High Definition Graphics

Andy Warner tells us all about the pizzly bear at the Nib on Medium.com, and you should go have a look at the whole thing for two reasons:

1. It's interesting and well-presented.

2. The fact that it's interesting and well-presented hit me at the right moment, because it's part of a whole issue of graphic non-fiction and a couple of related things that I've been puzzling over lately.

I got sucked into a discussion on Facebook yesterday that was a subsection of a conversation over at webcomicsalliance.com sparked by an essay in which a cartoonist got hung up on definitions of webcomics and comics and comic strips and comic books in a way that reminded me of why I bailed out of rec.arts.comic.strips several years ago.

When I was in college, someone quoting someone else remarked, "Art is, essentially, defining," which does not mean that artists should get tied up in ridiculous arguments about what to call things.

What it does mean is that true art doesn't simply depict and describe but establishes and defines the nature of its subject.

There is an emerging category of graphic journalism that needs to be held accountable, that needs to do more than describe and depict.

Warner's piece works in large part because it is compact and well done.

I would suggest that there are only a couple of people -- Joe Sacco, for example -- who can carry out that level of reportage at any greater length than this kind of compact, single-gulp without drifting into the realm of, if we must define categories, a "graphic lecture."

I've run into it twice recently in slightly different forms and, with all due respect to the CSotD Prime Directive, I can't really discuss it without naming the specific pieces. But it's genuine criticism, not "shaming."

The first was Brooke Gladstone and Josh Neufeld's The Influencing Machine, which is interesting but, like Scott McCloud's revered Understanding Comics, consists mainly of pictures of someone delivering a lecture.

In McCloud's book, the saving grace is that a lecture on comics ought to be illustrated for obvious reasons.

A lecture on media literacy doesn't need to be, which imposes a much greater burden on it to justify its format.

Movie critics speak of "The Watch Test," which is that, if you look at your watch, the movie has a problem with length and pacing.

If someone asks, "Why isn't this just an essay?" a piece of graphic non-fiction has a similar issue with reader engagement.

As a frequent writer of children's history and historical fiction, I am interested in the emergence of graphic formats for teaching, but I also bring to it a deep dislike of stories in which the only "fiction" consists of Bobby and Susie talking to Kindly Old Uncle Billy and the rest is the didactic old fart telling them about when the buffalo herds went as far as you could see and blahblahblahblahblah.

Simply illustrating facts is no less deadening -- and no more inspiring -- than Ben Stein's epic lecture in Ferris Bueller. But I'm seeing that in graphic nonfiction aimed at kids and, frankly, it pisses me off because it endangers a promising format that they have not yet learned to dread.

Which brings us back to Joe Sacco: I think the reason his long-form graphic non-fiction works is that he kind of borrows from Ken Burns in using a technique of introducing us to individuals within the narrative who humanize what we're seeing, picking graphics that underline his point, and weaving it all into a story and not just a rote depiction of facts.

One of the bulwarks of journalism is that you have to gather several times more material than you can use.

In part, this is to let you pick only the best pieces, but it is also in order to give yourself a deeper understanding of the topic than you could convey by simply vomiting up willy-nilly everything you've learned.

This is the artistic challenge of "defining" as opposed to "describing."

For the graphically oriented, let me explain it this way: The value of an illustration is not in its "realism" and certainly not in the number of brush strokes it contains. If that were true, a photograph of an old man in armor would be more valid than Picasso's simple drawing.

Picasso knew much more about Don Quixote than he put in that picture. And yet it's all there.

Similarly, written journalism doesn't tell every detail and it may tell only a fraction of what the journalist knows. But it tells the parts that define the topic, and it tells them in a way that defines the topic, just as Picasso defined his. 

Which brings us to the second recent book that disappointed me, Box Brown's biography of Andre the Giant. I was aware of Andre as both a wrestler and an actor and I really wanted to know more about him, but I read the book and I really don't know very much more than I brought with me.

I liked it. I enjoyed reading it. It's not a "bad" book and a lot of others have really liked it.

But let me compare it with Art Spiegelman's Maus, which not only defined Spiegelman's father, Vladek, but in doing so defined (and I speak of artistic, not categorical, definition) the experience of both the Holocaust and, more specifically, of Spiegelman's life as the child of Holocaust survivors.

Admittedly, a big piece of definition to bite off, but consider this:

In Brown's biography, for instance, we learn that Andre was an alcoholic, but what we see is him drinking a lot and even too much. And, having been told of his difficulties as a giant in society and as the product of poverty, we accept his alcoholism as fact. But those are merely facts. The greater "why," the total impact, seen and unseen, upon him and upon those around him is left undefined.

By contrast, Vladek Spiegelman is depicted not simply as someone who was embittered by his experience in the camps, but as someone who was a son of a bitch to begin with. Art Spiegelman never says "My father survived the camps because he was a son of a bitch," but, boy, that thread is there to be picked up: He defines his topic through the unspoken, undrawn storyline that flows through what he did say and what he did draw.

Vladek's personality is illuminated in who he was before, during and after the war, not simply in how he looked (he wasn't a mouse anyway) or how he acted or how he spoke, but in how all those things and others between the lines impacted the people and events he experienced.

Maybe I've just wasted 1,000 words.  Here it is in seven:

"Depicting" is just illustration.

Art is "defining."

 

Comments

[Brian Fies]

"Why isn't this just an essay?" That's the key right there. Also: why isn't this a prose novel? Or a prose biography? I see a lot of comics that seem to exist only because someone said, "Hey, I hear these graphic novel things are hot, do it like that."

A graphic novel should have a reason for being graphic or it shouldn't bother. The pictures must convey information or tell a story the words can't. Sacco's work is a good example: some reporter could've gone to the places he went and taken photos of the things he drew, but their dispatch wouldn't have told the same stories that he did by fusing his words and pictures into comics.

Regarding the "cartoonists hung up on definitions" debates that inspired this post, I think they're useless and tiresome. It's a big beef I have with McCloud (and told him so). Write the words, draw the pictures, put it out; let other people fret over the trivia of what to call it and which shelf to stock it on. As Orson Welles supposedly said when a critic asked him to analyze his own work, "I'm the bird. You're the ornithologist."