Hugo Frey

Editorial: History in the graphic novel

It still remains the case that comics are not generally considered to be legitimate objects of cultural analysis. Despite the innovations of cultural studies and the interest of historians in the realms of ‘everyday life’ and ‘popular history’, comics have been confined to the intellectual margins. One reason for their marginal status appears to be the fact that they are hybrid forms which mix text (without being novels) and images (without being films) (Groensteen 2000: 35). Although ‘hybridity’ has been a much discussed concept, especially in relation to ‘postmodernism’ and ‘postcolonialism’, this has not helped to rescue comics from their ‘considerable lack of legitimacy’ (Groensteen 2000: 29). The use of the term ‘graphic novel’ in Britain and the US has, partly, been an attempt to rescue comics from their critical neglect, as well as to recognize the emergence of specifically adult comics and book length works, particularly in the last 20 years. This special issue of Rethinking History is an argument for an engagement with the graphic novel by all those concerned with ‘history writing’ and the analysis of historical representations. Although the graphic novel has largely remained beneath critical attention the form has actually been the site for some sustained and sophisticated engagements with the problems of representing historical events. It was the publication of one work, more than any other, which transformed the status of the graphic novel: Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986, 1991). This representation of the Holocaust, through the memories of Spiegelman’s survivor father, demonstrated the potential of the form. The use of complex and controversial narrative and visual strategies also attracted the critical interest of historians and cultural critics. Hayden White, for example, argued that Maus was a ‘masterpiece of stylization, figuration, and allegorization’ (1992: 41–2) and a ‘critically self-conscious’ (1992: 42) contribution to the debate concerning the limits of representation surrounding the Holocaust. His was only one voice amongst many, and one recent bibliographic survey has shown approximately 100 articles and reviews have so far been published on these two slim volumes. Not only this but Maus also helped transform the language used to describe comics and contributed to the popularity of the term ‘graphic novel’. No longer could works in comic book form simply be dismissed out of hand and the sophistication of these works had to be given recognition. Art Spiegelman himself described what he had written as a ‘co-mix’ rather than just a comic. The slight change of spelling indicated a significant change in direction for the form, as Spiegelman explained: ‘One of the problems is that the word comics itself brings to mind the notion that they have to be funny. [. . .] I prefer the word co-mix, to mix together, because to talk about comics is to talk about mixing together words and pictures that tell a story’ (1998: 174). Now, the very hybridity which had been used to condemn

‘Layouting’ for the plot: Charles Burns and the clear line revisited

Relying on a close-reading of a page selected from Charles Burns’ X’ed out (2010), this article proposes a critical debate on the stakes of producing and reading remakes. In other words: what does it mean to rework a Clear Line aesthetic, both from the point of view of drawing and from that of storytelling? We argue that this reworking does not only reveal hidden aspects of the original model, but it also provides new feedback on the way we read it. More specifically, at the end of our original reading of Burns’ remake, we ask for the opening of a debate on the Clear Line style (in the past it has been too often reduced to the technique of stylised drawing and a smooth, transparent, storytelling). For us, the beginning of such a new debate will be the discussion of layout and nonlinear ways of storytelling that are very different from standard panel-to-panel transitions. As we discuss throughout, it is the power of these aspects that Burns’ work helps us to best think through.

Documenting the Charlie Hebdo Tragedy

This chapter focusses on the feature length documentary L’Humour a Mort, directed by Daniel Leconte and Emmanuel Leconte (released in France in December 2015). Made just months after the fatal attack on the staff at Charlie, it provides a day-by-day account of the events of January 2015, as well as contextualising the periodical’s earlier defence of its right to publish the Danish cartoons. In addition, the documentary provides a palimpsestic tribute to the publication, the victims of the terrorist attack on its staff, as well as police and French Jewish victims killed during the same bloody week at the beginning of 2015 (including the attack on the Jewish supermarket that occurred in suburban Paris on 9 January 2015). The hypothesis that I will develop in this chapter is that the work is a strong example of a contemporary twenty-first century national cinema for France. That much is evident. However, I will also spend much of this chapter also arguing that the work is greatly nuanced and a significant documentary film in its own right. My ground for this argument is twofold. Firstly, that the structuring of the work owes something to the fragmented and polyvalent narrative techniques of late-modern aesthetics of the remix (and as espoused in Blier’s Merci la vie). Secondly, that L’Humour a mort is a telling micro-history that ably shows its viewers the horror of the experience of a contemporary terrorist attack.

