This Book Contains Graphic Language: Comics as Literature (review)

Rocco Versaci’s intention in This Book Contains Graphic Language is a work of what some comics fans call “comics evangelism”: it seeks to convince readers unfamiliar with comics that the graphic novel is a valid form of literature. To this end, Versaci compares the prose and comics versions of several canonical “literary” genres (e.g. memoir, journalism, war film). He demonstrates that comics’ unique formal resources, specifically their use of images in addition to text, enable comics to address the central concerns of these genres in ways that prose cannot.

As “comics evangelism,” Versaci’s text is effective. On the grounds that “excellence in comic books is not isolated to a few titles but is much more prevalent” (25), he covers a wide variety of texts, exposing readers to a good cross-section of contemporary American comics production (though he doesn’t cover the important comics of Europe, East Asia and Latin America). He does a good job of documenting the similarity and even the superiority of comics to comparable literary texts. This argument is most powerful in chapter 5, which shows how ‘50s war comics were more honest and nuanced than war films of the same period, because their cultural marginality enabled them to “fly under the radar” of censorious oversight.

However, Versaci’s focus on a broad range of texts results in a disappointing lack of depth. Because he covers so many texts, his readings of individual comics often demonstrate merely that the use of images produces effects unachieveable via prose alone. Versaci doesn’t give close attention to the exact nature of these effects or to the means by which they are produced. His readings would have benefitted from more sustained insight and from a little judicious application of theoretical concepts. Hopefully, Versaci’s shallow descriptions of his texts will be intriguing enough to inspire readers to produce more creative readings of the same texts.

For readers who have doubts about the value or acceptability of studying comics, Versaci’s book is an effective justification of comics studies. However, I worry that Versaci’s book may also promote misconceptions about comics. His emphasis on “comics as literature” is a sound political move. Assimilating comics to an already “respectable” cultural form is an expedient way to earn such respectability for comics. As a comics scholar myself, I certainly agree that this is a desirable outcome, but I fear that Versaci’s emphasis on literature may obfuscate the important ways in which comics destabilize the category of literature. Versaci considers comics mostly in their narrative capacity, treating the pictures primarily as enhancements to the verbal text. But in my view, what makes comics fascinating is precisely their irreducibility to either words or pictures, tableau or narrative, and their interrogation of these distinctions. In comics, images become language and vice versa, highlighting the socially constructed nature of the word-image opposition. Unfortunately, Versaci sidesteps this question by simply claiming comics for literature. In his admirable effort to promote comics studies, Versaci may have obscured the reasons why studying comics is exciting.