Comic Books and Graphic Novels

by Wy Dot Com

Comic books have come of age!

I don’t mean superhero comics, nor do I mean The Beano.

I mean the adult ones, with adult storylines, grown-up graphics.

I mean ones like American Splendour by Harvey Pekar.

So let’s draw a distinction between comic books, and graphic novels.

Comic books are usually one-page storylines, with graphics to suit. Excellent example is, indeed, American Splendour: a book of shorts, different illustrators; stand-alone plots and events.

Graphic novels are really the high end of this market: book-length complex storylines, one illustrator. The text-to-graphics ratio is usually loaded to the text; the graphics and layout, in consequence can be spectacular.

Think of Harvey Pekar’s My Cancer Year.

American Splendour: autobiographical explorations of Midwest America. Harvey Pekar, divorcee, low-pay job as hospital records clerk; collector of jazz and blues vinyl 78’s. There is something about his obsessive lifestyle has the feel of a Woody Allen. The humour comes from the low-key ‘Hey, made it through another day!’ type theme. We see him meet his new partner, their meeting of nerdy personalities, how they shake down together; we see him feted by Letterman, and the cost of that. We see him diagnosed with cancer, and pull through. But most of all we see his day-to-day encounters with colleagues, guys in bars, neighbours, street corner escapades: the every-day interactions, and failures to connect.

There is no character build-up, the stories are inconsequential, artless, random. Uniquely American. No other country quite gets this tone for the failure of its dreams.

 The sheer good fortune of knowing Robert Crumb before he went West Coast, helped launch Harvey into publication. He had the ideas, stick man storyboards; but Robert Crumb had the belief in him, and contacts. We learn all this from the books.

And now, of course, made into a great film.

I must warn you about F C Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan – the smartest kid on earth.

Don’t get me wrong, the whole concept and execution are excellent; the tonal range of the illustrations is perfectly suited to the atmosphere and mood; the inventiveness of layout, range of characters and events, are admirable.

It’s just that Jimmy Corrigan is so relentlessly bleak.

Each page demands a lot of close reading: they are packed with detail, with tones of voice; slow perusal is the only way to take in the richness and complexity of the images. But it also makes you soak up the sterility of the main characters.

It is set, like American Splendour, in the mid States, around Chicago, and mostly in contemporary times; there are substantial look backs to well researched beginnings in wooden rooming houses, the dockside buildings of the 1880s.

In complete contrast is Daniel Clowes’ Ice Haven.

There is talk of “emotional reserve”; there is also puckish humour: the failed writer, Random Wilder, has to call in kids off the street to fix his car engine, so he can asphyxiate himself; but the garage is too draughty.

Bleak? Ok, but surrounded by much underplayed quirky humour.

There is also a post-modernist element as comic book critic Harry Naybors pops up to voice qualifying academic overviews of the values of comic books: is it art, or not art: even that is, in the main, meant as humour.

Coming from a similar environment and background as Jimmy Corrigan author F C Ware, these stories are worlds away as general concepts go.

Clowes’ female characters are always delightful: the talented, repressed Vida; teenage Violet, lost to the world: her half brother Charles is saved by his crush on her.

Ware’s women are magazine women; the central figures in Jimmy’s life are never seen whole; never a face to his domineering mother; the nurse in the hospital he fantasises about is never more than a fragment here, an arm there.

So, is Ice Haven a comic book, or graphic novel? It has the structure of the comic: short, single-event-led stories, but they build, overlap, intrude, gel, to a complex whole. Clues are given but here is no grand denouement; red herrings flap around.

Daniel Clowes’s other well known books include Ghost World, another classic film of this genre.

What these books have in common is a take on character that can only be called emotionally nullified, an involvement with the world several times removed.

Private Detective Amos, in Ice Haven, is more entangled with his own nature than the job in hand. His Chandleresque monolgue seriously undercuts his final words to his neglected wife: “ I said, ‘My world would be absolutely unbearable without you.’”

Even so, this second-hand emotional tone contrasts greatly with Jimmy Corrigan’s almost neuraesthenic emotional immaturity.