The Proto-Graphic Novel: Notes on a Form
by Jeet Heer
Monday, October 19, 2009
Artistic innovation always outruns the vocabulary of critics. Artistic forms and genres are created long before there are words to describe them. Cervantes didn’t know he was working on a great novel when he wrote Don Quixote; he couldn’t have: the novel as a distinct form didn’t exist then, nor would it exist for centuries. If you had asked Cervantes what he was up to, he might have said he was writing a burlesque of courtly romances.
On the same principle, Jules Verne and H.G. Wells didn’t know they were writing science fiction novels. Wells might have had some idea late in life when science fiction as a genre emerged and his earlier work, which he might have thought of as scientific romances, were co-opted as pioneering examples of the genre.
The same principal is true of the graphic novel: now that the form exist, we can see all sorts of ancestors of the form. Books that previously existed as isolated oddities can now be seen as precursors of a form.
In the previous post, Dan mentioned that R.O. Blechman’s The Juggler of Our Lady (1953) can be considered as a proto-graphic novel. True. The same can be said of the many woodcut novels of the early 20th century, as well as the much earlier work of Rodolphe Töpffer. Other candidates for the form include Myron Waldman’s Eve (1943), the 1950 thriller It Rhymes with Lust (done by the team of Arnold Drake, Leslie Waller, Matt Baker, and Ray Osrin), Milt Gross’ He Done Her Wrong (1930), Don Freeman’s Skitzy (1955), as well as a number of works from the early 1970s by Martin Vaughn-James. Raymond Briggs probably belongs on this list.
Just today a publisher sent me Dino Buzzati’s Poem Strip, a proto-graphic novel originally published in Italy in 1969, and now available in English thanks to the good offices of the New York Review of Books. I’ll have more to say about the book in another post, but it is an interesting example of Magritte-inflicted surrealism not dissimilar to the contemporaneous work of Vaughn-James.
As more and more proto-graphic novels come to light, we can start seeing some commonalities in the form.
Here are a few things these books tend to have in common (although there are exceptions to every rule):
1. The cartoonists who work on them tend to come from a background outside of commercial comic strips or comic books, either from the fine arts, from children’s literature, or from avant-garde literature. The exceptions here are He Done Her Wrong and It Rhymes with Lust.
2. The works tend to be allegorical or dream-like rather than realistic; that is to say the characters and stories tend to be emblematic rather than follow any of the rules of verisimilitude or psychological realism.
3. In their time, some of these works were very popular and successful. That’s certainly true of Töpffer, some of the woodcut novels, and The Juggler of Our Lady. But there is little sense that they belong to a tradition or are created by a communal context (the woodcut novels might be the exception). Often the cartoonist involved only did one or two such books (Vaughn-James seems to have been more persistent than most).
Most of these books in there time were sports, isolated mutations, freaks of nature. But when we bring all these books together, they do seem to form a sort of tradition: not perhaps a strong tradition like the novel but a quirky, wayward and at times prophetic tradition, like 19th century science fiction.
PS: Someone should make a list of all the proto-graphic novels. That would be a worthwhile resource.
Labels: Martin Vaughn-James, Milt Gross, Myron Waldman, Proto-graphic novels, r.o. blechman, Raymond Briggs
Great post. You might add Max Ernst's collage novels to that list.
I suspect they’re pretty much forgotten by everyone, but the gag cartoonist Ken Pyne had two “Cartoon Novels”(as the covers described them) published by Sphere paperback in the UK.
“The Relationship” (1981) and “Martin Minton” (264 pp, 1982)
The format Pyne adopts is to have each page as an independent gag cartoon, but Pyne has structured each book so that the jokes work together to form a narrative.
In “The Relationship” each gag comes with broad heading “Her Flat”, “Saturday Afternoons”, “At the Pub”, to give some additional structure to an archetypal story of banal English romance and its failures.
“Martin Minton” has a definite story, about an inadequate man’s rise to success in contemporary Britain. As the book reaches its end there are some pages which are there solely for artistic affect, rather than pure gaggery.
– matthew davis
Good points! Further to #3: I wonder if there's more of a continuity between proto-GNs than often gets acknowledged. As you say, the woodcut artists were certainly conscious of each other's work, and Gross was riffing on them too. Blechman's book came out following some of Steig's and Steinberg's and Dean's oddball cartoon books [which are united by theme rather than narrative, but still]. Briggs seems to combine a picture book sensibility with what he might have seen in French comics albums of the time. Vaughn-James was aware of the woodcut novels and Ernst, and said his work "hovers around the edges" of European comics.
