Write Like You Mean It: Graphic Novels
by Julia H. Jackson
“I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece.” – John Updike, 1969
A young Iranian girl is sent to boarding school in Switzerland in an effort to escape the Iranian revolution. One night, after her boyfriend breaks up with her and she is left alone in an isolated European metropolis, she gets on the subway and rides it in loops all night long. She is an outspoken artist, a teenager living in exile whose strongest bonds are to the God she is just beginning to doubt and her uncle Anoosh, who is a political prisoner.
Who is this girl? And how do we know her?
We see her in thick black and white lines, her story outlined in rectangular blocks, words penciled in panels like a photograph’s negative. She is Marjane Satrapi, cartoonist, writer, and author of Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, and its sequel, Persepolis 2: The Story of Return. Satrapi, who grew up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution and was educated in Iran, Switzerland, and France, transformed her story into an animated film in 2007. Satrapi’s story is family, exile, religion, art, politics, and personal growth, and it transcends both cartoons and memoir. Her work is best categorized as graphic novel, a genre that we will explore in today’s Write Like You Mean It: Graphic Storytelling.
Reflect for a moment on your second-grade writing class. Remember the worksheets that were half-lined, half-space for illustration? In a way, this is a form of graphic storytelling. Children’s books are often presented in this format, with colorful illustrations that relate back to the story. Newspaper comics use space and images in a specific way to tell stories by using panels to show differences in time, character perspective, or location. Where do graphic novels fit in the scheme of things? What is their purpose? And just how does one write a graphic novel?
The history of graphic novels is long and varied. In a literary world, even the very terms “graphic novel” is highly contested. Art Spiegelman, creator of Maus, two books that chronicle his father’s survival of the Holocaust, is considered as the patriarch of graphic novels for many, and yet he prefers the word “comics.” As he told The Economist, “’Graphic novel’ sounds more respectable, but I prefer ‘comics’ because it credits the medium. [‘Comics’] is a dumb word, but that’s what they are.”
Be that as it may, the fact is that Spiegelman’s work pushes the boundaries of a standard comics format. His depictions of Jews as mice and Nazis as cats in Maus set a tone that was hardly funny, nor was it restricted to a gut reaction. Rather, the juxtaposition of almost cartoonish characters against the serious backdrop of concentration camps, mortality, and emerging American identity give the book weight. His is a story that can’t be restricted by the definitions of “memoir,” “cartoon,” “comic,” or even “novel.”
In more recent years, the graphic novel has emerged as a permutation of popular entertainment. The Watchmen, by writer Alan Moore, illustrator Dave Gibbons, and colorist John Higgins, follows D.C. Comics superheroes in an alternate history where the United States win the Vietnam War, thanks to heroes who have been transformed into vigilantes. The novel mimics the D.C. Comics style with its vibrant, melodramatic colors and particular vocabulary, and yet by proposing a different kind of cold war, it serves as a darker political commentary than the original superhero comics.
Not all graphic novels are about war. Craig Thompson won critical acclaim for his 2003 autobiographical novel Blankets, which follows him as a young man who discovers love just as he is breaking free from his Evangelical Christian background. The novel is an impressive 600 pages long, and yet the meat of the story is expressed in the brief exchanges between characters, the shared looks that we as readers get to actually see. The snowy backdrop becomes a character of its own as Thompson chronicles the saga of two young lovers who meet at Bible camp.
How is it that these stories impact readers? Graphic novelists are like the triple-threat performers of Broadway musicals; they can draw, write, and package these stories as if they were onstage singing, dancing and acting. Of course, not all graphic novels are illustrated and written by the same people; the partnerships between writers and artists often create a special alchemy that adds personality to the story. Notable author-illustrator duos include writer Harvey Pekar, creator of American Splendor comics, and cartoonist R. Crumb, whose work has run the gamut with publications like Zap Comix and Arcade Comics Revue. And although Crumb’s illustration lend a certain cartoon style and surreal characterization to Pekar’s stories, the main idea behind American Splendor is to document the daily intricacies of a seemingly simple life.
So now the question is: How do writers and artists know which parts of the story need illustrations? If you think back to your second-grade creative writing prompts, your illustrations were most likely linked back to the text on a given page. But what happens when a character feels a whole range of emotions in one sentence? Or when another character is suddenly caught up in a quick series of actions, such as in a car accident? Is it more important to draw a person’s entire body, and give a full picture of what he or she looks like, than it is to zero in on a single, peculiar characteristic? Here are some tips to writing a graphic novel of your own:
1) Storyboard. Animators and illustrators alike plot out the actions of their characters, scene by scene. Although it is important to put story first, you might have a better idea of how the events will unfold if you have a visual aid.
2) Develop a consistent style. One of the great things about graphic art is that you don’t have to subscribe to a specific aesthetic; that is to say, your characters don’t have to look like Art Spiegelman’s or R. Crumb’s. Stick characters can be just as compelling as fully-animated ones, as long as they have distinct personalities and are easily recognized.
3) Design your own setting. Create a rough sketch of your characters’ world, whether it is twenty-first century New York or twenty-third century Mars. Even if you don’t include this outline in your final story, it will give you a clearer idea of how your characters can move within their world. By knowing where they are and how they got there, you can then intuit their challenges and desires. In Persepolis, the protagonist’s life changes dramatically when she moves from country to country. Superheroes transcend Earth’s atmosphere in The Watchmen, and every time they do, the characters grow.
Graphic novels are a way to transport readers using both words and visual art. The journey of a young Iranian women might have appeared very differently if it were told as an epic poem or a young adult novel. In the end, the use of multiple media gave the story a power that transformed it beyond the page.
What’s your favorite graphic novel? Let us know!
