Graphic Novel Reading Group discussion
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Single creator vs. "assembly line" production
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I'd agree that the indie approach of single artist/author comics--for the most part--has led to proportionally more good comics than the mainstream assembly line approach, though let us not forget that there are some great mainstream comics and some amazingly crappy independent ones. However, collaboration can lead to great work, too, as is evidenced by the work Alan Moore (for instance) has done with other creators, notably Eddie Campbell on the brilliant From Hell (not to mention Watchmen). I would include some "mainstream approach" comics among the best work in the genre--Carl Barks's Disney work, for instance, though admittedly he both wrote and drew his stories, or Neil Gaiman's collaborative work on Sandman. Collaboration isn't necessarily or inherently an inferior mode of artistic production.I think the problem with "Marvel method" isn't so much that collaboration is inherently bad, as that the approach as practiced treats comics as product rather than as art.
Granted, there are exceptions. It's hardly the art form that doesn't have them; any system can produce great work. Mostly, I'm building an article on why comics as a whole would be better off changing terminology from independent and mainstream to something else. It grants inherent control over the North American industry on a genre that will probably always be niche. It's like saying 75% of movies need to be Medieval adventure fantasies. Putting superheroes and the entire geek culture out front (I qualify for geek status, I'm sure you'll be stunned to hear) hides the true appeal of the rest of the field, a flood of inspiring, amazing books. What I have in my apartment crosses every genre and a book exists for every person's taste. This is not to impugn the quality of stuff like Chew, Saga, Walking Dead, or any of the floppies from places like Boom! Studios and Dynamite. Nor do I presume to judge the taste of the people who find those books entertaining. By all means, like what you like. I started this topic wanting to know more about the appeal for most comics readers of one over the other.
I just think the future of comics is these graphic novels. I think fiction written with a single voice to tell a personal story has a greater potential to become treasured by people of different walks of life just because in terms of subject matter, it covers far greater terrain than the trade paperbacks. That greater breadth (Market Day's paupers, Peter Bagge's slackers, the conceptual layers of Beanworld the soapy melodrama of Posey Simmond's two masterpieces Gemma Bovery and Tamara Drewe) is what can open new markets to this medium.
I agree that "mainstream" and "independent" (or "alternative") are inaccurate descriptors, and they are so for several reasons, but I suspect that the historical roots of the terms will make the likelihood of changing them remote. Obviously, "mainstream" comics are hardly mainstream in any meaningful sense of the word, though fifty years ago, say, it would not have been unfair to call comics published by large professional comics companies "mainstream," as such comics used to cover quite a range of generic territory, not just power fantasy. Even then, though, genre was the dominant element; not until the "independents" came along did we begin to get what we might call legitimately "mainstream" in the real sense of the word material--history, memoir, realist fiction etc. Even some of the "independents," though (early on, anyway), specialized in genre-based material hardly distinguishable from the Marvel/DC model, so the question of what they were independent from or alternative to was and is a good one. Who or how something is published would seem, perhaps, less germane to the distinction you're suggesting than who has primary control/ownership of the material--a distinction, perhaps between corporate-owned property and creator-owned property (though even that line is rather blurry if one looks at, say, Image: is Todd McFarlane, say, a creator-onwer, or has he simply become his own corporation?).
So, yes, the current terminology is inapt. But it's not likely ot change unless someone can come up with a mure accurate but appealing alternate. Any ideas about what those terms might be?
Frankly, I'm comfortable with graphic novel versus trade paperback. Folks here are much more focused on trade paperbacks, but there's scarce few of us graphic novel fanatics out there. Even at ComiCon, it's still the single patch of floor space where it's easier to walk around and have conversations. The other media stuff is mobbed. Both areas are having a Rennaisance period, pretty much, but my media of choice is those stand-alone books with minimal editorial input and a huge amount of passion for what they do as cartoonists. I think they're all amazing, down to some of the great-mediocre ones. I find it to be bigger, more satisfying and way, way, way more diverse artistically. I have a living room full of the things, and I could easily double it's size while I'm still finding quality books.
I think there is even less of a divide between creator owned/collaboration than between mainstream/indie. When people talk about mainstream, they mean Marvel & DC, and it's kind of the editorial interference that puts people off those, rather than the writers and artists. For example, this recent thing about Batwoman's marriage is entirely down to the corporate nature of DC's editorial policy (here is a decent summary of it: http://io9.com/dc-s-explanation-of-wh...).
Most of my favourite comics have had multiple creators (2000ad's Judge Dredd: Trifecta is an amazing crossover with several authors all pooling their best ideas), not to mention the fact that most TV shows in America had a writer's room.
Indie, to me, means a smaller publisher that doesn't interfere too much, although for ongoing strips there is a certain amount of mapping out necessary. It's not a cut and dry division as with all things in life and art, it's a lot more complicated than that! It would be an interesting discussion to try and define indie, there's been very little in the way of academia about comics, so it is quite an interesting topic.
I can see the distinctoin you're drawing between "graphic novel" and "trade paperback," but it's a problematic one, especially if one wants to talk with someone from outside the comics world and be understood. "Trade paperback" is a format--basically hardback-sized book with soft covers--that can apply to a book of any genre from a publisher of any size, from the latest high lit novel to the latest installment in a generic publisher-owned line. Only in comics, really, can the trade pb really be differentiated from the gn, as a collection of issues from a longer running series as opposed to a stand-alone work. And even there, the outliers problematize the term. Is Watchmen a trade pb or a gn? What about the various Sandman books? Walking Dead? The various Cerebus collections? Etc. I'm not sure it really solves the problem.
