Spaniard addendum

An interesting grace note to the blathering argument of the graphical novel is the fact that in the 1960s in Spain, La Novela Gráfica was a term used as a label on a type of comic of digest-size, such as this title aimed at a female audience (November 1960).


There's a lot of blather about the term being pretentious in its being a composite of a literary and an Art reference, but here it is, 4 years before it is said to have been invented in 1964 (insofar as the Spanish is a relative of the American), on a fairly commercial product. Knowing this kind of magazine, I would imagine the interior would be somewhat less attractive than that very nice cover, which does show how good the best of those commercial ink illustrators were back then.

Picture from the blog of Pepo Perez, an artist of merit, whose blog I have referenced a few times over the last week. His drawing has a fresh spontaneity that appeals to me very much. Here he is in collaboration with writer Santiago Garcia in an immediate response to the subject of the political protests in Spain in May.


It was translated into several languages; whole thing is in English here.

The Spaniard in the Works (part 6)

When we argue about the naming of a thing or a person, what we're really talking about is our releationship to it. The same person can be 'mother' and 'daughter' to different people, or 'friend' and 'enemy'. It all depends where you're standing.

A new book that came out six months ago from Artist Paco Roca, El invierno del dibujante, (The winter of the cartoonist) is a world class piece of work. I only say it that way because his other major works appeared first in France but he chose to launch this one in Spain. This is not an oddity these days. All of my own books are published in countries other than the one I live in. And in the past the Spanish artist has often had to look abroad for his bread and butter. I was enjoying the work of Spanish comics artists long before I ever knew it. Accomplished draftsmen in formidable quantities were filling up the pages of English comics weeklies when I was a kid, beginning with Jesus Blasco drawing The Steel Claw in 1962. Their names and details still remain largely a mystery to me. Blasco's wikipedia entry ends with: "His work is relatively unknown in the United States, with his main exposure being three appearances in Warren Publishing's Creepy, which were all miscredited to other artists."

There's a great blog here by Manuel Deskartes devoted to showing the work of all those hard working guys of whom so little is known. In Deskartes archives I found a page of Stingray by Sebastian Boada that I could well have enjoyed as the title was a favourite of mine in the early 1960s. I'm sure there would have been an economic element in this favouring of Spanish talent, a way of doing things more cheaply, because I know publishers too well. But that's not to diminish the level of that talent. And there's a whole world of facts and details here that I would be happy to learn about. This is where Manuel Barrero could tell me a thing or two thousand.

But whereas in the 1960s the artist became an anonymous cog in another country's machine, Paco travels as an author. He gives interviews and talks about his themes and ideas. Entrecomics transcribed the dialogue from a Panel on the graphic novel at the Spanish convention Getxo and posted it on Dec 22 2010. Here Paco explained that for him the idea of the graphic novel was about freedom, from format, from genre, from continuing characters. It's a new era of comics, he said, in which the subject can be anything. Seeing it as a 'liberation' may be a particularly Spanish angle on la novela gráfica, but he is obviously talking about the same thing as I am.

He's also talking about it in his book. It is set in 1957 and is about a coterie of cartoonists, persons who actually lived and whose work Paco grew up reading. They attempt to extricate themselves from the oppression of an industrial system that was crushing the potential of their work. It's set in the time of Franco's regime and there is undoubtedly a lot happening on different levels. I don't yet have this prize winning book to discuss in detail, having read it under hurried circumstances while in Spain, but It fits with a few points I want to make.

I love Roca's sense of place and time. The whole story is here. The city, the grey atmosphere of winter, the little boy looking longingly at the comics hanging from the rack at the kiosk. Ahead of the men is the optimistic note of the two cheerful girls at far left, behind them the alert authority of a police officer.


If this impeccably composed wraparound cover was all that existed of this project, it would already be a masterpiece in my mind.


I think this is a promotional poster of the same ensemble from a different angle.


And until some publisher does us the favour of an English language version, I'm presuming that kid in the background is being scolded because he won't get his nose out of the comic so he doesn't walk into the traffic. (if there is more to it I'm sure someone will shortly inform me)




And here is the editor, censoring with his red pen.



Roca's book is an intelligent and well wrought 'novela gráfica', but in my enjoyment of the vividness of his pictures just now, I find myself thinking about one of the problems of the graphic novel environment. With the increasing recognition of the form as a literature, with its official entrance into 'Literary Studies', we have seen a critical tendency to talk about the books more exclusively in terms of their structure and intelligence as narrative texts, as 'reading' (or at the lowest level just as a story). I often see valuable things being overlooked. Do our critical writers still enjoy pictures for their own sake as they certainly did in the old days I spoke about at the top? Then they could recognise one artist from another and mentally separate them from the childish nonsense these artists usually had to work with. I'm not saying we should all traipse back there, just that we should think for a moment about that and whatever else may have been traded away.

