On Comics: Literature in a Hurry

by

As is always the case with the changing of an academic semester I am in a crunch, a bind for time, a purgatory almost completely devoid of reading. At such times of year I generally fall back on one of several categories of reading to keep me chugging along: children’s and young adult, favorites (that happen to be brief), or comics and graphic novels. The latter concerns me today. When I am freaked out with the amount of work on my plate, comics and graphic novels save me.

I find that many people have a bad attitude about comics. When I tell people that my thesis in graduate school was on comics and the oral tradition, they generally think I am a head case. “But comic books are for kids. My son reads Spider Man all the time!” an acquaintance says. “Comics are no better for the brain than watching television,” another co-worker assures me. What’s to understand is that comics and graphic novels—their longer, more detailed cousins—can be just as “literary” as any other genre or medium. Discounting the form is like saying there’s never been a quality film or a classic children’s book. To ignore comics is to bastardize them.

For me, comics are literature in a hurry. That is not to say that they are in any way “less” than traditional printed volumes or any other creative medium. Comics certainly are not created in a hurry, they are rarely fully understood or studied in a hurry, but thanks to comics I can have a quality reading experience in a relatively short amount of time. In a similar fashion to watching television or a film, comics are largely processed without overtly thinking about how it happens. As the reader skims over the page of a comic, the illustrator need only provide pivotal images to get the reader through and provide the bones of a plot. The reader does the rest. The reader’s understanding is the connective tissue that binds the images together. In the empty spaces between images, or the “gutter” as Scott McCloud calls it in his book Understanding Comics, the reader fills in time shifts, changes of location, or other sundry connections in order to understand and interpret the sequence. The same concept applies to other visual media that require images to be viewed or read in sequence like picture books, movies, or a favorite sitcom. Whenever I ask my literature students to read comics for the first time, they are often baffled and lost, but with time they get used to the process of reading comics and the progression begins to happen naturally and with increasing speed as they work through the marriage of images and written words.

Comics have become a haven for me in times of stress not only because I can process them quickly after much practice, but because they are rich in innovation and the plots are often just as complicated and creative as a traditional novel. The first graphic novel I ever tackled was Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning, The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. Split into two volumes, it tells the story of Spiegelman’s father, Vladek, and his family’s experiences surviving the Holocaust. Black and white illustrations are juxtaposed alongside black and white photographs and other realistic images. The result is a shocking, often heartrending, and personal view of the atrocity of that time period. At its core Maus is a great story—an affecting story. But Spiegelman’s illustrations catapult Maus into the realm of the extraordinary. By drawing the Jews as mice, the Nazis as cats, Poles as pigs, and various other nationalities as animals, Spiegelman simultaneously gives insight into his characters’ roles while critiquing the uselessness of ethnic stereotypes. In the end, the stereotypes, as well as the animal faces themselves, are only masks worn by humans.

Another of my favorite graphic novels, and one I plan to teach to my Children’s Literature class this semester, is Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese, a National Book Award finalist and winner of the Michael L. Printz Award which is awarded yearly by the American Library Association for excellence in young adult literature. It is a highly esteemed graphic novel that follows in Maus’s glorious footsteps to some extent. Yang tells three delicately interwoven stories. The first is a traditional Chinese folktale about the Monkey King. The Monkey King wishes to be powerful and indestructible like the other gods, so he works hard, learns to be godlike, but ultimately hubris gets him trapped under a mountain. The second story is the plight of a young Chinese boy, Jin Wang, who wants nothing more than to look like an “all-American” youth so his classmates will understand him and he will fit in. The remaining thread is the story of Danny, a blonde, blue-eyed teen troubled by his Chinese cousin, Chin-kee. Chin-kee is an over-the-top caricature of a Chinese character with big buck teeth, a thick accent, and to really put a stamp on the typecasting, his luggage consists of stacked Chinese take-out boxes. Danny is so mortified by Chin-kee’s behavior that he constantly changes schools.

The genius in Yang’s graphic novel is not only his impressive ability to weave the three stories together into a single unit in the final chapter, but also his willingness to use visual stereotypes in ways similar to those in Maus. Chin-kee is an ironic character who is not only entertaining but also confronts common stereotypes in appearance and his annoying excellence in school. In Jin Wang’s story the people around him often utilize the same stereotypes Chin-kee embodies by mispronouncing Jin’s name or making unfair assumptions based on his Chinese heritage. The bevy of stereotypes come to a screeching halt when, in the final chapter, they are shown to be empty and false in a revelation about Danny and Chin-kee.

With fine graphic novels like Maus or American Born Chinese I can ingest a multi-faceted, finely written, and finely illustrated story in an hour or so. In that way, comics and graphic novels are literature in a hurry. However, to truly appreciate a story like American Born Chinese, like any great book, multiple readings are to the reader’s advantage. I certainly did not pick up all the subtle visual cues and symbols my first time through, but I did appreciate the innovation of the illustrations and the talent in the storytelling. Though I often find myself too busy to pick up a chunky, canonical wonder like War and Peace or Anna Karenina, I never have to go without quality reading material when I have a shelf stocked with graphic novels. 

Books mentioned in this column:
American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang (Square Fish, 2008)
The Complete Maus: A Survivor’s Tale by Art Spiegelman (Pantheon, 1996)
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art by Scott McCloud (Kitchen Sink Press, 1994)


Andi is a recovering university academic employed by the North Carolina community college system as an English instructor. While she decided to forego a Ph.D. and career as a professor, she fills in all the free time her current position affords her with editing literary publications, reviewing, freelancing, and blogging at Tripping Toward Lucidity: Estella’s Revenge. Her work can be found in the journal, Multi-Ethnic Literature of the United States (MELUS), and Altar magazine as well as online in various venues such as PopMatters.com. She is a member of the National Book Critics Circle (NBCC), and writes fiction. Her turn-ons include new books and gelato, while her turn-offs are reality television and washing dishes. Contact Andi.