By Joost Pollmann
Nobody, I guess, not like we need water and bread, love and safety. A roof and a stove in winter, sunblockers and cocktails in summertime. Indeed: who decides what the basic necessities of life are? I have friends who would wither away like neglected houseplants without a regular dose of soccer. Looking back over the past thirty years, if I had to say what has been the dominant factor in it for me, it would be: the comic book or, more precise, the graphic novel. There is no rock-hard boundary between the two, at most a sliding scale running from generic and genre-specific to authentic and author-specific. At the same time, they're worlds apart. In 2004 I published a booklet about the graphic novel in which I - in alphabetical order - investigated "the unexplored territory between the literal and figurative".* Words and pictures unite to tell stories about all things under the sun, but in a classic comic (say, Hal Foster's Prince Valiant) this happens more straightforwardly and literally than in a drawn novel (for example Jacques Tardi's It Was the War of the Trenches). For me the essential difference between the two lies in the use of metaphors. The ability to speak figuratively is one of the strongpoints of the graphic novelist, who has the freedom to invent his or her own rhetorical tricks and develop a new visual language with its own codes and meanings.
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli, published by Pantheon Books / De Bezige Bij. “Why do you think you are always right?”
It might be helpful if I give some examples. In Asterios Polyp, the highly ambitious graphic novel David Mazzucchelli published in 2009, we witness the relational struggles between the architect Asterios Polyp, who is as rationalistic as he is narcissistic, and his Japanese wife Hana, who looks at the world through a much more emotionally and lovingly tinted lens. Mazzucchelli came up with the idea of expressing the divergent temperaments of his two protagonists by depicting each in a distinctive style. Polyp he draws constructivistically, as if he were a mechanical man, Hana he draws much more organically, like a warm-blooded being. A radical choice, but also one that is fairly simple to put on paper for a comic book artist. More importantly: it is convincing.
Petar & Liza by Miroslav Sekulic-Struja, published by Concerto Books
In his masterpiece Petar & Liza (2022) the Croatian artist Miroslav Sekulic-Struja repeatedly uses an effective emblem to evoke the loneliness (and sloppiness) of his anti-hero Petar: his shoes. Better said, a pair of ragged shoes with loose laces. As Petar strolls through the drab streets of a poor, Eastern European city, trying to make ends meet, those laces get untied again and again, sending an uncomfortable message to the reader: that life has no easy solutions. In fifteen close-ups Sekulic-Struja presents us these shoes, and sometimes the socks as well. This focus on the humblest part of Petar's appearance eliminates the need for a verbal explanation: we get it. And we sympathize.
My final example is Penelope, by Judith Vanistendael (2019). In this graphic novel, title heroine Penelope is working as a surgeon in Aleppo. She operates on a girl injured in a bombing, but cannot save her. When Penelope returns to Brussels from Syria, she says to herself, "Coming home is getting harder and harder." In her travel bag a nasty surprise awaits her: a red shape, painted like a bloody stain, that follows her everywhere in the house, even at night, in her bedroom. It is the soul or ghost of the girl she failed to save, and thus the materialization of her guilt. Putting down a war trauma with just a few simple brushstrokes shows how effective the comic idiom can be. (That red spot, by the way, has a second meaning in the book, because while Penelope was operating somewhere in the Middle East, her daughter in Belgium was having her first period...).
Penelope by Judith Vanistendael, published by Oogachtend
In other words, the graphic novel works well with visual metaphors, but why is that important? As a discipline, comic art resides somewhere between the novel and the cinema. To give prose and poetry real depth, the reader must find unspoken words and meanings between the lines, but that requires that the writer or poet has put them in first. In cinema, we are familiar with subtle stylistic means such as silent acting (wordless expression) and hors champs (imageless expression). Using these tools, the filmmaker can tap into a reservoir besides the literalness of the plot, which is more associative and perhaps resonates with something in the subconscious of the audience. "Genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood:" this famous quotation of T. S. Eliot briefly sums up what art - and inherently also the graphic novel - is all about: it gives a better understanding of or deeper insight into the reality (and unreality) of the world around us, by providing extra antennae, extra senses as it were, to the reader, listener or spectator.
The graphic novel is actually still a young phenomenon. Maus, the seminal work by the American comic artist Art Spiegelman, was serialized from 1980 to 1991 and since then has been published as a two-volume book. In the past thirty years, the graphic novel has blossomed, but the good thing is that there is no ready-made recipe for it. Every illustrator who sets out to create a graphic novel faces the challenge of developing a personal style for it, with a new idiom and self-devised metaphors. Not a formulaic fill-in-the-blanks exercise, but a creation that further expands the expressive power of the drawn book.
* “Abecedarium van de grafische roman” - Joost Pollmann