Comics Grow Up: Graphic Novels & the Alternative Scene
Detail from Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen (1987).
Kavanaugh: What do you think of the term "graphic novel" that has come into use?
Moore: The term "graphic novel" was something that was thought up in the 80s by marketing people...[there are] a couple of things out there that you could just about call a novel...in terms of density, structure, size, scale, seriousness of theme, stuff like that. The problem is that "graphic novel" just came to mean "expensive comic book" and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel comics — because "graphic novels" were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel, you know?
— Barry Kavanaugh & Alan Moore, "The Alan Moore Interview"
Graphic Novels
In 1978, Will Eisner published A Contract With God and Other Tenement Stories, a collection of short stories centered around a Jewish tenement community in the Bronx in the 1930s. While there were a number of previous long-form works of sequential art that might have been called "graphic novels" — including the wordless woodcut-novels of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward, as well as "illustrated novels" such as Gil Kane's His Name is...Savage! (1968) and Blackmark (1971) — A Contract With God is considered the first to combine all the traditional elements associated with the modern form of the medium: sequential art, word balloons, literary content, and a cohesive, long-form narrative.
The mid-1980s saw the publication of three milestone works in this newly-designated format. In Maus, comix veteran Art Spiegelman told the story of his family's experiences during the Holocaust through the use of anthropomorphic animals, a stylistic trope that could be traced to the earliest days of the comics medium. Writer/artist Frank Miller's dark reinterpretation of the Batman myth in The Dark Knight Returns (1986) lay the foundations for the character that persist to this day. Finally, writer Alan Moore and artist Dave Gibbons combined profound philosophical themes with sophisticated visual storytelling to create Watchmen, still considered by many to be the greatest superhero story every told.
Wordless Novels
Wordless Books: the Original Graphic Novels
“Wordless books” were stories from the early part of the twentieth century told in black and white woodcuts, imaginatively authored without any text. Despite its short-lived popularity, the woodcut novel had an important impact on the development of comic art, particularly contemporary graphic novels with a focus on adult themes.
Passionate Journey
A wordless novel of 1919 by Flemish artist Frans Masereel. The story is told in 167 captionless prints, and tells of the experiences of an early 20th-century everyman in a modern city.
Story Without Words
A wordless 1920 novel by Flemish artist Frans Masereel that tells the story of a man who strives to win the love of a woman in 60 woodcut prints.
Lynd Ward: Six Novels in Woodcuts
The complete collection of Lynd Ward's six wordless "novels in woodcuts," including Gods' Man.
Flood! A Novel in Pictures
Flood! is a modern novel written in the ancient language of pictures, and its expressionist graphics hold a film noir edge. Long out of print and now at its tenth anniversary, Flood! conveys all the joys and sadness that intermingle in our large cities and gives us a look at a possible future.
Blood Song: A Silent Ballad
Consisting mainly of full-page images, spreads, and diptychs, Blood Song is a wordless, full-color tribute to the resilience of the human spirit and the need for that spirit to make itself heard.
Foundational Graphic Novels
A Contract with God
A revolutionary graphic novel that recreates the neighborhood of Will Eisner's youth through a quartet of four interwoven stories.
The Complete Maus
Maus is a haunting tale within a tale. Vladek's harrowing story of survival is woven into the author's account of his tortured relationship with his aging father. Against the backdrop of guilt brought by survival, they stage a normal life of small arguments and unhappy visits.
Watchmen
This Hugo Award-winning graphic novel chronicles the fall from grace of a group of super-heroes plagued by all-too-human failings. Along the way, the concept of the super-hero is dissected as the heroes are stalked by an unknown assassin.
Graphic Novels: History, Theory and Criticism
Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know
Presents an accessible, entertaining, and highly illustrated guide to the diversity of contemporary comics in book form.
Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics
Examines how notions of the graphic novel began to coalesce in the 1970s, a time of great change for American comics, with declining sales of mainstream periodicals, the arrival of specialty comics stores, and (at least initially) a thriving underground comix scene.
The Graphic Novel: An Introduction
Explores the graphic novel as a form of visual and literary communication, showing readers how to situate and analyze graphic novels since their rise to prominence half a century ago.
Detail from the story "Teen Plague" in Charles Burns' Big Baby (1982).
It is difficult to generalize about the new alternatives because they were so diverse. The best way to define them is by contrasting them to the mainstream. First, and most obviously, they were not about superheroes. Instead, they were concerned with a wide spectrum of mature subject matter...topics like radical politics, sex and hardcore horror were viable for the alternatives because the mainstream could not, or were not inclined to, cope with them.
— Roger Sabin, Comics, Comix and Graphic Novels: A History of Comic Art
Alternative Comics
The development of the graphic novel coincided with the spread of "alternative" or "indie" comics in the 80s and 90s, which emerged from the underground comix scene of the late 60s and early 70s. The indies incorporated a bewildering range of styles, subject matter and creators, but they were all similarly produced and distributed outside the "mainstream" comics publishing infrastructure, which was dominated by Marvel and DC and overwhelmingly concerned with the superhero genre.
