This Is Not a Graphic Novel: The Adventuress

The Adventuress (Harry N. Abrams), by Audrey Niffenegger

The greatest challenge facing comics as a medium today is not the dwindling readership, the explosion of variant covers or the fact that Iron Man’s been acting like such a dick lately. It’s linguistic. Even as comic books are being talked about more than ever—and in more different venues than ever before—we collectively have a hard time of even agreeing on what to call the damn things.

Up above, for example, I just said “comic books.” Should I have said “graphic novels” instead? No, probably not; the two are different words describing different types of publications, although it’s worth noting that some works are written as graphic novels but published as comic books (and then later republished as graphic novels), and some individual comic books are written as graphic novellas or short stories.

The best term is the one Scott McCloud arrived at in his seminal, must-be-read-by-everyone-who-plans-to-ever-open-their-mouth-in-public-about-comics tome Understanding Comics: “Sequential art.” But the term, accurate as it is, can sound so…awkward and self-serious in casual usage. Unless I’m writing a scholarly work or having a discussion about the definitions of the medium with an art professor, I prefer to just say “comic books.”

I got to thinking about the challenges of talking about comic books/graphic novels/sequential art the other day, when I picked up Audrey Niffenegger’s latest from the library, but the problems of talking about the medium were underscored in Wired News’s Tony Long’s fuddy duddy blog entry Gene Luen Yang’s American Born Chinese being nominated for a National Book Award, which predictably lead to push back from more enlightened individuals (Dirk Deppey’s October 30th Journalista blog has the best coverage and link assortment I’ve seen; go there to get up to speed).

Long’s opinion can be pretty much dismissed from the point where he says, “I have not read this particular ‘novel’…”, but his main criteria seems to be that comic books are not novels, although he expresses this opinion pretty ridiculously, “This is simply to say that, as literature, the comic book does not deserve equal status with real novels, or short stories. It's apples and oranges.

“If you've ever tried writing a real novel, you'll know where I'm coming from. To do it, and especially to do it well enough to be nominated for this award…is exceedingly difficult.”

I have written a real novel (a terrible, unpublished one) and it was difficult, but nowhere near as difficult as writing, illustrating and lettering a graphic novel (which I’ve also tried and, coincidentally, ended up with terrible, unpublished results). To do the former, you need to be a master of one skill set; to do the latter solo, as Yang did with American Born Chinese, you need to be a master of at least two, maybe four (Yang’s book is in color, another step in the comic book-making process, and it looks hand-lettered, but even computer-lettering is a skill great novelists don’t need to master).

Of the response’s to Long’s opinion, Neil Gaiman (who won a short story prize for a single-issue of his comic book Sandman…a graphic short story? A chapter of a graphic novel?…fifteen years ago) had the most humorous, “[I]t seems a rather silly and antiquated argument, like hearing someone complain that women have the vote or that be-bop music and crooners are turning up in the pop charts.”

It was in reading the others though that the problem of defining the medium comes up. The Slave Labor Graphics live journal makes some good points, but what threw me was this: “Is it bound and does it use sequential art to tell a story? Then it's a graphic novel.” What does this say about comic books that aren’t bound? Did Sandman only become a graphic novel once it was collected into a trade? Can online comics never be considered “graphic novels?”

This is all a really, really long introduction to a new feature here at EDILW, where we’ll be looking at books that aren’t graphic novels or comic books or McCloud-ian sequential art, but are nevertheless pretty damn close.

First up is the Niffenegger book I mentioned earlier. She’s best known as the author of The Time Traveler’s Wife, wonderful, clever and pretty damn heart-breaking prose novel I’d recommend to anyone who likes reading books without panels, which I occasionally do when I can’t find a graphic novel. The titular character of the book is an artist who works in the medium of paper. You may not be surprised to learn, Niffenegger is herself.

In 2005 she released The Three Incestuous Sisters, “an illustrated novel” (no really; it was a story book), in which she drew full-size, colored pictures and inserted brief lines of text. It wasn’t really an illustrated novel at all. It wasn’t a novel of any kind, but a story book or picture book, of the sort you’d find in the children’s section of your library, but it wasn’t for kids. It was beautifully drawn and designed, and it flowed with a sort of dream logic; a touch of magical realism, a touch of matter-of-fact fairy tale.

Her latest is The Adventuress, a book whose title and image of a masked woman sliding out of a window may stir the hearts of superhero fans. This one, the sticker on the cover of my local library’s copy tells me, is “A novel in pictures.”
This is a perplexing thing to call a book of any kind, but particularly this book. “An illustrated novel” is a term that makes sense; it’s a novel that’s been illustrated, like Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland or C.S. Lewis’ Narnia books; hell, the version of Pride and Prejudice I read was illustrated. But what’s a “novel in pictures?" Isn’t that just another way of saying a “graphic novel?” Speaking strictly linguistically, I’d say yes.

But despite being told in both pictures and words, despite the fact that it fits loosely into the McCloud-ian (how many times do I have to write that word before it becomes a real one, I wonder?) definition of “sequential art,” and despite the fact that it’s bound, I don’t think The Adventuress truly qualifies as a graphic novel, nor a novel in pictures.

It’s definitely graphic and has pictures, but the “novel” bit seems to be overselling it. Much like Niffenegger’s Sisters book, it uses sparse sentences to describe the scenes drawn in the pictures, but here the prose element is even more sparse, with single words and colons serving as title cards of sorts for the action in the pictures. I doubt there are any more than 500 words to the whole story, and it lacks many of the elements we usually associate with the modern novel; it reads instead like “a poem in pictures.”

The narrative is rather random, and contains another magical realism plot line. If there was a point to it—that is, if the book was about something—I failed to notice it.

That’s not to say it isn’t a great book, of course, it’s just that it’s ambitions and form don’t seem to overlap with that of a novel of any kind, let alone a “graphic novel” or “novel in pictures” at all.

Our heroine is a woman with short black hair, a long skirt, long glove and no shirt covering her bare breasts. She was created by an alchemist, carried off and married to a baron, burns down his house, goes to prison, makes a cocoon, turns into a moth, gets captured by Napolean, falls in love with him, gives birth to a cat, and so on.

Niffenegger’s sense of character design has a primitive feel to it, one that’s covered up by her command of color and framing of each scene. She also exploits the medium of drawing to great effect, creating images of her heroine’s spirit by simply not coloring in the drawing of her, for example, or giving the illusion of movement or change by drawing multiple arms coming from the same elbow.

It’s a really remarkable-looking book, and one I’d highly recommend readers look for at their local libraries (or read for free at a nearby big box book retailer), if you can’t afford the $27.95 for a five-to-ten minute read. Yes, it’s a remarkable book. It’s a gorgeous picture book, it’s a well-designed story book. It’ s a poem in pictures, a narrative image collection, a bound gallery show.

But it is not a graphic novel.