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tHe aiM of tHiS CHapter iS not to reinVent tHe proBleM of the word-and-image relationship, here in the field of comics and graphic-novel production. In a modest and pragmatic way, the following pages will try to show the relevance and interest of this issue in this field, in itself as well as in relationship with analogous or comparable tendencies and evolutions in Europe. Neither will this analysis enter into long discussions on the boundaries of the corpus that will be analyzed. The concept of the contemporary American graphic novel will therefore be used in a broad sense, entailing all comic art productions in book form that address an adult readership. The group of works that will be labelled here as “graphic novels” range from the postmodern cyberpunk superheroes comics à la Watchmen (Gibbons and Moore 1987) to more experimental works such as Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan (2000), and including the autobiographic novel Maus by Art Spiegelman (1986 and 1991). Other examples will be quoted and analyzed further on. I realize that using a single label for works that may differ dramatically, on the one hand, and trying to define a certain number of global characteristics, on the other hand, is a risky and dangerous business, doomed to fail. The remarks that I will make in this contribution (and I hope not all of them will be sweeping overgeneralizations) should be taken with caution and read words and images in the contemporary american graphic novel J a n Ba etens 93 Words and im ag e s in t He am e r ican g r a P H ic n o v e l as nothing more than a first step toward a larger study of the word-and-image problem in this type of visual storytelling. The issue of intermediality is often reduced to two fundamental questions: first, the convergences and divergences of the information carried by, respectively, the visual and the verbal aspects of the comic strip as a hybrid medium; second, the question of the inequality of those aspects, which may occur simultaneously but which are not therefore considered to have the same value. Before putting a new emphasis on phenomena that are at least as important as these two questions, but that are so taken for granted that often readers fail to pay attention to them, it may be useful to take a closer look at the double issue that often monopolizes the critical debate on intermedialization: the hybridity of the narrative information , and the structural imbalance between word and image. The hybridization of comics introduces a split at the level of the dispatching of information, which is presented through the visual as well as the verbal channel (textless comics are not common, and when used they are often three panel gag-strips). What one needs to understand the story is not just provided by the images, but also by the text (balloons or captions or otherwise integrated textual material), and much scholarship has been devoted to the meticulous scrutiny of any parameter that can display either a convergence or a divergence of the verbal and the visual. Text and image can, for instance, meet or depart at temporal level (we see before we read, or vice versa). Or they can overlap or contradict each other (we do not see what we read, we see something completely different, we don’t see anything, and, in all three cases, vice versa). Or, to quote just a last example of a list that is far from being exhaustive, there can be a shift between the instance that utters the text (the narrator, or the embedded narrator if a second-level narrative is developed) and the instance that sees or filters the image (the focalizer, an extremely complex instance that can be multilayered, since just as in matters of narrative voice, the structure of focalization, that is of who is seeing what, is open to embedded structures: an image seen through the eyes of a character is of course not just an internally focalized image, it is an internally focalized image embedded in a broader framework that is always already focalized by an external focalizer). Whatever may be the relevance of discussions around focalization (which it is impossible to do without when one wants to make a precise analysis of the narrative structures of a graphic novel), the seductiveness of this type of discussion is so extreme that focalization sometimes becomes almost an aim in itself...

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