For anybody who was too busy thinking about what underpants to wear tomorrow, here is what has happened. I have removed what was originally here. But I'm not going to delete another post in an attempt to erase history, even if it is only the history of baloney, so I have to leave a marker.

casualties of war:

May 17 post at Zona Negativa- deleted with all 70 commentarios.

Posts at Entrecomics of 29 and 30 June, 1 and 2 July sunk with all who railed in them.

post at Eddie Campbell of June 30 missing in action, of July 2 killed in battle.

this post converted to a memorial.

If anybody ever asks me to explain it all, I would not know where to start.

A link and an open letter to The Spaniard in the works.

Argentina's national daily LA NACION, 1st July, has a huge 3,680 word (counting them has become a disturbing trend here at Campbell blogspot.) article on The graphic novel. La edad adulta del cómic (link thanks to Loris Z)

There's nothing here that we haven't heard before, but let's bookmark the event as an indication of the growing international recognition of this movement. And Campbell's manifesto is quoted in two places.

To Jose Torralba,

You keep going back to the so-called manifesto. You know, when I wrote that I did it for a specific purpose. When one or two places asked if they could use it, i said certainly, but please explain in a short paragraph when and why it originated. That is, I wrote it as part of a thread on the old Comics Journal site. There was a big article in The NY Times weekend magazine. Spiegelman, Clowes, Brown, Seth, Tomine were all interviewed and photographed. Everybody was complaining that the article had got it all wrong. I said, they got it wrong because as a community we constantly give out confused information. We send the signal that arguing about the meanings of the words is important, that we can't all agree on what it is we're supposed to be about. We're stuck with 'graphic novel'. Instead of sneering, put it on the flag and get behind it. So why don't we all agree to a set of principles. They won't be absolutes, they're simply a guide to stop arguments so that we can all move forward in the same direction and promote the thing we're all involved in. Thus, we say 'novel' but we don't necessarily mean that in the sense that it's understood in the book world. You fastened upon my criticism of Manuel Barrero, but he was in a situation where he was addressing people in or more familiar with the book world than the comics world: Literaturas.com. He quoted my manifesto but he was doing the very thing the manifesto was written to head off. He was arguing about the words. 'Perversion of a publishing label'- he insists I left out the word 'genre' in that title, but that's just another one of those words that makes comics into a hillbilly town on the map of culture. My metaphor misfired there, because he took it personally. In a better world I might have had the foresight to think that he could actually be from the provinces, but in these internet driven times, everybody is just online in a great equality. It certainly wasn't meant personally except in the sense that it was he who wrote the words I was criticizing.

But, you know, hey! If you and Manuel want to say it's a publishing label, you never heard any complaint from me. I was just saying that's not what Eisner had in mind. Go for it. Enjoy yourselves. Who said you couldn't? I didn't. Eisner didn't. Nobody owns individual words exclusively. (unless they're trademarks of course) Just for god's sake stop arguing about it.

The manifesto wound up being reproduced and posted all over the place and in several languages. I quite liked the way Santiago used it because he understood the spirit of it. He has a paragraph about Toeppfer not wanting to be seen to take his concept too seriously, and he shows Campbell likewise. The introductory paragraph is generally no longer attached, and it's a document I no longer have any control of (I once deleted it from Wikipedia, but that couldn't suppress it) so I expect when you first saw it you took it at its word as being a manifesto. When you took the so-called manifesto and pissed all over it, with your ten-part satire, it probably never occurred to you, as it may not have done to Manuel, that I might one day see it. But that's all right. You had a sense of humour then. Today you have left it in your other suit.

Now I wait to see whether you will also piss all over my olive branch.

sincerely,
Eddie Campbell

Woman Accused of Spraying Deputies With Breast Milk is a Special Ed Teacher

DELAWARE, Ohio (KTLA) -- A special education teacher is facing assault charges after allegedly spraying sheriff's deputies with breast milk.
It happened Saturday as Delaware County deputies were responding to a domestic dispute.
The woman's husband told deputies his wife had been drinking at a wedding and hit him several times before locking herself in a car outside a banquet hall. When the deputies found 30-year-old Stephanie Robinette, they tried to talk her out of the car...more

My dear pal Mick Evans sent the above link. Perusing Wednesday's post on my blog he observed : "51,000 words! that's a small novel. They could have written Memories of My Melancholy Whores but instead they debated the bloody graphic novel.”

The Spaniard in the Works (part 5)

I left this disquisition at the point at which a hundred thousand words and more had been expended arguing over the meanings of words. And while I believe it is a thing to be avoided at all costs, I invariably find myself trapped in a situation where I have to deal with the subject. In short I am called upon to explain la novela Gráfica, as happened in the Barcelona interview described at the beginning of this series of posts.

