecting with young adults about intimate and personal issues […] Their content is presented in a way that readers can relate to immediately.’ Next year Walker will be publishing Lesley Fairfield’s Tyranny, about a young woman’s struggle with anorexia.
Walker is not the only publisher to have found success with graphic novels: Self Made Hero’s acclaimed Manga Shakespeare series makes the plays relevant to a young audience without dumbing them down, while the content of Puffin’s Artemis Fowl and Young Bond series lends itself well to the graphic novel format, and Random House’s Babymouse series for readers aged six and up, with its distinctive pink and black covers, crosses the line between comic book and graphic novel.
Some authors and illustrators are beginning to experiment with the format: David Almond and Dave McKean’s The Savage is part novel, part graphic novel, as is the lengthy Caldecott Medal-winning The Invention of Hugo Cabret by Brian Selznick, which alternates whole sections of single full-page images with pages of text only. The book very successfully brings together the ‘conventional’ novel and the wordless book. The changing angles and perspectives of the images will be familiar to readers from their experience of film, and the approach is cleverly embedded in the subject of the book itself: the early days of cinema.
At the other end of the spectrum is Templar’s full-colour Robot City series by Paul Collicutt, which in style is akin to a traditional comic book, though the books are described as graphic novels for ages eight and up. The protagonists - Rod, a robot, and Mike, a human – run a detective agency in a city of 15 million people and a million robots.
The language is reminiscent of 1950s crime fiction, making the series both tongue-in-cheek nostalgic and futuristic. The deadpan humour has undoubted appeal for an adult readership.
Graphic novels, then, are simply a way to tell a story using images and usually words. They have the potential to appeal to all readers, but are perhaps particularly suited to those accustomed to a range of media and story formats, from film to audiobooks to computer games.
The once-common idea of growing out of pictures when a child learned to read ‘properly’ seems to have had its day, as is evidenced by the growth of post-modern picture books which appeal equally to adults and children.
In a graphic novel, too, the pictures and words combine to make meaning. Boundaries of form and content are being extended all the time. As Lizzie Spratt says, ‘It’s an exciting form of literature and storytelling to explore, and there is so much yet to be discovered.’
