The Falcon   |   Volume 81, Issue 26

Published 6/02/10   |   Log In

Comics: not only for children

Art books address concepts far beyond Superman

By MELISSA FORBES, Features Editor

Published: February 18, 2004

It's a book. It's a movie. It's a ... comic book!

The films "X-Men" and "X-2" grossed a total of over $372 million in the United States. The total for the first three "Batman" movies is almost $600 million. "Spider-Man" alone grossed over $407 million, making it the fifth top-grossing film in U.S. history.

The popularity of "comic book movies" grows even more when the definition is extended to include more than just the superhero genre: the "Alien" series, "The Mask" and "Road to Perdition" also find their roots in comic book series.

Comic book worlds seem to appeal to more than just a handful of die-hard fans and small children, and while they may be less lucrative than the movies they inspire, comic books themselves are still a presence in society.

"In the past seven years, I've seen a decrease in people who believe they're investing in comics, but an increase in people who just enjoy reading," said Ganny Hochberg, a manager at Pike Place Market's Golden Age Collectibles.

Actual comic books, which hit stores on Wednesdays and normally cost about $3.50, contain just snippets of a storyline at a time, much like television shows that end in cliffhangers week after week. Readers who are less interested in collecting and more interested in the stories may prefer trade paperbacks, which gather all of the comic books from a particular stry arc in a series and bind them together into one continuous volume.

Hochberg attributes people's growing desire to read comics to the capabilities of the visual form.

"It's like cinema in your hands," she said. "It's a medium like any other, so it can be used to tell any kind of story."

Can be, and is. Hochberg explained that comic books and graphic novels (book-length comics) cover topics ranging from superheroes to murder mysteries to non-fiction works about topics like war and cancer.

Even the superhero genre is more than it is generally given credit for, she said, pointing to "Watchmen," Alan Moore's iconic work from the '80s, which she described as "deconstructing the superhero."

Hochberg said that "Watchmen" "takes a real hard look at what motivates people to put on a costume and say 'Hey, I'm going to interfere with everyone's life.'"

Senior James Pedrick agrees that the idea of the superhero is more than just an indestructible character running around in tights and a cape saving the world.

"I think Sept. 11 has redefined the relevance of the superhero," he said. "Especially a superhero like Spider-Man, where it's not just this greater-than-life invincible character, but someone with real problems that you can relate to."

Spider-Man is a favorite of Pedrick, who has been reading comics since 1992. The web-slinger series that he is currently involved in reading are "The Amazing Spider-Man" and "Ultimate Spider-Man," which retells the Spider-Man story in modern times, much like the recent movie.

He also suggests Craig Thompson's autobiographical graphic novel "Blankets," which deals with the author's romantic and spiritual struggles growing up. Pedrick said he has loaned his copy out to numerous friends and even professors.

He says that comics can be literature too, and should be taken seriously as such.

"I don't see why one has to take away from the other," he said. "Comic books offer an artistic form of telling stories that a book can't, just like a comic book can't tell a story in a way that a book can."

However, Pedrick said that although he has learned to appreciate the more "sophisticated" and literary titles, his loyalties and those of many fans are with the superheroes characters of youth.

"We know them; they know us," he said. "And we don't have girlfriends."

Associate Professor of English Dr. Christine Chaney actually teaches on a graphic novel in her USEM course, which examines how truth can be found in fictional media and also includes a self-portrait by Rembrandt and the obligatory autobiography of Frederick Douglass. (Chaney, incidentally, is happily married.)

They are all examples of "the literary self-portrait," she said, which are "neither novels nor are they factual autobiographies, per se."

The graphic novel she uses, "Maus," is Art Spiegelman's retelling of his father's experience in Auschwitz-Birkenau during the Holocaust. It is also the story of Spiegelman's poor relationship with his father and the way that the process of creating the comic book changes that relationship.

Chaney said that part of the appeal of "Maus" is the way it uses a fictional, "even a 'low-class' genre" to tell a familiar story. She said that by reading the story of the Holocaust in a new genre, people can "hear it with new ears and see it with new eyes."

She said that it is important that the book is visual as well as literary, and that it should be taken seriously, much in the same way as film is.

"We're in a post-text era," she said. "We read the visual in our time in a way that I think is unprecedented, and we use unusual forms of narration all over the place."

Senior art major Heidi Wall said that the visual is perhaps the most important aspect of a comic book.

"Artwork is a way of telling a story in a more intuitive way," she said. "Here's a chance to engage with literature on a visual level that's not frickin' staring at the television set."

Wall herself is creating a comic book for her honors project, something she has been doing for a long time. She says she has never wanted to do anything else, and whenever she gets to pick what to do for a project, she always chooses to make a comic book.

"I think it's always been really important to me to communicate any ideas in a way that kinda brings people from point A to point B," she said. "Comic is a way to do that in a multi-layered, visual and mental environment."

Wall said that she has been reading comic books since she could read, and that as she has gotten older she has developed a taste for Japanese comics, which she says contain more diversity in style and content than just the "anime" that everyone knows about.

"In Japan they value comic books as an art form more than Americans do," she said.

As for specific Japanese titles she enjoys, Wall mentioned Ai Yazawa's "Paradise Kiss," which is an example of manga, "comic books written by girls for girls." The series follows a group of fashion designers and a high school girl learning to be a model, and, Wall said, brings up questions about identity and decision-making, but does it in a fun way.

She also recommends "Gon," by Masashi Tanaka, which is a word-free comic that follows the adventures of a miniature Tyrannosaurus Rex running around in the modern world.

However, "it makes me feel weird to recommend comic book titles to people," she said. "What you like will depend on who you are."

That said, she said that she has given up on convincing other people about the value of comic book.

"I used to try to get people to read comics all the time, but at this point I don't really care. If they don't want to read comics, they're missing out," she said.

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