Equal Mediums?

The readings this week were about graphic novels, comics, or any other sort of “picture book” and how they are more complex than one might first expect.  I strongly support using graphic novels in the classroom whenever possible—especially when students are choosing a book freely to read. They often seem less intimidating to students who are not strong readers, or seem like an “easy” choice to students who are good readers, but in reality they are complex and thought provoking.

Even knowing this, I was surprised by how much detail and deliberate choice is involved in constructing these works.  Kyle Baker’s preface highlights this, saying, “Comic books/graphic novels are a visual medium, so it’s most important for an artist to choose a subject with opportunities for compelling graphics” (6).  Not every story can be successfully told as a graphic novel—so from the very beginning, the author of such a novel must make a good choice.  Understanding Comics takes this idea of deliberate choices further in speaking about the gutter and how “in the limbo of the gutter, human imagination takes two separate images and transforms them into a single idea” (66).  Readers are much more active in this reading because they have to take what is left unsaid, undrawn, but that does happen, and fill in the gutter.  Thus, “to kill a man between panels is to condemn him to a thousand deaths” (69).

The details matter in graphic novels, and I would not deny that everything from color, to shape of the frame, position of the frame, to size of the frame and much more play a role in this.  I’m convinced—graphic novels require care, thought, and active skills in both creating and reading them.  So here’s my question—are they literature? I can’t deny that reading all 200 pages of Nat Turner had me emotionally invested, sickened, confused, uncertain, and sympathetic at different points—all things any good piece of writing should do.  But I also can’t deny that it only took me an hour to read, which would not be true of most 200 page works of literature.

So is time spent what makes something count as literature? Is it the ability to decode specific symbols? Or is it the story, the ability to get caught up in something outside the self, the absorption in another world, the puzzling through and coming to a conclusion in the end?  Aren’t all of those things part of what we value about literature? Don’t we get all of those things out of good traditional and good graphic novels?

The genres are still different—to say their not cheapens them because the form is part of the work whether it is a traditional novel, a graphic novel, or even an oral folk tale.  But maybe the point is that since each can be equally complex, requiring thought and interpretation, we should regard them as equal mediums of story.

One thought on “Equal Mediums?

  1. Professor Sample

    I appreciate where you’re coming from with the question “So is time spent what makes something count as literature?” But I can’t help but feel that the question conflates duration with depth. I am very reluctant to equate the length of a work or the duration of time it takes to read it with the work’s literary value. As we’ve discussed throughout the semester, a short story—even a short short story—can be very profound.

    I prefer to think about literature in a way that separates the specific medium or platform from the contents. My go-to definition is simply this: something is literary when it calls attention to language, expression, and meaning-making. Seen through this lens, even the most disregarded forms of communication, say comic books or text messages, can be literary, if not literature.

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