The Graphic Novel: The Graphic Novel as a Specific Form of Storytelling

There exist as many theories on storytelling as there are ideas about the novel itself. And the (rhetorical) definition of narrative by James Phelan as “someone telling someone else on some occasion and for some purpose that something happened” remains, in all its abstract generality, one of the soundest statements ever on what storytelling actually means. However, in this chapter we will not go into a complex discussion of what words such as “narrative” or “novel” signify, but emphasize instead medium-specific aspects of storytelling in the graphic novel. In other words, this chapter focuses on what is particular about the graphic novel as a storytelling device and what makes it different from a novel or from a film, even if in some regards one may recognize some similarities. It would be absurd indeed to deny that stories are everywhere. Nobody has ever doubted Roland Barthes’s claim: “There are countless forms of narrative in the world.... Moreover, in this infinite variety of forms, it is present at all times, in all places, in all societies.” But we maintain that a story in graphic novel format is more than just a story told in graphic novel format: the choice of the medium induces a set of possibilities as well as impossibilities, of obstacles as well as chances, that are not found in other media, even if it remains always possible to retell or remake a given story in a different medium. The recent love affair between Hollywood and superhero comics and the growing number of experiments in retelling graphic novels across media – as, for instance, in the film versions of American Splendor (2003, Shari Springer Berman and Robert Pulcini) and Ghost World (2001, Terry Zwigoff) or the animated cartoon version of Persepolis (2007, Marjane Satrapi and Vincent Paronnaud) – display some of the opportunities and dangers that characterize these kinds of adaptation. And, of course, the process can go the other way around as well: comics and graphic novels can adapt stories that have already been told in other media, such as City of Glass , David Mazzucchelli’s 1994 reinterpretation of Paul Auster’s 1985 novel; Waltz with Bashir, Ari Folman’s (and David Polonsky, 2009) graphic novel version of his own 2008 movie; and the Escapist series, built in 2004 as an homage to the character invented by Michael Chabon in his novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay (2000).

The Graphic Novel: Nostalgia and the Return of History

It seems that wherever one looks in our contemporary culture, including to the world of graphic narratives, history and nostalgia are a common theme. After the post-modernism and the “end of history” of the early 1990s, the past has maybe never been as popular as it is today. Here we want to make a further contribution to the ongoing debate on the meaning of the dominance of the past in the present in the field of graphic narratives, and more specifically in the graphic novel. For us, when discussing the graphic novel, several aspects stand out and merit analysis and further consideration First, on the face of it, the rise of the graphic novel has reflected and contributed to the wider culture of nostalgia. Graphic novelists are talented at generating sophisticated treatments on history, and many of the most prominent exponents have been drawn to this subject. Certainly, it is also the case that along with the appearance of “all of this history,” underneath the real issue at stake is how selection processes work, the reorderings that bring some material back into fashion and leave other work behind. Second, nostalgia-inspired graphic novels can look formulaic. More importantly, reprinting or playing with old comics pose some creative problems as much as original solutions. Some of the old comics display value systems that are dated and inappropriate; putting works in museums poses difficult questions of how to display narrative sequence. Third and finally, the graphic novel can represent a pulling away from the conventional formulations and dilemmas associated with cultures of nostalgia. In this last chapter we explain how important and influential creators Spiegelman, Baker, Clowes, Backderf, Ware, and others provide a more complex and nuanced set of discourses on history. Their work is a sophisticated, and at times radical, treatment of the past when compared to other material from within the otherwise predictable fashion for anything vintage.

The Graphic Novel: Introduction: The Graphic Novel, a Special Type of Comics

Is there really something like the graphic novel? For good or ill, there are famous quotations that are frequently repeated when discussing the graphic novel. They are valued because they come from two of the key protagonists whose works from the mid-1980s were so influential in the concept gaining in popularity: Art Spiegelman, the creator of Maus , and Alan Moore, the scriptwriter of Watchmen . Both are negative about the neologism that was being employed to describe the longer-length and adult-themed comics with which they were increasingly associated, although their roots were with underground comix in the United States and United Kingdom, respectively. Spiegelman’s remarks were first published in Print magazine in 1988, and it was here that he suggested that “graphic novel” was an unhelpful term: The latest wrinkle in the comic book’s evolution has been the so-called “graphic novel.” In 1986, Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns , a full-length trade paperback detailing the adventures of the superhero as a violent, aging vigilante, and my own MAUS, A Survivor’s Tale both met with commercial success in bookstores. They were dubbed graphic novels in a bid for social acceptability (Personally, I always thought Nathaniel West’s The Day of the Locust was an extraordinarily graphic novel, and that what I did was ... comix.) What has followed is a spate of well-dressed comic books finding their way into legitimate bookshops. Sadly, a number of them are no more than pedestrian comic books in glossy wrappings, and the whole genre, good and bad may find itself once again banished to the speciality shops.... And more briefly, but in a similar vein, these are the views of Alan Moore: You could just about call Maus a novel, you could probably just about call Watchmen a novel, in terms of density, structure, size, scale, seriousness of theme, stuff like that. The problem is that “graphic novel” just came to mean “expensive comic book” ... it doesn’t really matter much what they’re called but it’s not a term that I’m very comfortable with.