So I have evolved a strategy for getting through the process without giving in or falling prey to the innumerable stupidities to which the comics world has subjected it. The first problem to navigate past the idea that it is a format. At this early juncture I usually bring up Will Eisner, who has a substantial reputation with both the regressive and the progressive crowds. This artist is often given as the initiating spark for the whole thing. Whether it is true or not is one of those arguments that leads to tears and should be avoided. So I'm not saying he was or he wasn't, he's just a place to start that is likely to be accepted by most parties.

What did Will Eisner mean when he called that first book of his a 'graphic novel'? The naysayers are quick to point out that it is a collection of short stories, and in the field of writing, a bunch of short stories does not make a novel. The problem with these naysayers is that they are usually the same people who argue that 'graphic novel' is a format, without any concern for the fact that in the field of writing, a novel is not a format. In other words, they are trying to have it both ways, though unconsciously, since the contradiction does not normally occur to them. I don't think the majority of comics readers can separate the idea of 'form', where comics are concerned, from 'format'. Put it this way, a song is a musical form and an mp3 is a format. It should be easy enough to separate those two concepts and apply the same principle to comics.

Will Eisner clearly wasn't thinking of a graphic novel as a format. This is easy enough to demonstrate. In the same month that A Contract With God appeared from Baronet books., October 1978, he also started serializing Life on another Planet in the Kitchen Sink Press Spirit magazine, in 16 page 'signatures', with 'A GRAPHIC NOVEL printed on the very first page. We may deduce that he had given up on the idea of another book like the first one. The reader was instructed to cut out the pages, fold them and secure at the side with thread or whatever. It is perhaps to be observed that he was thinking his graphic novels were going to be in a small format like paperback books, but let's not confuse the issue here, as later episodes were all printed full page size (somebody probably pointed out to Will that folks nowadays are not inclined to cut up their magazines, so anybody who cut out the first one would have done so in vain.) In his mind he was drawing a long-form comic, which he called a graphic novel, and he was serializing it. That is, he didn't retroactively decide it was a graphic novel. I only mention that in relation to one of the Spanish arguments.

(From Spirit magazine #19, oct 1978. Kitchen Sink Press)

So, what did he mean by novel then? The answer that gets me out of this catch-22, invariably leads to an even trickier quandary. He was making a bid for 'literariness'. The problem I find myself in at this juncture is that I must then say what I mean by 'literary', and my own idea of it is somewhat different from Will's. His idea of literary would have implied a shelf of books that you keep, in contrast to the low status of the throw-away comic, and in subject it would perhaps have been bounded by Ring Lardner at the populist end and Booth Tarkington at the more serious (consider his grand family saga, The Name of the Game in comparison to The Magnificent Ambersons). Whether Eisner ever reached the goal of his ambition is a separate argument. For this one, let it simply be noted that he often said he imagined a comic that went beyond 'stories of pursuit and vengeance', that dealt with more profound subjects "such as a man's relationship to God". From the beginning he wanted to create a different kind of comic.

As to my idea of literary then; can comics be literature? (let's not lose sight of the fact that the graphic novel is a kind of comics). This question is a minefield. On the one hand I suspect that there is a school of thought that rejects such a pretension, that insists that the essence of comics is that they are always anti-status quo, subversive in some way or other, and that literature is the stuff foisted on you in school and comics are the natural antidote to society's streamlining of us. On the other there is the intellectual standpoint that insists that comics are an autonomous art-form and not just a genre within an older traditional culture of reading.

The latter attitude holds to the presumption that literariness implies that the graphic element of a comic would be considered subservient, when the parts should be formal equals. Caroline Small answered this problem recently at The Hooded Utilitarian:

" I really resist the idea that literature is made of words (and also I suppose the idea that pictures are not made of words in the same way that all things are texts.) Literature is not prose or story. It is a register, a cluster of ways of making sense and making meaning that makes sense (or that meaningfully makes non-sense). It is a register that is almost always associated with words, but “word-thing” is not any sort of essence of literature to me. It is more “thing, often with words.” Or like Baetens says “a way that parameters are logically used.” The parameters are usually words, but that is just the “dispatch.” Once literature means how the parameter is used it can be made of anything."

As I said in yet another interview recently, Shaun Tan's The Arrival is a book without a single word in it, and I have no problem in thinking of it as literature. And Will Eisner was a practical man who would have had no time for the kind of complicated modern literary theory as read above, but there would have been no problem for him in considering a quality 'graphic novel' to be literature, whether it be Maus, or Palestine, or Persepolis, or Jimmy Corrigan. It should be recognized that, to a significant extent, the literature of our times has pictures.


(to be continued)