Not sure where I'm going with this, other than to suggest that while it's fun to think of these guys toiling away in the wilderness constantly reinventing the wheel, it might be useful to try to figure out how they've reacted to each other's work, too. Especially because their influence hasn't really extended much into the realm of today's graphic novels [which wasn't the case with Cervantes, say, and the novels that came in his wake]. Anyway, interesting stuff, thanks!
It's by no means comprehensive, but I edited a 2004 issue of Indy Magazine loosely dedicated to this topic. This was before the republication of Gross's book, and as far as I know the first consideration of Blechman in a comics context (I could easily be wrong on that one, though). The issue's here:
http://www.indyworld.com/indy/summer_2004/index.html
Here's an excerpt from my editorial:
"The history of original, book-length graphic narratives is generally a list of isolated incidents. There are occasional trends, such as Töpffer's imitators or the followers of Masereel and Ward, but more often these books tend to be idiosyncracies (or idiosyncratic bodies of work, like Edward Gorey's). The book length graphic narrative is re-conceived each time according to a particular artist's concerns. As such, the books become difficult to classify, especially vis-a-vis any definition of "comics." (Milt Gross is the only profiled artist who self-identified as a cartoonist.)
These books all emerged from a period after the birth of mass-market book publishing but before the "comic book" as we know it fully adapted to the book format — a period before the book-length graphic narrative collided with the comic-book-straining-beyond-its-bounds. In that light, Harvey Kurtzman's 1959 Jungle Book stands out as a wholly original "comics-book" fully utilizing the stacked, vertical page structure and other graphic-narrative devices codified within the context of the comic book industry proper (with Jules Feiffer's semi-comic-bookish Passionella and Other Stories appearing in that same year)."
You know, I actually read that issue of Indy Magazine when it was first posted but somehow completely forgot it. Chalk this up to pre-mature senility. Sorry for re-inventing the wheel … although I guess that's an appropriate thing to do given the topic.
No problem at all, it's a totally fascinating topic and one worth revisiting.
Vancouver underground talent, George Metzger, had a book out in the 70's. is that too late.
One thing about the proto-GNs is that a lot of them use a structure of one illustration per page. I suspect they aren't people who looked at comic strips and thought, "Hmm, I could make a whole book out of this!" So some of the most basic elements of comics (like panels) are missing–not out of any desire to fool around with the formal structure of comics, but rather as a result of creating their own personal structure which doesn't reference any existing comics (at the time when the work was created). I would certainly say this is the case with Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward.
My friend just showed me a series of lithographs by Pierre Alechinsky that he made in 1970 that seem like they could be some sort of artist book/pseudo comics, although I don't know how they were exhibited: http://www.moma.org/collection/browse_results.php?criteria=O%3AAD%3AE%3A107&page_number=10&template_id=1&sort_order=1
Man, I miss Indy magazine.
As an aside, I thought it was interesting to see that the majority of the entries on the "Key Untranslated European Graphic Novels" list were still not translated into English.
A case that doesn't quite fit, for reasons of political exigency as much as for anything else, is Charlotte Salomon's "Life? Or Theater?" It certainly looks like a graphic novel in retrospect — completed in 1942, there are over seven hundred gouaches that employ dialogue or narrative text, and while she doesn't use "panels," several pages have multiple time-traversing images assembled in a sort of montage. Contrary to Jeet's grouping of "allegorical" commonalities among proto-graphic novels, this is a dense autobiography (I'd be curious if anyone else can date an autobiography created in sequential pictorial art before this).
"Life? Or Theatre?" strikes me as a forerunner to the graphic novel in concept, but in fact it was never printed as a collection of images until the 1970s. Salomon herself was killed in Auschwitz in 1943. It's not clear to me how she intended her pantings to be presented — whether she intended to have them published as a book at all.
I did a write up for the Comics Journal about her a couple years ago — here's a paragraph:
"Salomon appears to have been unaware or uninterested in the syntax of comics. Her visual narrative seems to proceed from comics' antecedent sources – traces of medieval paintings and broadsheets can be found, as well as hints of another idiosyncratic proto-comics artist, William Blake (it's not certain she knew of Blake's work, but it's possible she encountered it in her days at art school). And, of course, she also draws from film.
