Like Words, Drawings Tell Stories

And there's a growing literary format in which they carry the tale

Ted Landphair | Washington, DC 19 July 2010
 

Photo: kevindooley, Flickr Creative Commons
Manga, a longstanding Japanese version of graphic novels, is such a popular literary form that ian entire category in several bookstores.t's

In a recent Washington Post story, Michael Dirda described young people sprawled on the floor at bookstores, their eyes riveted on the books in front of them. In fact, Dirda wrote, no other readers look quite so utterly absorbed.

The books belonged to a hot but, until recently, somewhat obscure genre that many Americans have never heard of.

Franklin Park Library, Flickr Creative Commons
This is an obviously well-attended workshop, specifically on how to create graphic novels, at a library in Franklin Park, Illinois.

It's the graphic novel. And the graphic part has nothing to do with explicit written descriptions of people, places, acts, or events. It refers to the illustrations, or graphics, that, in this form of book, carry the story as much as, or more than, the words.

Graphic novels - whose format has been traced all the way back to medieval woodcuts and to adult 19th Century Japanese illustrated stories called manga - look a lot like comic strips in book form. But each volume tells a full and complex story. 

Graphic novels are mocked in some literary quarters as simplistic - another example of what some consider the dumbing down of the American culture.

portlant, Flickr Creative Commons
The first word is washed out a bit from the flash reflection, but it reflects a meeting announcement for a book club of folks who read graphic novels in Portland, Oregon.
Writer Alan Moore, for instance, scoffs that graphic novel is nothing but a marketing term . . . meaning 'expensive comic book.'

That's an interesting take, since Moore is himself a British comic-book writer.