Because of the alternative scene's heterogeneous nature, a cursory overview of its titles and creators will necessarily overlook something. However, one anthology that had an outsize influence was Raw. The brainchild of Art Spiegelman and Françoise Mouly, Raw was envisioned as a cross between a glossy art magazine and traditional comic book, featuring avant-gard and experimental work on large-format pages. Spiegelman's Maus was first serialized in Raw, alongside work by comix veterans like R. Crumb and Lynda Barry, as well as new creators like Charles Burns (whose stark black-and-white style recalls the art of the wordless woodcut novels of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward), Gary Panter and Mark Beyer.
Other noted alternative anthologies included R. Crumb's Weirdo and the British title Deadline, which featured the first appearance of the popular character Tank Girl by Alan Martin and Jamie Hewlett. In 1982, American publisher Fantagraphics began releasing the Hernandez brothers' Love and Rockets; the company would become one of the most respected in the indie publishing scene, with titles including Daniel Clowe's Eightball and Chris Ware's Acme Novelty Library.
Locas: The Maggie and Hopey Stories (Love & Rockets)
Created over 15 years from 1981 to 1996 in the pages of the legendary comic book series Love and Rockets, Locas tells the story of Maggie Chascarrillo, a bisexual, Mexican-American woman attempting to define herself in a community rife with class, race and gender issues.
Big Baby
Big Baby is a particularly impressionable young boy named Tony Delmonte, who lives in a seemingly typical American suburb until he sneaks out of his room one night and becomes entangled in a horrific plot involving summer camp murders and backyard burials.
Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron
Clay Loudermilk stumbles into a screening of a bizarre snuff film that wraps him up in a mystery surrounding a series of cult-inspired killings, dubbed “The Harum Scarum Murders.” The subsequent path Loudermilk’s life takes is both a terrifying journey into madness and jaw-dropping tour-de-force of visual imagination fraught with psychosexual and conspiratorial tension.
The Boulevard of Broken Dreams
The place is New York City in 1933. The setting: the Fontaine Talking Fables animation studio. Teddy Mishkin–definitely alcoholic, possibly insane–is hard at work on the latest cartoon short for Waldo the Cat, the "star" of Fontaine's stable of animated characters. But little does anyone (except Teddy) realize that Waldo is real–and that he is Teddy's insidiously helpful assistant.
Co-Mix: A Retrospective of Comics, Graphics and Scraps
A comprehensive career overview of the output of this legendary cartoonist, showing for the first time the full range of a half-century of relentless experimentation.
Blabber Blabber Blabber: Volume 1 of Everything
Reflective of the early 1980s before the appearance of Barry's well-known characters Marlys and Arna, the comics in Blabber Blabber Blabber cover the more adult subjects of bad love, bad perms, being single, Prince, and miserable break-ups―resulting in one of the most oft-quoted Barry sayings: "Love is an exploding cigar which we all willingly smoke."
El Borbah
Meet El Borbah, a 400-pound private eye who wears a Mexican wrestler's tights and eerie mask. Subsisting entirely on junk food and beer, El Borbah conducts his investigations with tough talk and a short temper. He smashes through doors and skulls as he stalks a perfectly realized film-noir city filled with punks, geeks, business-suited creeps and mad scientists.
The New American Splendor Anthology
American Splendor is the series that sparked a revolution in comics and brought graphic novels to the attention of post-adolescent readers everywhere.
Jimbo in Purgatory
In this spectacular graphic novel, Panter has transformed his protean punk hero Jimbo into the protagonist of a reinterpretation of Dante's Purgatorio
I Never Liked You
Chester Brown tells the story of his alienated youth in an almost detached, understated manner, giving I Never Liked You an eerie, dream-like quality
Alias the Cat!
Comix pioneer Kim Deitch uncovers the lost world of Alias the Cat who, in 1915, appeared not only in a comic strip and film serial, but in real life as a freedom-fighting superhero in this metafictional, mindbending narrative.
Alternative Comics: History, Theory and Criticism
The Other 1980s: Reframing Comics' Crucial Decade
Going beyond "the big three" graphic novels (Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen), this collection offers a more complicated and multivalent picture of this remarkably robust era of ambitious comics publishing.
The Hernandez Brothers: Love, Rockets and Alternative Comics
This study offers a critical examination of the work of Gilbert and Jaime Hernandez, Mexican-American brothers whose graphic novels are highly influential.
The Rise of the American Comics Artist
Starting in the mid-1980s, a talented set of comics artists changed the American comic-book industry forever by introducing adult sensibilities and aesthetic considerations into popular genres such as superhero comics and the newspaper strip.
