GRAPHIC NOVELS
Jeremy Lewis
GRAPHIC NOVELS have been with us for a long time, but it’s only in the past thirty years or so that they have become respectable reading matter. Whereas the French and the Belgians have always immersed themselves in bandes dessinées, including the Asterix adventures and Hergé’s irresistible Tintin stories, while the Japanese devour manga fiction in prodigious quantities, the Anglo-saxon world tended to look down on what they regarded as lowbrow comic strips. No longer, it seems.
As early as 1969 John Updike announced that he could ‘see no reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip masterpiece’, and in 1986 his prophecy came true. Based on his father’s experiences as a Polish Jew who had survived the Holocaust, and first published in magazines, Art Spiegelman’s Maus caused a sensation when published in book form, winning its author the Pulitzer Prize. Graphic novels were no longer confined to children’s stories or the wilder reaches of fantasy, crime and science fiction, but were happily devoured by the literati.
Where America led, Britain soon followed. Many of the best graphic novels have been published by small firms who sell their publications through specialist shops like Gosh! and Forbidden Planet. Among mainstream publishers, Faber and Harpercollins publish several titles a year — Harpercollins published George Martin’s A Game of Thrones — but at the literary end of the spectrum the market leader has long been Jonathan Cape, who has published some eight new titles a year since the success in 2000 of Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan.
Dan Franklin of Cape is, with Rachel Cooke of the Observer, the great champion of the genre, and together they set up the annual Cape/observer graphic novel short story prize in 2007. Franklin first became involved when, in 1998, he was offered the rights in a new book by The Oldie’s Raymond Briggs.
Father Christmas, The Snowman and When the Wind Blows had been hugely successful in the children’s market, but Briggs’s new book, Ethel and Ernest — an account of his parents’ married lives — was better suited for the adult market. Franklin loved it, took a punt, and went on to sell over 200,000 copies in hardback and paperback.
Unlike Raymond Briggs and the witty and perceptive Posy Simmonds, few of Cape’s award-winning graphic novelists are household names, but their time will come: who could really resist a book called Alice in Sunderland? Jimmy Corrigan won the Guardian’s First Book Award; ten years later Stephen Collins’s The Gigantic Beard that Was Evil won the Graphic Novel of the Year Prize, while Joff Winterhart’s Days of the Bagnold Summer competed with Wolf Hall for the Costa Novel Award. But graphic books are not restricted to fiction: in 2012 Dotter of her Father’s Eyes by Bryan and Mary Talbot, an account of the unhappy life of James Joyce’s daughter Lucia, won the biography section of the Costa Prize; and in 2013 Cape published Joe Sacco’s
The Great War, an account of the first day of the Battle of the Somme, which unfolds like a miniature version of the Bayeux Tapestry.
Expensive to produce, graphic novels are usually printed in China, from where they are shipped back to this country, and although they sell steadily as backlist titles, the rewards for authors are modest; but they are edging their way into the literary mainstream as well as selling in enviable quantities.