Rocket Bomber - article - comics - commentary - Graphic vs Novel vs Comic

Once again, while looking at the New York Times comic chart, I’m struck by their choice of language.

If I didn’t know any better, if I were an average reader with an average [non-existent] knowledge of sequential art employed in long-form storytelling, I might see a “Graphic Books” Chart tucked in at the end of other bestseller lists and assume that Graphic meant something else.

Like gory. or violent.

English is a marvellously flexible language, and new words get coined all the time, and old words are dusted off and forced to pull double (and triple) duty.

Take ‘novel’. It used to mean ‘new’. It was applied to a new form of literature, several centuries back, but now very few of us think of [or know about] this double meaning of the word ‘novel’ when we talk about books, even while the meaning of ‘novel’ as new is still current and in currency. In fact, it’s not so far out of the pale to imagine a reviewer discussing a novel novel, though most would balk at that construction.

‘Comic’ used to mean ‘funny’ – and still means funny when we talk of the people who engage in funny as a profession, especially those determined to do so in live performance venues. But for most of a century, ‘comic’ has also been applied to the funny-pages, a shorthand for a whole class of graphic arts that once started with ‘comic strips’ but now encompasses a Whole World of Art, some of it dark, some of it ‘graphic’ in the splattery-gory-sense-of-the-word-graphic; some of it dramatic and weepy; some of it experimental and edgy and expanding the form; and occasionally some of it also quite funny.

The fact that ‘comic’ once only referred to funny, or it’s continued utility in that role shouldn’t automatically preclude it’s new use-and-meaning as a shorthand for sequential art. Just as a ‘novel’ is hardly new these days but is the accepted term for a lengthy work of fiction, ‘comic’ should be good enough as the accepted term for a lengthy work that combines integrated pictures and words in the service of a narrative.

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Graph as a Greek-derived English word-root is slippery, but almost always comes back to the verb ‘to write’. We can gerund that verb to a noun: “writing” — which is the meaning employed in things like Telegraphs, Photographs, and Spirographs (which are more properly known in mathematics as epicycloids).

Over time, the act of writing and it’s descriptive qualities espoused a new meaning for graph — anything that adequately described something might then be called a ‘graph’ – from pie charts and tables to epigraphs, graphemes, and eventually, the graphic arts.

yes, all this has to do with ‘writing’, in as much as we are still putting marks down to represent ideas, but the meaning of ‘graphic’ doesn’t gain from it’s long history, and only takes us farther away from the unique artistic forms developed in the 19th and 20th centuries.

And ‘graphic’ as an adjective has also picked up the meaning of ‘vividly and plainly shown’ — which is a complement, until one begins to talk about graphic sex and graphic violence. Indeed, given how quickly most of us resort to thoughts of sex and violence, most casual references to the term ‘graphic’ will never be considered outside of that sordid application.

So when I see a bestseller list of Graphic Books on the New York Times website, comics are the furthest thing from my mind.

Oh, I know what the Times means; and I get that they would desperately love to have been the ones to coin the term that defines a whole medium of human expression [who wouldn’t?] but “Graphic Books” they ain’t.

“Graphic Books” conjures up images of noir & splatter & loose women and looser men and No Details Left Out — and, honestly, I’m up for that — but I’m not sure what that has to do with comics. And if one cared to scratch even a millimetre into the etymology of ‘graph’ calling something a Graphic Book is like saying it’s a ‘written book’ and all books are written down, no? might as well call them book books, or recorded stories. “Graphic” means nothing, or at least nothing special in this context.

Yes, I know, I’m nitpicking and cherry-picking when it comes to definitions of Comics — and I’ll concede that “Graphic books” is a neologism adapted from “Graphic novels” — and I appreciate the time and effort the Times invests in tracking comics, which are a growing but still very small percentage of publishing overall.

I just personally dislike that label, ‘graphic’ books. In either case, we’re re-purposing an old term for a new form, and if it is impossible to use Eisner’s term, Sequential Art, then my preference would be to call the whole mess Comics.