Merry Wanderer of the Night:
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A couple of week ago Ron stopped by to talk to us about what makes a good graphic novel. It seems like a lot of you out there agreed with Ron's thoughts and some of you were looking for a good place to start with graphic novels. Ron compiled a great list of some of his all time favorites. I've read about half of these and I can vouch to their greatness!

Boiling the medium down to just a few recommendations is…impossible, but I’ll do my best to provide an interesting and diverse list. Even so, superhero comics will comprise a healthy portion of the list because they are so integral to the medium. I’ll also try to mix ongoing series with singular, one-shot works. Away we go—

Watchmen/The Dark Knight Returns

These two works are closely linked despite being vastly different when it comes to content. Watchmen is the arch-comic, the comic of comics, not only because of its brilliance, but it’s also a comic about comics. This is something the movie didn’t adequately capture. Writer Alan Moore spins a “Golden Age” story out of control, warping it into a self-reflexive mirror to the superhero genre, and artist Dave Gibbons subverts classical style, yet doesn’t seem like a carbon copy of it. This is a perfect comic.

In The Dark Knight Returns, Writer/Artist Frank Miller redeems a laughable Batman by infusing him with eighties pop-culture sensibility. The story sees Bruce Wayne as an old man, forced to once again become Batman in order to stop a brutal crime wave in Gotham City. The work, while whitewashed in eighties action movie veneer (Miller’s Wayne owes more to Clint Eastwood than Adam West), also explores the enduring nature of the character and his relationship to other heroes in the DC universe. It’s a rip-roaring read, but it’s also Miller at his cleverest—there’s a density to the work that he rarely has been able to recapture.

(Further reading: [Moore] The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen I & II; From Hell; [Miller] Batman: Year One; Daredevil: Visionaries Volume 2; Sin City.)

Criminal

Ed Brubaker is one of my favorite writers, and this is the reason why. Criminal pulls on the pulp origins of early comics as well as film noir and blends it into one outstanding package: contemporary but timeless stories about the criminal underworld. The tropes may feel familiar, but a good story, especially a crime story, isn’t “predictable” so much as it is inevitable. If there’s one thing this series has in spades it’s that sinking feeling.

(Further reading: Captain America; Sleeper; The Immortal Iron Fist; Gotham Central.)

Asterios Polyp

This is one of the most formally experimental pieces that I’ve ever read. Writer/Artist David Mazzuchielli uses everything at his disposal to construct a fascinating character study of a dead-beat architect named Asterios. It’s a vibrant book, story-and-art-wise, with each character constructed in interesting colors and character-specific fonts. It’s simply a pleasure to behold.

(Further reading: City of Glass.)

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic
This is an amazing work, something you’d lend to non-comics to get them hooked on the medium. It plays simply at first, but unfolds beautifully, each chapter adding a layer of complexity to the story. The art is outstanding, too, and lends to the credibility of the story itself, about a death in the family and so much more. The story will resonate with any reader, and that’s the highest praise I can give it.
(Further reading: Dykes to Watch Out For.)

Daredevil Volume 2 #16-19, 26-50, 56-81

This run of issues comprises Brian Michael Bendis and Alex Maleev’s run on the book, a run that is simply outstanding. The most common phrase associated with the series is that, “Daredevil spends as much time out of his costume as he does in it,” which is a simple way of saying that the run is unusual within the genre. It’s more than that, though. Bendis’ characters speak in dialogue closer to David Mamet’s theater aesthetic than “word balloon banter,” and he fractures the timeline brilliantly to deal with heavy thematic concerns about the real power that a hero holds. Maleev’s art is also outstanding. He brings gritty realism to the book, and employs specifically cinematic techniques to convey the story. It’s a terrifically exciting body of work.

(Further reading: Powers; New Avengers; Ultimate Spider-Man.)

Scalped

This book is similar to Criminal (I could see them shelved together, yes), but offers a unique slant on the crime genre. Instead of portraying the underbelly of a city, Scalped digs into an Indian reservation in the Dakotas in which a sleazy FBI agent tries desperately to bring down the corrupt man who runs the rez, Lincoln Red Crow. The best part of the series is that it doesn’t pull any punches, everything writer Jason Aaron throws at the reader means something, and either pushes the plot forward dramatically or tells the reader something important about a character. The stakes in this book are incredibly high.

