The Graphic Novel: An Introduction by Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey

Written by two of the world’s leading experts on the history and theory of comics, this well-organized, meticulously researched, and accessibly written book not only provides an excellent overview of foundational research in the field, but also constitutes a cutting-edge scholarly contribution in its own right. Indeed, if I were limited to recommending a single, one-stop resource to students or nonspecialists interested in the history, structure, and thematic concerns of comics and graphic novels, Baetens’s and Frey’s volume would be my recommendation. Productively intervening in longstanding debates concerning problems and possibilities of the very tem “graphic novel,” and fully conversant with the latest scholarly approaches to comics storytelling more generally, the volume is packed with insights into the historical development as well as the medium-specific properties of graphic narratives; it also offers vivid and compelling interpretations of a variety of case studies, ranging from often-taught texts by authors such as Kyle Baker, Alison Bechdel, Eddie Campbell, Daniel Clowes, Robert Crumb, Will Eisner, Neil Gaiman, Hergé, the Hernandez brothers, David Mazzucchelli, Frank Miller, Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, Harvey Pekar, Joe Sacco, Marjane Satrapi, Craig Thompson, Adrian Tomine, and Chris Ware to less widely known works by Derf Backderf, Sam Glanzman, Simon Grennan, Dave McKean, Jim Starlin, and Martin Vaughn-James, among others. Especially noteworthy is the way the book brings together European and Anglo-American traditions of comics scholarship, and in the process outlines a comprehensive, richly synthetic framework for research on the graphic novel, in which ideas from literary history and popular culture studies link up with work in visual semiotics, narratology, and adaptation studies.

The introduction characterizes the graphic novel as “a special type of comics.” Noting that authors such as Spiegelman and Moore have expressed skepticism about the relevance and utility of the graphic novel as a concept and a generic category (or publishing phenomenon), Baetens and Frey highlight the continued use of the term and its ongoing impact across a range of media, including comics, literature in print, and film. As the authors remark, although Spiegelman and Moore raised legitimate concerns about how use of the category of graphic novel may in some contexts reflect an elitist dismissal of earlier comic book traditions, including those associated with the underground comix movement that took rise after the institution of the comics code authority in the United States in 1954, the term continues to be used as shorthand for “adult readership comic books,” that is, for single-volume comics whose design attributes and characteristic themes set them apart from “regularly serialized titles or more generic material (super-heroes, sci-fi, or fantasy)” (3). More precisely, while being careful to make qualifications and register exceptions, the authors define the graphic novel as a medium marked by features that sit on a spectrum at whose opposite pole is the comic book; they then situate those features at the four levels of form, content, publication format, and production and distribution aspects (8–23). At the level of form, graphic novels foreground individual styles in a way that traditional comic books did not, and they also innovate by accenting the role of the narrator or sometimes even refusing to narrate. Again in a manner that is more or less distinct from the traditional comic-book mode, when it comes to content graphic novels “work on the borderlines of first-person narrative, history-from-below, and oral history,” while also developing fictional narratives with historical meaning (and vice versa). Regarding format, graphic novels, avoiding the serialization associated with comics, are typically “one-shot” creations that commonly assume the shape of the traditional novel. Finally, thanks to the influence of the underground comix tradition as well as the practices established by major publishers such as Pantheon, Penguin, and Faber and Faber and then continued by independent presses like Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly, graphic novelists enjoy a degree of creative freedom unknown to many earlier comics artists (16–17). In sum, Baetens and Frey’s open, flexible definition suggests that “the graphic novel, though not necessarily a sharp break at the level of form or market conditions, represents at least some level of self-knowing ‘play with a purpose’ [vis-à-vis] the traditional comic book form, and in some cases a radical reformation of it” (19).

The chapters in Part One provide historical context for the study of graphic novels. Chapter 2, “Adult Comics before the Graphic Novel,” traces the effects of the anti-comics crusade led by Fredric Wertham in the United States in the mid-twentieth century; it also explores interactions between comics production and the fine art work of Pop artists such as Roy Lichtenstein, Andy Warhol, and Mel Ramos. If, on the one hand, “adult comics and graphic novels can be understood as an antithesis to the stigmatizing emphasis of the postwar moral scare” (32), on the other hand the development of Pop Art helped transform popular-culture and mass-media artifacts, comics included, into “statements on society” (42), with Warhol’s and Lichtenstein’s blowups and reinventions of strips and particularly the Pop Art-inflected Batman television series (1966–1969) suggesting how in being appropriated in new contexts comics could also be reinflected with new meanings. Chapter 3 examines how underground comix as well as more mainstream comics productions laid groundwork for the emergence of the graphic novel. In comix creations, authors such as Jaxon and Justin Green pioneered styles, narrative methods, and thematic emphases that would be taken up by the graphic novel when it emerged as a more or less discrete and recognizable mode in the mid to late 1980s. But repackaged newspaper comic strips (especially Peanuts and Doonesbury) together with sci-fi comics also contributed to an environment in which it was possible to market “serious,” adult-oriented graphic narratives. Chapter 4 discusses how the “big three” graphic novels published in 1986–1987, Moore’s and Dave Gibbons’s Watchmen, Spiegelman’s Maus, and Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, firmly established the form as a bona fide mode of graphic storytelling. Yet the chapter also situates these key works amid other innovative extensions of the medium as well as increasingly sophisticated critical commentary by practicing authors as well as academic specialists.

