The Spaniard in the Works (part 2)

In the event that the following may bore the arse off you, here is a funny face in a Spanish elevator.


So El Tio Berni (Alberto really. It takes an eternity these days to sort out people from their online monikers) was asking me about ‘the graphic novel’?
When, I ask myself, did they become interested in that? Spain has its own names for the comics. I was last here in 2005 and there was no hint whatsoever that they needed an extra one. As soon as I got home, I looked it up in Wikipedia. I mean Wikipedia (Español). Novela gráfica or, in translation: graphic novel

and I find myself astonished.

The wikipedia page is perfect in its simplicity. It looks like something I might have constructed myself. It describes the subject as a movement and names its important practitioners, Clowes, Sacco, Seth, Satrapi, etc. and so far it’s only 168 words into the article. Contrast it with the American one, a tedious wilderness trek which takes you through three weeks of ‘definition,’ scrolldown through another fortnight of ‘history,’ through cave paintings and medieval tapestries, then examines every miserable claimant to being the first graphic novel, and by the time you get to something that matters, say Maus, you have read 2,655 words (out of an end count of 3,821) and completely lost the will to live.

And the Pictures. The American version has images by Kane, Corben, and Gulacy that represent the onset of the late mannerist phase of comic books, with absurdly posturing heroes. The page really is a grotesque embarrassment and it should be deleted. The Spanish version by sublime contrast just shows a well-stocked corner in a book store. Nothing misleading there. The page was established in 2004.

But when did they start talking about la Novela gráfica?

Blogger The Watcher, in a post of 31 Mar 2009, conveniently explains the terms used in Spain and when they kicked in.: Tebeo, cómic, novela gráfica. (don’t try to read this only in Google translation, which makes a massacre of a subject which is already at best a dog’s breakfast). The medium was originally referred to as historietas, or small stories. Tebeo comes from TBO magazine, which originated in 1917 and by the late 1930s sold in quantities huge enough to give its name to the whole medium. I think the English language word ‘comic’ crept in around the 1970s when the history of the American newspaper strip started to be celebrated internationally, When Raymond, Foster, Caniff etc. were raised to the level of old masters. Spain has always been good at publishing these old masters, and The Watcher might be surprised to know that they were never as familiar to the average comics reader in the USA as they are to him. I have several books in Spanish that were not, or at least not then, available in English editions, including a set of ten slim volumes of Stan Drake’s Julieta Jones. And finally, we have the arrival of la novela gráfica, which the Watcher concludes is a ‘chorrada’ or, roughly translated, a ‘turd’, though a year later, and I like the cut of his gib, he changes his mind.

As I look deeper into the subject I find a document quoted all over the place which I thought was a thing that had had its brief moment in the world and was put to sleep four or five years ago. I‘m referring to a thing called Eddie Campbell’s manifesto of the graphic novel. If you've never heard of it, off the top of my head I can think of six places where you can find it online in English. here's one. The Spanish Wiki page links to a translation at 68Revoluciones (posted May 2007). Pepo Perez posted a different translation last year. I also know it in Portugese and French. It's the most widely disseminated thing I have written. It has been well described as "a not-altogether-serious document that is also not altogether kidding." In Spain when journalists want to explain 'graphic novel' they quite often reach for my little manifesto. I wrote it in the first place as a demonstration of a way to stop my comrades from arguing about the meaning of words, thus promoting confusion and discord to the world at large, when it would be useful instead to promote our ideas.

By Dec. 2007 in Spain, the term graphic novel had made such inroads into cultural awareness that
"The Online Literary magazine Literaturas.com offers readers a special titled "From Comic to graphic novel', which contains 15 articles. The supplement has been coordinated by Luis Garcia and among the articles that comprise it are by novelist José Ángel Mañas, the poet León Vicente Muñoz Álvarez, the cartoonist Angel de la Calle and principal of Tebeosfera.com, Manuel Barrero." The pieces are more or less interesting; to give a sense of the tone, one from the postmodernist viewpoint talks about Alan Moore and Watchmen and describes From Hell as "a masterpiece that teaches how to make metaliterature without sacrificing the literature."

Everything is going well until the comics expert steps up. Manuel Barrero, in a lengthy essay titled La novela gráfica. Perversión genérica de una etiqueta editorial (Perversion of a publishing label) writes:"Eddie Campbell, the artist of From hell, a comic book calling itself a graphic novel even though it was previously serialized, has erected in defence of the neologism a manifesto, stating that the graphic novel comprises a new art form, a movement, a 'cause'. This elitist approach generates a quality judgement that can lead to separation of categories of readers (cultivated vs uneducated), the fragmentation of the possibilities of the medium...etc"

To put it bluntly, Barrero is not somebody I would choose to represent my medium. In the above illustrious company he has embarrassed himself with his cultural provincialism. Who else but a comics fan would think that a text that has been previously serialized has disqualified itself from being a novel? Where does this business about qualifying come from anyway? In the larger world of writing (we'll leave 'literature' out of it for the moment) such a notion must sound curious indeed.

However, Spain luckily has representatives of a more cosmopolitan cut. (continued in part 3)

Funny Face Alert!