(Further reading: The Other Side; Wolverine: Weapon X.)

As I said, great list! Be sure to check out Ron's previous post and his blog Entertainment Etc.

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Today I have a little something different. Last week when I wrote my review for American Born Chinese I couldn't help but think to myself What do I really know about any of this? I've reviewed a decent amount of graphic novels on here, and I read them quite a bit as a kid, but I still feel incredibly awkward reviewing them. I am under the impression that this is the sentiment from a lot of bloggers and readers who are interested in the graphic novel but don't know how to look at it critically. To try and remedy this here and for other people, I asked my graphic novel enthusiast friend Ron to give his thoughts on what exactly makes a good graphic novel and what he looks for. Please check out his thoughts!

In its simplest form, a graphic novel is a bound collection of comics between floppy covers. It may be part of a series, about six to eight issues, a standalone story, or an omnibus edition, which contains about thirty issues of a single series. Pinning an exact definition down for the term is tricky—there isn’t a concrete set of terms to define things within the medium. For example, in front of me sits Brit, a series of one shot issues—bound like graphic novel collections. But we’ll push the hardcore ontological stuff to the side for now and just focus on sketching out the graphic novel in broad terms.

The real key to understanding the graphic novel, and comics, is to understand that neither of them are genres. They are mediums, like film or books or even video games. All movies aren’t action films, nor are all comics about superheroes. So, like films and books, there’s something for everyone. Last week, I got my brother hooked on Brian Wood’s series, DMZ, which isn’t about superheroes at all, instead a second American civil war. While superheroes may have the highest profile in the industry (for example, Captain America’s death makes news) there are many individual genres to choose from.

Reading a graphic novel is also something that needs to be decoded by the reader. There are general guidelines to reading a graphic novel, determined by the positions of captions, panels and bubbles on the page. From both the written and artistic perspectives of the medium, a good graphic novel should never confuse the reader within the page or delay him or her from moving to the next panel in a clean transition. This is of course assuming you’re not dealing with a book that’s intentionally breaking these rules, just like in postmodern fiction.

But, as avid readers, it’s not all about reading the story from cover to cover and shelving the book. Graphic novels can be analyzed just like the rest of literature, but it may take some getting used to. Though comics are the synthesis of words and images, the brunt of the analysis comes from the image itself, like in film. It uses a very similar visual vocabulary, the borders of the panels act in ways similar to a film frame. If a character takes up most of the panel, it suggests power, the same way it does in film. If the panel is canted, it suggests similar unease. The comic differs from film in that it’s static images, not fluid cuts on a single frame. There is a larger context to panel design in how they work as a whole on the page.

The filmic analogy, however, doesn’t capture the breadth of actually analyzing a graphic novel: the words are important, too. Most of the text in a graphic novel is dialogue, that’s the way it should be—cluttering the page with explanations of the action is redundant, poor storytelling (postmodern and meta considerations aside).

Further mish-mashing mediums, the words even have power beyond their literal meanings. Bold words indicate important or stressed words, but the author doesn’t supply an emotional indicator afterwards, like “sadly” or “angrily.” The words don’t just sit on the bottom of the page, like filmic subtitles do. Different fonts can also hold different meanings. In David Mazzuchelli’s atounding Asterios Polyp, each character “speaks” in a unique, creator-designed, font, suggesting their different voices on a symbolic level. Comic book dialogue is unique to individual readers; it’s active reading.

This dense toolbox gives creators a lot to work with, so readers need to be diligent in identifying the particular tropes a writer or artist is employing. Some creators, like Alan Moore, will use everything at his disposal to construct the comic, while others, like Frank Miller, only use tools to highlight important elements in more standard stories. But much of the time, stories can be absorbed without worrying about postmodern dialectics within the work, or analyzing it as closely as English majors are wont to do. Once the medium is unlocked, the most important thing is to pinpoint interests. Like zombies? Grab the zombie book. Like superheroes? Your choices are plenty. Like Vikings? We’ve those, as well. So next time you find yourself near a comics outlet…stop in and have a look.

A little too serious for my own good,

RON.

Thanks for sharing your thoughts with us Ron! Be sure to check out Ron's blog Entertainment Etc.