Part Two explores formal aspects of graphic novels, with the terms and concepts developed in this section of the book being broadly applicable to graphic narratives of all sorts. Focusing on panels and page layouts, Chapter 5 reviews the ideas of analysts such as Benoît Peeters, Thierry Groensteen, and Charles Hatfield. Noting the possible tensions between the sequential organization of panels and nonsequential reading modes (e.g., zooming in on a single panel rather than situating it within the ongoing flow of the page), the chapter outlines taxonomies and distinctions developed by the three theorists just mentioned, in effect bridging semiotic and reader-oriented approaches, as well as European and Anglo-American contributions to the scholarship. Chapter 6 turns to issues of style, or what the authors term “graphiation,” which can be defined as the manner in which “the hand and the body—as well as the whole personality of an artist—is visible in the way he or she gives a visual representation of a certain object, character, setting or event” (137). As Baetens and Frey suggest, when it comes to style the traditional comic book constitutes something of an anti-model for the graphic novel, insofar as “it is part of the graphic [novelist’s] self-construction as a serious author to oppose the industrial principles underlying the production of comics” (135). In addition to discussing obstacles to changes in authorial style, including the difficult, time-consuming nature of drawing, the authors explore how variations in style do become possible—for example, through combinations of available stylistic models or full-on imitations of other authors’ styles. The chapter also contains an illuminating section on aspects of word/image hybridity in graphic novels (143–61), discussing experiments with wordless drawings, depictions of words as images, and strategies for designing cover illustrations. The final chapter in this part of the book is titled “The Graphic Novel as a Specific Form of Storytelling”; it examines the relevance of ideas from narratology for the study of graphic novels, while also considering how these texts’ medium-specific properties carry implications for the study of narrative as such. Especially productive are the chapter’s discussion of the role of space in graphic novel, including the presentation of temporal relationships via the spaces of the page and also the functioning of places or spatial environments as character-like beings in their own right; its emphasis on how graphic novels (and graphic narratives more generally) engage in characterization by foregrounding agents’ bodies and more specifically their faces; and its account of graphic novels that rely on abstraction, or nonfigurative modes of representation, to raise questions about the problems and possibilities of narrative itself.

Part Three turns to thematic issues, with Chapter 8 focusing on “exchanges, interplays, and fusions” between graphic novels and recent and contemporary literary fiction, and Chapter 9 exploring the extent to which graphic novelists’ practices participate in or resist nostalgia toward bygone eras, including the golden age of comics. Chapter 8 discusses how authors such as Michael Chabon and Jonathem Lethem have engaged directly with comics traditions in their fictional as well as nonfictional writing, while Chip Kidd and Dave Eggers have helped establish a publishing environment that is hospitable for graphic novelists—for example, by including their work in collections also containing literature in print. For their part, graphic novelists, in addition to creating covers for works of literary fiction, have undertaken adaptations of texts by Auster, Joyce, Proust, Trollope, and other prominent literary authors. The final chapter of the book then explores how “nostalgia culture,” or the impulse toward the archival, figures in graphic novels. The institutionalization of the graphic novel in academic settings, reprinted collections of classic strips, and commentary on earlier comics traditions by graphic novelists themselves—all of this contributes to the nostalgic profile of many exemplars of this storytelling mode. Yet an alternative, anti-nostalgic strand can be found in texts such as Sacco’s and Chris Hedge’s Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, with its documentary-like portrayal of the poor and disenfranchised in contemporary US culture; Derf Backderf’s critical treatment of 1970s America in My Friend Dahmer; and Kyle Baker’s Nat Turner, with its use of photographs to register the continuing presence of locations bound up with the history of slavery.

The volume ends with a comprehensive twelve-page bibliographical guide whose rubrics correspond to the main sections of the book. This extraordinarily useful guide, along with the authors’ exemplary synthesis of historical contextualization, detailed interpretations of individual works, and extrapolations from specific case studies to larger trends in the development of the graphic novel, make Baetens’s and Frey’s text the perfect introduction to this vibrantly innovative arena for storytelling. Indeed, in opening up so many new lines of historical, formal, and thematic inquiry into graphic novels in such an engaging way, the text in effect invites readers from the undergraduate level on up to co-create what remains, excitingly, a still-emerging field of study.