In Defense of Graphic Novels: Essex County , Summer Blonde, Griffin and Sabine & Body World

Recently, I chanced upon the coverage of Canada Reads 2012 (Canada Reads is an organization that comes up with a list of great Canadian books every year). I'd just found out about Canada Reads because I heard that Sara Quin was one of the champions for panel put together to help decide the essential book of 2012 (basically a book that tops of the list). She fought (extremely well) for Essex County by Jeff Lemire, which is a graphic novel and the first ever novel of its genre to be included in the Canada Reads' Top 5. You guys can go check out the entire thing on YouTube; below is Sara's introduction of herself and the book.

Sadly, Essex County didn't win (although I'd love for you guys to check out the entire 2-day coverage featuring the fight for Essex County to see how well she battled for it--I linked it below) but I really believe in what Sara was saying about the graphic novel and how it is a great medium and is just as (if not more) effective than entirely written word. In the video below, Sara talks about what happens in Day One and how while she was disappointed that the other panelists were disqualifying Essex County on account of it being a graphic novel, she wasn't surprised either because something relatively new like this is bound to scare a lot of more traditional readers. 

I got extremely sad at the end of watching the Canada Reads stream because even if I know that despite losing she was able to draw a lot of attention to the genre and that in itself was a victory, I know all too well how it feels like to fight for a piece of work even if you go into it knowing you're probably going to lose in the end. The knowing takes nothing away from the disappointment. This is so true especially in the field of literature where things that are more everyday and mundane and seemingly easy to understand are often cast-off as unimportant or not relevant whereas the truth is that it is often harder and more tedious to write about mundane things, not to mention that stories which deal with everyday life often hit home the hardest (examples being Bullet In the Brain by Tobias Wolff or Uncle Wiggily In Connecticut by J.D. Salinger or heck, even the Bob Ong books which are well-written and widely read but unacknowledged by the literary community because they're hilarious and because they aren't sure if the person writing it has a PhD ). 

In the Canada Reads sessions, one of the other panelists discredits the genre because of the pictures, saying that because of its illustrative nature, the graphic novel is easy to get through and she says that a certain level of craftsmanship must be put into writing something which implies that graphic novels don't possess that level of craftsmanship. I understand that to a lot of older people, the graphic novel genre is discredited because the pictures are seen as "dumbing it down" and this is because they were brought up in a society where books with pictures were seen as juvenile. But I just don't think that that's necessarily true. 

I was thinking about it on the bus home and graphic novels involve so much more literal craftsmanship than written novels do because when you're writing a book you're working with words, yes but all you're essentially doing is typing whereas if you're illustrating (whether drawing or painting) you're literally crafting the form as well as--in a lot of cases--handwriting the text and dialogue. I think that people have forgotten that just because something is easy to read, it doesn't mean that it was easy to make or that it's sloppily made. In fact, some of the things that are the easiest to read are things that were the most difficult to write. One of the other panelists in the Canada Reads videos says that the graphic novel is like the iPod--it's cool and stuff but come on, to which Sara replies something like, "You do know the iPod saved Apple right?" In the same way that Apple technology is easy to use but extremely difficult to perfect (can you just imagine everything that the Apple people go through everyday) in order for it to become easy to use, good graphic novels have been labored over with such excruciating care that it's ridiculous (and scary) to think that some people will discredit it just because they think it's easy to draw. 

I can't remember who said it but last week, my friend Ron read aloud to me from one of the books that he'd been reading and one of the extremely interesting things he read to me was this bit about content and form. I'm paraphrasing (for lack of the actual text and Ron being offline) but it went something like the thing about form is not the content behind it but the ciphering of the form itself. And I think that's true--stories and the way stories are told are always a mesh of the form and the content and there are some stories that are best told through the graphic medium. I ordered a copy of Essex County online because I really want to read it--I've seen some of the preview pages online and they're wonderful.

I was also looking through my extremely humble collection of graphic books this afternoon and I was thinking about how true these stories ring because you're able to map out the world that they're living in, visually and how well-entwined the narrative and the form are. For example, take Adrian Tomine's Summer Blonde & Shortcomings--he tells extremely mundane stories in the most wonderful ways. There's this one graphic short story of his called Hawaiian Getaway (included in Summer Blonde) which is about a girl who takes to reaching out by prank-calling the payphone across the street and watching the people who pick it up. It's simple but really blends wonderfully with the medium because you get to see the faces of these people whom she tele-emotionally molests. I just don't think it could've been done any other way. 

Then there're the Griffin & Sabine books by Nick Bantock--for those who haven't read them, the books are basically a collection of letters from these two strangers who correspond over a period of time and eventually decide to meet; the letters are made so well and with so much care that you can just imagine this lonely guy in his apartment, making all these letters to mail to a woman he's never met. The form is the content (and vice versa).

Today, Trizha lent me a graphic novel called Body World by Dash Shaw and I think that it is one of the most well-written and most well-crafted graphic novels I've ever come across. Everything, from the orientation of the book (portrait) to the dialogue, to the drawings, to how the setting is revealed is incorporated into the form--which ties into a bigger theme of the book which is (basically) that everything is connected in that places have memory and altering your perception through certain highs (the protagonist is a botanist/drug addict) can lead you to see different planes of the Body World.

A grid map/legend with corresponding longitude/latitude coordinates folds out from the back of the cover page so that you can read the work side by side with the map. The first panel on most pages tells us where the scene is taking place--you use the map to tell where it is. I really love this mode of story telling and easy map access because it allows you almost experience the geography first hand. It's wonderful. I'm thinking of ordering a copy of this as well.

Reading Body World and all these great stories has really got me thinking it's a damn shame that these books don't get the credit they deserve or that even now that they're getting more attention than they did a couple of decades ago, it'll be a while before all this well-crafted work will be given the credit it deserves. But also, it makes me believe even more that just because something is independent or unrecognized by a body of so-called gatekeepers, it doesn't mean that it has to be bad in the same way that so much of great stuff in the nerd community (lit/graphic novels/comics/film) of the Philippines is heavily independent.