Graphic NovelsTwice in my life I have had complete strangers come up to me in public and tell me that I am "too old" to be reading comics.
This hasn't happened recently: as Douglas Wolk says at the beginning of Reading Comics, "It is no longer news that comics have grown up." Graphic novels are reviewed in national newspapers and granted prestigious awards; the New Yorker and the Guardian print short graphic stories; ordinary bookshops stock graphic novels in their own sections rather than (as was once common) shunting them into the sci-fi or humour shelves.
Yet although comics aimed at grown-ups are now the rule rather than the exception, the telling of stories with words and pictures is still an art that is little understood and not much respected. Those who are used to reading prose novels can appreciate the stories and the dialogue but have nothing to say about the art, while those with a training in fine art can wax lyrical about line and composition but have nothing to say about the stories. What is needed is a new set of critical tools unique to the medium so that comics can be appreciated for what they are: not novels with pictures, and not movies that don't move, but their own kind of thing, with their own treasures and glories, and their own aesthetic rules.
Douglas Wolk is not the first to try to figure out what those rules are - Reading Comics is preceded most notably by Will Eisner's Comics and Sequential Art and Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics - but he is unique in being a critic approaching comics from the outside rather than a comics creator approaching them from within, and in his combination of scholarly precision and unfettered enthusiasm.
Critics in any artistic field could learn from Wolk's willingness to express not just appreciation but joy. His enthusiasm is as infectious as it is refreshing: after a lengthy discourse on the awful insularity, sexism and misplaced nostalgia that pervades the comics subculture, he answers the question "Why bother?" with a firm "Because comic books are awesome" and a list of 48 miscellaneous proofs of their awesomeness - which also proves that Wolk knows comics as well as he loves them.
He has a keen eye for both the surface appeal that makes the reading of comics enjoyable and the underlying patterns that make it rewarding; he is open-minded, bending over backwards to ensure that his own opinions are not mistaken for facts, yet not lacking the courage of his convictions. For instance, he is the first comics critic I've come across to point out that the late Will Eisner - a pioneer of the medium - created stories that were mawkish, sentimental, and heavy-handed, populated by cardboard cut-outs rather than characters - and yet he drew them with breathtaking panache and vision, and that is why he is celebrated.
This is typical of Wolk's approach. He has enough confidence in the value of comics as such that he doesn't feel compelled to focus solely on unarguable masterpieces such as Jimmy Corrigan or Maus (inset) - the critical equivalent of showing visitors the good china. In order to know how comics work, it helps enormously to look at the ones that don't work, and the ones that only work in some ways; failure is easier to identify than success, and frequently more instructive.
What's more, Wolk is unabashed in admitting that "a lot of the comics I treasure most are somehow dodgy or flawed, and I'd rather explain what brings me joy about them than
endorse them unequivocally."
There's an unfortunate gap in that he completely neglects Japanese comics, or manga; as he says "I'm basically going to avoid discussing manga . . . partly because manga seems to operate by a slightly different set of rules, but mostly because I simply don't have the taste for most of it." Certainly it's better to admit ignorance and say no more on the subject than to know nothing and talk about it anyway; but the "slightly different set of rules" that govern manga have infiltrated American comics to such a degree as to blur the lines between them. The influence of Japanese artists on their American counterparts over the past 20 years is almost impossible to overstate, and Wolk's silence on the subject leaves his account lopsided.
However, even this gap is the result of Wolk's decision to avoid canon-building and resist the temptation to make definitive and exhaustive statements - a wise choice. For although comics have indeed grown up, comics criticism is still in its infancy: it's a young field that doesn't need to have its growth hampered by doctrinaire pronouncements. Wolk's contribution is intelligent, discerning, incisive, and terrifically engaging: not the last word, but a very good place to start.
Katherine Farmar blogs about comics at Whereof One Can Speak: http://puritybrown.blogspot.com
Reading Comics: How Graphic Novels Work and What They Mean By Douglas Wolk Da Capo Press, 405pp. £13.99