Comic Strip

I admit I've been a little slow to embrace the graphic format.  Somewhere deep down, the term "comic book" is lurking and, with it, the idea that comic books are not real books.  Never mind that Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for Maus: A Survivor's Tale or that all the book clubs have read Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic by Alison Bechdel.  The prejudice lingers.   Books are books and graphic novels are ... well, something else.

I am working, though, on changing this, so when I saw a graphic novel on the New York Times Best Books of 2009 list, I decided to read it.  Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli is the story of a New York City architect.  Though he has won many awards, Asterios Polyp is a paper architect – none of his designs have ever been built.  He plays the arrogant academic to perfection; always ready with a clever response, he has a merciless wit and a great affection for the sound of his own voice.  A spiritual crisis is inevitable.

The story opens on Polyp’s fiftieth birthday.  His wife has left him and depression has set in.  Alone in his city apartment, he seems barely functional.  Lightning strikes and fire guts the apartment.  Everything is lost and Asterios Polyp walks away.  His journey to redemption has begun.  And, as is the way with such odysseys, a long, strange trip lies ahead.

When I went in search of background material on this book, I discovered that it had made everyone’s Best of 2009 list – low-brow, high-brow, no-brow – everyone loved it.  Magnificent … mind-blowing … masterpiece!  I liked it – I even liked it a lot, but I wasn’t quite there with it.  Then I thought about how I had read it – barreling through, one text block to the next.  Of course, I noticed the artwork, but reading is about words.  Or is it?  I decided I needed help.

I learned that in the world of graphic novel education, all roads lead to Will Eisner.  Eisner, born in 1917, was one of the inspirations for Michael Chabon’s The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay.  A pioneer of the American comics industry, Eisner also produced what is considered our first graphic novel:  A Contract with God, published in 1978, is a collection of stories from the tenement houses of New York City, where Eisner grew up.

Eisner was an innovator, but, more importantly, he was also a tireless promoter and educator.  His Comics and Sequential Art: Principles and Practices is now in its 30^th printing.  Adapted from his course at New York’s School of Visual Arts, this work covers the fundamentals of graphic storytelling.  In his words, this format  “presents a montage of both word and image, and the reader is thus required to exercise both visual and verbal interpretive skills … The reading of a graphic novel is an act of both aesthetic perception and intellectual pursuit.”

Seeking to improve my visual interpretive skills, I dug in.  Comics and Sequential Art is actually a pretty quick read if you’re not attempting to produce any art.  Eisner covers imagery (including text as image), conveying time, framing, (this is really important in sequential art), and expressive anatomy.  He emphasizes that the success of imagery depends on commonality of experience: the artist must evoke “images stored in the minds of both parties.”  This “symbol decoding” (which is a way of describing reading) is especially important in a graphic presentation.  As there is less “telling” going on, the artist must guide the reader to appropriate imaginative leaps to fill in the blanks.

I went back to the book and “read” it again, this time looking only at the art and not reading any text.  Still wrong, but, like practicing one hand alone on the piano, useful, even necessary.   I took note, though, of the use of text as image.  On the M-word trail, I was up to Masterful.

David Mazzucchelli makes extensive use of symbolic imagery.  Asterios Polyp is of Greek descent, he teaches at Ithaca, he is a “paper” architect, but marries a woman who creates hard sculpture from found objects.  Lightning strikes, he leaves home.  He descends and ascends.  He is wounded, he survives, he returns.  It isn’t subtle, but it works.  I inched a little closer to Magnificent.

Eisner’s book doesn’t talk about color.  Several reviewers did, though.  I think it was color that did it.  On the third time through – all together now, word and image – I paid special attention to the use of color.  This isn’t a Best Book of 2009 – this is a Masterpiece!  Don’t miss it.

(Photograph from ohhhbetty, Creative Commons, Flickr.com)