Altogether, one gets the impression that if comics had not existed up to that point, she would have nearly invented them, just to suit her own purposes."
I really wish someone would bring "Life? Or Theatre?" back into print — it's a pretty astounding work.
On my own site I've been reviewing graphic novels that weren't published as graphic novels. So far, I've covered Citizen 13660, The Cage, and The Secret.
As Robert Boyd said, the one image per page thing is a common element in many of these books. Also, the text tends to be separated from the images. I wonder if these artists were more influenced by picture books than newspaper strips.
Jeet–
I have to strongly disagree with your inclusion of Martin Vaughn-James on this list. His first two books, "Elephant" and "The Projector," show that he had complete mastery over the full language of comics; indeed, "Elephant," especially, can be seen as a (non-proto) graphic novel, arising directly out of the underground comix movement. Admittedly, it is experimental (ok, so it's, say, "Hopscotch" rather than "Vanity Fair"–but they're both still novels!), and it substitutes a kind of modernist strangeness for the usual humor of the underground; nevertheless, it is in complete control of the language of comics. Same with "The Projector." I don't think you can call them "proto" just because they came earlier than the wide use of the term "graphic novels" (keep in mind, anyway, that the term was already in use in the late sixties); "proto" implies something inchoate, not yet fully resolved, and there is nothing of the kind about "Elephant" or "The Projector." They are early examples of graphic novels, period.
I think the confusion often arises because people see "The Cage" outside of the context of the earlier work. But it is clear that in "The Cage" and, earlier, in "The Park," Vaughn-James made a clear choice to move away from the established comics language he had used in his first two works, and to create his own form of text-image hybrid, largely under the influence of the nouveau roman and the "roman textuel" of the Tel Quel movement, as well as of Resnais's cinema. Then he created his own term for his new form: A "visual-novel," as "The Cage" is subtitled. (By the way, visual novel was also the term Kirby chose for "Silver Star," not "graphic novel.") If anything, this would make "The Cage" a "post graphic novel," or at least a "post-comic," not a "proto" one.
I guess what I'm saying is that the application of the term "proto" needs to take into account also the artist's intention, and historical positioning; it cannot apply only to form, or date for that matter. If "The Cage" were a "proto-GN," the same would have to be true of Martin Tom Dieck's "Hundert Ansichten der Speicherstadt," in which Tom Dieck abandoned the more traditional comic form of his usual work to create a book with only one "panel" per page–and no words at all, in his case. Obviously, calling "Hundert Ansichten" a "proto-GN" would be absurd–but, if so, so is applying the term to MVJ's work.
A lot of great points have been made and I'm not sure if I can accomodate all of them. But briefly, it might be useful to make a distinction between proto graphic novels that come out of the tradition of comics and those that have roots in other artistic forms (what might be called para-comics). If we make this distinction, then Martin Vaughn-James emerges as a very interesting liminal figure since he's both been influenced by comics and has a foot in para-comics. But I'd love to see more written about Vaughn-James, from Andre and others.
Hi Jeet–
Thanks for your interest. I did speak on "The Cage" at CAA a while ago, and I will write it up at some point. For now, I just want to say that I appreciate your new notion of the "para-novel," but still, I will (cordially and respectfully! :)) insist on not applying it to MVJ. As "Elephant" and "Projector" show, he is a comics artist, a cartoonist, and a really good one at that. He may have been other things too, but he did not come from outside comics anymore than, say, Victor Moscoso did (who had a fine arts degree from Yale!). "The Cage" needs to be considered not a sport, but the conscious product of a comics artist who is branching off in a new, innovative direction.
when somebody gets around to doing a round-up, don't forget to look at my review of AB Frost's Carlo of 1913, which was included in the Stuff and Nonsense published by Fantagraphics. Like other books mentioned above, there was one picture per page, and over a hundred pages. My review was in a 2004 issue of the Comics Journal. I'd post it on my blog but I appear to have lost the original file. As you'd expect with Frost there was a great feeling of animation from picture to picture, and the captions didn't really shackle it too much.
For the record, Eddie Campbell's essay on A.B. Frost appeared in The Comics Journal #260 (May/June 2004). It is very much worth reading — perhaps we should get permission to scan it in and reprint it?
