Novel graphics
Comics are the superheroes of education. It’s a suspicion I’ve long harboured. As a child, I regarded my dog-eared issues of The Phantom, Battle, Commando, 2000AD and Superman as inverse Clark Kents or Bruce Waynes: all muscular, balletic action on the outside but with a cooler cerebral core.
Much later in life, classics such as Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ The Watchmen, Art Spiegelman’s Pulizer Prize-winning Holocaust memoir Maus and the astonishing Logicomix, which makes the quest for foundational mathematics sexy, only confirmed my suspicions.
Now come two new graphic novels which seal the deal. Darryl Cunningham’s The Age of Selfishness: Ayn Rand, Morality, and the Financial Crisis is nothing short of miraculous, tackling the “the complexities of economics by distilling them into a series of accessible concepts for all ages”. The illustrations are deliberately blocky and naive, the palette restricted and the dialogues and commentaries pithy and often very funny.
Equally miraculous is Scott McCloud’s The Sculptor, which deploys the Faustian trope of an artist selling his soul for the promise of artistic immortality. David Smith is a failed New York sculptor who is given just 200 more days to live in exchange for the ability to perform superhuman feats of public art. But he doesn’t reckon on meeting the love of his life in the interim.
McCloud’s first graphic novel in 10 years, The Sculptor is a tour-de-force of the sequential artist’s art, deploying a monochrome palette, beautifully rendered cityscapes, highly expressive figurative drawing and a flexible, dynamic grid to work up to an emotional sucker punch that will leave you in tears both of sadness and exaltation.
But how did we get here?
With the rise of the storyboarded film and TV series you might think the concept of sequential art had reached its logical conclusion. That’s even without taking into account screen adaptations of comics from the DC and Marvel superhero stables or graphic novels such as Blue is the Warmest Colour and Gemma Bovery.
The story’s more complicated. Cartoonist Will Eisner, an early pioneer of the sophisticated comic and graphic novel as we know them today, adapted film techniques to comic strips; he was also one of the first to use comics for educational purposes, thus borrowing from the film documentary.
And yet cave paintings, hieroglyphs, mythological and religious narrative sequences in frescoes and stained glass windows, Oriental calligraphic scrolls, illuminated manuscripts, picture books and early political cartoons can all be fairly classified as sequential art with multiple functions.
Of course we’re using “art” here in its loosest sense, without any value judgement. But read Eisner’s Comics and Sequential Art (1985) or McCloud’s Understanding Comics (1993) and you come up against two formidable practitioner/theorists for whom the evolution from the primeval swamp of pulp comix to the ivory tower of graphic novels is a vexed one.
It’s a battle that, while not necessarily explicit, still rages today, and for a guide through the complexities of the comic form you could do no better than the latest edition of 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die. After all, what other book takes in Rupert the Bear, Max Ernst, Barbarella, Batman, Shaun Tan, Fritz the Cat, The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers, Manga and Sin City while featuring such observations as “Unfortunately Pichard’s most eye-catching work generally features large-breasted, doe-eyed women being tortured in increasingly convoluted ways, usually by nuns”?
The truth is comics either flaunt their street cred merely to conceal their educative or high art credentials or, like Frank Miller and Bill Sienkiewicz’s iconoclastic Elektra Assassin, up the aesthetic ante almost to the point of incoherence. And they are superheroes all.
1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die is published by Pier 9 ($40). The Sculptor is published by SelfMadeHero ($40). The Age of Selfishness is published by Abrams Comicarts ($25).
