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How Graphic Novels Won Respect
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Comic book expert Danny Fingeroth to appear at Brooklyn’s Court Street Barnes & Noble 7 p.m. Sept. 23
The Rough Guide to Graphic Novels is pitched as the ultimate companion to the expanding world of the “literary comic book”.
With author Danny Fingeroth’s background, it’s easy to believe it. Fingeroth is a prolific comic book author, and was one of Spiderman’s editors at Marvel Comics.
The quick skinny on graphic novels is this: after a gradual build-up, they burst out as legit lit with the publication of Maus about 15 years ago.
In Maus, author Art Spiegelman uses anthropomorphic animals to tell of his father’s harrowing struggle to survive the Holocaust as a Polish Jew. The book, which won a special Pulitzer Prize in 1992, also follows the author's troubled relationship with his father and the way war reverberates through generations of a family.
The graphic novel has the advantage of being able to develop character through pictures as well as words. The comic-look grabs kids and gets them reading before they realize it.
The educational value of the graphic novel became clear to me in 1999 when I interviewed John Ostrander, author of The Kents, a story about the ancestors of Jonathan and Martha Kent, adoptive parents of Superman.
Elizabeth Baker, a teacher at a high school in Beekmantown, New York, decided to offer a course on the graphic novel as a senior elective that year.
She taught The Kents.
Parents and others in the community raised their eyebrows. Superman? In school?
She had some explaining to do, but did it well.
On the one hand, the graphic novel is a big, fat comic book. On the other, she said, it’s literature — and an emerging art form.
And a uniquely American one at that.
"Like jazz," Baker said. And like jazz in its early days, it wasn’t getting the respect it deserved.
Baker points to Maus. It’s a concentration-camp survivor’s tale, using mice as Jews and cats as Nazis, she said.
"It tells the story of a son going back to interview his father ... tells the story through pictures," she said. "You think mice, cats, how can this work? But it totally works."
The Kents is not a simple novel either. It takes us back to the end of the 19th century looking ahead to the 20th, while it has to appeal to the kids who are looking ahead to the 21st, Baker said.
Ostrander said earlier Superman stories place the Kents in Smallville, Kansas. He wanted to tell how they came to be in Kansas in the first place.
The task blended well with his long-held desire to do a fact-based Western and meld it with the universe of DC Comics.
Although he had already written enough comics "to deforest a small country," as he put it, they were generally fantasies or futuristic. Kansas then provided him with everything he needed for a good historical yarn.
"The struggle to decide whether Kansas would be a free or a slave state made it a dress rehearsal for the Civil War."
The story is peopled with historical characters as it tells the brother-against-brother story through the eyes of the fictional Kents.
The story began to interest the students, but the drawings captivated them.
"Look at the eyes," Baker said as she pointed out two men about to face off in the pages of the book. "You can see the emotion. The Kents offers character development through pictures, with complex multiple first-person narration.”
"If anyone thinks graphic novels are dumbing down reading," Ostrander said, "I challenge them to read the book and pass Elizabeth’s test."
Now comes Fingeroth, telling us that the graphic novel has cinched its place, after a journey that began in cave painting days, with sequential art in Egyptian tombs, on to the comic strip and the superhero craze of the 1940s, to the “genre-defining” Maus, to the 60 graphic novels he lists as must-reads.
He tells us about the authors and the illustrators of graphic novels and everything else you always wanted to know but didn’t know who to ask.
Fingeroth is your answer man.
When he left Marvel in 1995 he became editor of Virtual Comics, then took charge of creative development at Visionary Media. Now he publishes Write Now!, a magazine offering tips and lessons on writing for comics.
According to Wikipedia, Fingeroth wrote Dazzler, Deadly Foes of Spider-Man and Lethal Foes of Spider-Man mini series’, and the Howard the Duck movie adaptation comic, as well as all 50 issues of Darkhawk, and other Marvel titles including Avengers, Daredevil, Iron Man and What If? as well as his graphic novel, Deathtrap: The Vault.
His 2004 book, Superman on the Couch: What Superheroes Really Tell Us About Ourselves and Our Society (with Stan Lee) has been well-received and is in its third printing.
Fingeroth has also written Backstage at an Animated Series (2003); Best of Write Now! (with Stan Lee and Brian Bendis, April 2008); and Creation of the X-Men (2006).
He will hardly have time to stop talking about the Rough Guide before his next book comes out. It’s called Clark Kent: Jews, Comics, and the Creation of the Superhero (release date November 2008).
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