May I mention that in other parts of the world, there are collaborative comics that end up as the vision of a single creator? Manga artists in Japan have a team of assistants that work on up to 20 pages a week, which is actually a far greater output that a superhero serialised story. Needless to say, the indies can only manage a graphic novel a year at the most. Unlike the supers, most manga are still the vision of one or two creators only.If we're going to discuss production methods of one of the most labour-intensive types of story-telling on paper, I wish people would talk about it in a global sense more. Comics knows no borders, and I wonder why people are so parochial at times (I've read a few superhero books in my time, but capes and tights are not my thing).
Okay, Dominick, you've convinced me that "trade paperback" isn't the ideal nomenclature (dammit). There's got to be something better than what we've got. In all the creative arts, "indie" is usually code for "very few people will be interested in this, and media conglomerates will only take notice to the extent that they can swipe the ideas for their hack creators." I would propose "single volume/multi-volume" if that wasn't also unwieldy and kinda dumb. Terminology is a bitch.My main concern is that people outside the know on this medium will hear the term "graphic novels" as a catchall term for pretty much everything comics has to offer (and format-wise, comics is like silly putty), take a few random recommendations and be turned off by a geek-centered orientation that's never, ever going to appeal to them. All the writing I'm doing on comics these days is about appealing to a new market of readers.
I attend a writing salon every week, and last time I was talking there about my website and other projects, someone approached me who had heard from several friends that the new wave of graphic novels was something he should pay attention to. Based on very little information, he read Coward (which I know nothing about) and the first volumes of 100 Bullets and was underwhelmed. It's to his credit that he wasn't ready to throw in the towel, but I just can't see someone becoming a regular reader with so few signposts. It's like throwing darts at the wall. Consequently, I recommended Hard Boiled, Matt Kindt's stand-alone GNs (especially Super Spy), Buddy Does Seattle and, since he's a sports fan, biographies of Jackie Robinson and Satchel Paige and The Golem's Mighty Swing. I'll check in after awhile and see if he followed up on any of it.
BTW, no matter what the proper division is, Watchmen will be an exception. Imagine telling the average novelist that all their chapters have to be exactly the same length. It's ludicrous and arbitrary, but Watchmen makes a virtue out of it with its text pieces and clockwork construction. Plus, there's the fact that it was written and drawn to be a creator-owned work (a whole other can of worms) before Moore and Gibbons got the full picture of DC Comics' IP practices.
Sandman and Walking Dead are firmly on the "assembly-line production/ongoing narrative" side of the ledger. I don't thing that's even debatable.
Some of the early alt-comics works will fall into a grey area, since they were necessarily serialized before graphic novels was a thing. In my mind, most of Cerebus was created to be read as a novelistic work, and the division of labor was nothing like the "marvel method", so I think it's not hard to say that after the first book, they are pretty firmly graphic novelistic. Categorizing art will always piss somebody off. Mostly, I'm focused on what will incorporate the newbies. Telling the guy I described above that he should read "indie" comics, to me, is a very bad idea.
I agree that terminology is a challenge, but no easy solution suggests itself. "Graphic Novel" vs "Comics Collection" perhaps?For me, anyway, the problem is deepened by the fact that at least some works can be both. I see your point about Sandman, for instance, but would suggest that at least some volumes are not simply collections/compendiums of serialized fiction but are also coherent, contained narratives one could call a novel: Brief Lives, for instance. Serialization is not necessarily incompatible with form and closure, though in some contexts in comics, that closure might be a long way off. Cerebus is a good example: 300 serialized issues but also a set of (reasonably) self-contained novels (later on, anyway; the first one or two volumes are more collections of loosely-linked stories than coherently-constructed single works); the experience of reading the original serialized versions and the collection is very different, though Sim did not (unlike some other artists doing serialization/ collection) do any revising or editing of the original serial version.
I'd say Walking Dead is similar on this front. It is being serialized, yes, and it has a projected very long run, but as I understand it, Kirkman has a clear sense of arc and a planned ending at some future point. He seems to think is terms of twelve-issue or so arcs as more or less self-contained while also being part of a larger whole. I'm not sure I'd see something like that as terribly different from something like, say, a multi-volume series of SF or Fantasy novels, (e.g. George R. R. Martin's Game of Thrones: multi-volume narrative serialized over seven novels and several years).
But, yes, a collection of Jack Kirby Kamandi comics (say) is something very different from something like, say, Seth's It's a Good Life if you Don't Weaken (though that, too, was originally serialized)--and not just because of generic or qualitative difference, but structurally.
You know, the real labels are "graphic novel" and "graphic novel series". Prior serialization isn't an issue (because, who cares?), so much as its current format and how that jibes with the reading preferences of a customer. You do have stuff like Superman: Earth One as an outlier (stand-alone/non-serialized/assembly line), but you could argue that all the various Superman books collectively are a graphic novel series. They're at least supposed to take place within the same character's life.
What I felt they were missing was a recognition of two very different production models - a single creator making a book and "assembly line" production where multiple specialists collaborate to make a serialized product (plot, dialogue, pencils, inks, colors, letters, editing). In my adult reading, I have almost always found a single artistic vision to be more personal, more unified in terms of the marriage of words and pictures (i.e., they're not illustrating someone else's written script) and more satisfying to read.
The large bulk of internet comment and news is about the so-called "Marvel method", and the voting for our book discussions seems to follow suit. I wanted to ask, do people find the ongoing serials more satisfying in general, or is it a case of not having much experience with more stand-alone graphic novels? (Interestingly, Watchmen - the perennial go to to represent graphic novels - seems to straddle the two categories)
I sometimes wonder how many people out there read both Chris Ware and Spider-Man, and how schizophrenic they must be to live in both worlds. I thought this would spur some interesting discussion.