Books with Pictures

Comic books -- or should I say "graphic novels"? -- are coming up in the world, but as far as my experience is concerned, people still don't take you entirely seriously if you enjoy reading them. This strikes me as incredibly silly. One of the prevailing tests of "culture" in the western world seems to be one's ability to appreciate the visual arts; another is, of course, one's ability to appreciate the literary arts. So why is it that an artform which combines the visual and literary, often in stunning and innovative ways, gets such a bad rap?

Part of it, I suspect, stems from the fact that "picture books" are considered the province of children, "comic books" the domain of adolescents, and "chapter books" the signal that one has moved up into something like (young) adulthood. The smaller the print, and the fewer the pictures, the more "grown-up" something is. But this makes the huge mistake of equating literary form with content. While it's true that a lot of books for kids have pictures, and most books for adults don't, this doesn't mean that the picture book is an inherently poor medium for addressing "grown-up" ideas. I'll be the first to admit that I have only read a limited number of what I think of as picture books for grown-ups, but the ones that I have read have blown me away. Art Spiegelman famously uses the format to tell the story of his father's struggles as a Jew in Nazi Germany, and his own struggles with what his father's history means to him. Shaun Tan's work is more whimsical -- I fell in love with one story in Tales from Outer Suburbia about the afterlife of lost or discarded notes and scribblings -- but even if his subject matter doesn't always appear complex, his treatment is always nuanced. (If you want to read a really good essay on picture books by someone who knows them better than I do, check out his "Picture Books: Who Are They For?".)

Most recently, I've been working my way through the ten volumes of Neil Gaiman's Sandman comics, which feel about as intertextual as a T. S. Eliot poem, full of references to mythologies, history, and history, western and eastern, modern and ancient -- and still manage to keep this allusion in the background and tell a series of compelling stories about identity, duty, personal choice, and the things that make us human. When the cover tells you the story is "suggested for mature readers," I like to believe that this isn't because there's sex or violence or other things people don't want to think their kids are reading (though sometimes there is). It's because it takes a mature mind to appreciate the complexity of the universe Gaiman has crafted. I don't see how any reader could fail to take seriously a text in which the character of Lucifer ironically quotes from John Milton's Paradise Lost -- and then cites his own quotation!

Some of the stigma against comics may also stem from the assumption that they are newfangled inventions of an unpredictable popular culture, therefore lacking the respectability of tradition and elite status. There is a much larger question at hand here, about what constitutes "popular" and what constitutes "literary" (and why the two should be considered separately, if they should be at all), but on the small scale it seems important to point out that supposedly "literary" works have been relying on pictures for hundreds of years. Dickens and Thackeray both supervised the illustration of many of their major novels (with Thackeray even contributing his own illustrations, in come cases). William Blake is the prime example: he invented his own reverse-etching technique and hand-etched his poems alongside images that he watercolored after they had been printed. To call them "illustrations" is to miss the point; often, instead of simply "illustrating" the kinds of things discussed in the poems, Blake's images provide additional clues to interpretation, or serve to increase readerly confusion. Since all the pages were colored by hand, no two are the same, and radically different versions of the same poem exist -- for example, look at these two different prints of "The Tyger":

(If you're looking for more, check out the Blake Archive, where you can access images of Blake's works held in different collections across the world.)

So, if comics aren't "kid stuff" and they aren't really "new," what's the problem? As a final guess, I'd suggest that, while we live in a world that bombards us with thousands of images on a daily basis, we're only very rarely asked to read them. Comics, graphic novels, picture books -- call them what you will, this is exactly what they demand of us. By juxtaposing images and text, they call attention to the fact that pictures, in addition to simply being seen, can be read, and they challenge us to perform this reading, which is a challenge precisely because so many of the images we encounter on a daily basis seem to demand internalization without reading (just think of most advertising). In the process, they make some people a little uncomfortable -- but if art doesn't do that, at least a little, then I'm not entirely sure it is art to begin with.