Graphic Novels

Has the graphic novel – a fictional story presented in comic-strip format – finally become intellectually respectable?

Graphic novels have just landed with an almighty kersplat. Ten days ago, two such works were shortlisted for the Shakespeare Book Awards for the first time in the history of the prize, in two different categories. This was no publicity stunt: neither panel knew what the other had done. This is, surely, the moment when the graphic book finally made its entrance into the respectable club room of high literature. Hang on, though: can you compare a graphic novel with the literary kind? Wouldn’t that be like comparing a painting with a music video? Or is it time we started seeing them as comparable mediums for storytelling? If so, what next?

Robert Macfarlane, the chairman of another major literary award, says he has no objection in principle to a graphic novel being submitted for the prize. In fact, he has taught one, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, alongside the works of Russian writer Tolstoy and Don Quixote (by the Spanish writer Miguel de Cervantes) at the University of Cambridge, where he works in the English Faculty. ‘The idea of outlawing the graphic novel doesn’t make any sense to me,’ he says. ‘I don’t segregate it from the novel. The novel is always eating up other languages, media and forms.’ Graphic fiction, he says, is ‘another version of the novel’s long flirtation with the visual’. This is, he declares, ‘a golden age for the graphic novel’.

And he’s right. We are seeing a boom in graphic novels. Since Maus was awarded a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, they have gone on to devour every literary genre going. But so far, graphic novels have politely stood aside and let conventional books win the big prizes. Now they want the vote. Fighting for the graphic novelists’ cause, astonishingly, are some hefty prize-winning writers. The English novelist and poet A. S. Byatt is passionately in favour of graphic novels competing with regular ones. Byatt, who is a huge fan of Spiegelman’s Maus, thinks that French-Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis stands ‘head and shoulders above most novels being produced. It’s more interesting and more moving. It’s able to be serious because it can carry itself along on this unserious form. It allowed her to be witty about things that are terrible. And that’s why it’s a major work of art’.

The genius of the graphic novel, as the English writer Philip Pullman explains, is that it can bring into play so many levels of narrative by layering them on top of each other. Take American Alison Bechdel’s brilliant Are You My Mother? – in a single page, she can depict a memory of being with her mother in her childhood, dialogue between herself and her mother as they chat on the phone in the present, plus an image of herself toiling at her desk, trying to write her memoir. And what Bechdel and her mum are saying on the phone links to the diaries of the early 20th-century writer Virginia Woolf, which Bechdel also brings to visual life. Try doing that with words – it would take a chapter. Bechdel does it in a few panels. That, in the end, is precisely what keeps graphic literature so distinct from prose narrative.

Graphic novels and traditional novels demand, to be sure, the same amounts of time, intellect and artistry from their authors. But that doesn’t mean they’re the same thing. A few years on, will you be clicking the buy button on a graphic novel as happily as you’d pick up a work by a traditional novelist? Even Bechdel confesses that her reading habits are still struggling out of the past. ‘Honestly, I would be slightly more inclined to pick up a non-graphic work,’ she says. ‘At this point, there’s not a huge number of graphic novels that are about topics that interest me. But that, too, is changing. We’re becoming more visually literate. There’s some reason for these graphic novels creeping into the canon. We’re reading differently from how we used to 200 years ago.’