Jeet – Please do seek permission to scan and post.
And, generally, it's of course interesting to think about the lineage. Bill and Jeet have it right, it seems: a series of isolated incidents that adds up to a kinda fractured prediction of the future. Really we're talking about two things: 1- A formal work, i.e. a single, lengthy narrative of "book" length, that is nearer or further to/from a panel-to-panel comic, and 2, a commercial format promoted as such.
It takes a combination of a critical mass of artists and a receptive industry to really get the momentum behind a new form (or format), and it took a damn long time in the case of comics.
The first one (i.e. the form) is always the more interesting to me. As Eddie has nicely said, discovering the "first" of this thing is really kinda pointless. And anyway, no one can agree on what the thing is. And nor should they have to. The lineage is the thing, and Carlo is a great example of that. As is Blechman's Juggler…, which evolves out of a tradition that is very much the Steinberg/Steig idea of a "cartoon" book being an obliquely narrative, well-paced selection of drawings. Bob took that and crossed it with a children's book model, which gave him the explicit narrative element. And there you have it. Sort of. Then comes the work.
I have great affection for those mid-century "drawing books" which include conceptually tight volumes by VIP, Fougasse, and others. They're not telling a story so much as offering a thematic collection of work that, via sequencing, feels narrative. But there's no formal underpinning, really. They are their own genre, adjacent to full length graphic narratives and separated by the "explicit" narrative bit. It is this quality what most obviously separates the drawing book genre from lengthy comics, graphic novels, or whatever you want to call them.
Dan,
I think there are more important aspects to the idea of the graphic novel than just its length. You can find long form comics if you run a bunch of mid-sixties Marvel comics together (eg Doctor Strange). That isn't the point. It's still comic books. There are aspects which are more important and which are more pertinent to Eisner's concept of what he was doing (picking Eisner's as a worthwhile concept as opposed to say, Jim Starlin's). One was seriousness. Eisner has often said that the difference between Contract With God and what he was doing before was that it addressed a serious subject, a man and his relationship to his god. Another idea about the novel as opposed to comic books of the early '60s is that a novel has an author, where comic books at the time were largely anonymous (the cognoscienti could always tell who did what, but the works by and large appeared unsigned). The comic strips in the paper were being done by third and fourth generation cartoonists, and a lot of the time being ghosted. The idea of authorship is a more crucial aspect of the novel than just its length. It is pertinent that Eisner didn't even consider length an issue. He served up a suite of short stories. Another aspect is the seeking for a kind of comics that would address an adult sensibility. Yet another is the idea of comics for the bookshelf. Another is a superior awareness that Comics have a deep history, such as in this very discussion. Things like Little Nemo and Krazy Kat weren't available in reprint until circa 1970, around the same time to which we ascribe the beginnings of the graphic novel.
Having identified the aspects of the idea that make it unique, it then makes sense to find the sources of these aspects individually. Reading Harvey Kurtzman's Jungle Book (1959.. but I read it later) is perhaps the first time I ever considered the notion of comics having an 'author.' It's Harvey giving us his world-view, not a corporation such as Marvel comics, or a fiction as in the Old Witch's tales of terror. For comics that talk directly to an adult reader, the first time I was aware of this was in Feiffer's Sick, Sick, Sick, (1959) and also his Passionella (1960) which like Eisner's Contract, is a suite of longish stories. The origins of the idea of comics for the bookshelf i have attributed elsewhere to Woody Gelman and his Nostalgia Press.
Long form comics does follow naturally from the other aspects, in that seriousness of subject may demand more development, and adults have a longer attention span than kids. However, as I have said, to distinguish the innovators by getting out a measuring tape is to diminish a worthy idea.
ps
i.e. We need to reposition the argument so that length is seen as a by-product rather than THE defining feature.
Strip collections published as a single story-length volume (I'm thinking specifically of Doubleday's 1955 "Gordo") might could be considered an aspect of this lineage, as well. Great topic, great points, btw. I really get into Masereel, but Otto Nückel's "Destiny" (1930) is the work I probably consider (thematically, at least) a genuine progenitor of the "graphic novel" (I believe "A Novel in Pictures" appears beneath the title) but, of course, with Nückel, those single-image pages aren't exactly drawings anyhow, either.
In the "pen-and-ink" sense, obviously