Friday 18 April 2014

Can we stop calling them graphic novels?


The term 'graphic novel' has long been a pet peeve of mine, and for some reason it's come back into mind lately; probably something came up on my Facebook feed. In any case, it's a term that really bugs me, and I thought I'd talk about it a bit here. Calling them graphic novels is pretentious, it's unnecessary, and it's symptomatic of the comics medium's inferiority complex. Let's just keep calling them comics.

As far as I know, people first started talking about graphic novels when Watchmen first got collected into a single volume, presumably because DC realised that it was too good to let it go out of print and because there was a lot of money to be made from selling it in conventional bookshops. I love Watchmen as much as the next person, and the comics medium's desire to be taken seriously and accorded the literary merit it deserves is admirable, but appropriating terminology from other media isn't the way to go about it.

To me, 'graphic novel' just comes across as a bit condescending, as if comics aren't good enough in themselves and so have to borrow another, more respectable medium's name before they can be treated with the same respect as traditional literature. Admittedly, there are many cases where it is a fairly appropriate description, but even in those cases I simply don't see what's wrong with calling them comics, because that is fundamentally what they are.

When a comic is conceived of, written and published as a single, reasonably long volume, in the same way that a novel is, then it is fair enough to refer to it as a graphic novel, even if my aforementioned issues with the expression still stand. For instance, Blue is the Warmest Colour is a graphic novel, and Hellblazer: All His Engines is a graphic novel. There are certainly advantages to be had in writing and publishing your work in a single, novel-length work rather than serialised in periodicals, and there have been no shortage of great books in that format. The authors arguably have greater creative control, aren't constrained by page limits, and don't have to worry about deadlines. I've no issue with the format, I just think the terminology is a bit pretentious.

The real problem for me is that, nine times out of ten, when people say 'graphic novel' they mean 'trade paperback,' and while the terms are almost always used interchangeably, they ought to mean completely different things. Most of the time when people refer to graphic novels, they're talking about collected editions of monthly comics, in which several issues have been put in one book for convenience, ease of reading, and so that it can be sold in traditional bookshops.

Again, I've no issue with the trade paperback format. I don't buy single issues because the trade is usually cheaper and doesn't have adverts in it, and the fact that comics are being collected and preserved in this manner is a wonderful thing for the medium. Most writers tend to write for the trade these days anyway; it's pretty rare that you'll come across a single issue that actually works as a standalone story rather than as a chapter in a bigger, ongoing narrative. But this is where we come to the real crux of my problem with graphic novels.

Putting six issues of a monthly comic into one book doesn't make a novel any more than putting six episodes of a TV show on one disc makes a film.

The 12 issues of Watchmen may tell a single story that was clearly planned from the beginning as such, but that doesn't make it a novel. The 8 episodes of True Detective's first season also tell a single story that was clearly planned from the beginning as such, but no one in their right mind would refer to it as a film.

Like I said, it's a symptom of the medium's inferiority complex. It's a pretty old medium at this point, but given that its development as an art form was arguably set back at least 20 years by the Comics Code Authority, comics as a medium still has a reputation as being for kids, as unfair and undeserved as that stigma might be. It's simply a case of a relatively young medium borrowing terminology from an older, more respected medium to describe something that is uniquely its own, and doing itself a disservice in the process. It's implying that the comics medium is somehow inferior to the novel medium, which just isn't true. Neither is superior to the other, they're just different.

So there we are. While there are cases where 'graphic novel' is a pretty accurate description of a comic, for the most part the term is condescending, not applicable to the format, and a statement that comics aren't as good as prose.

And that's just a bit rubbish, isn't it?

Friday 4 April 2014

Is A Song of Ice and Fire going to collapse under its own weight?


Before I anger the legions of fans, let me first assert that I am absolutely one of them. I've been a die-hard fan of the series for years, I vividly remember losing my mind when it was announced that Charles Dance was going to play Tywin Lannister in the TV show, and my old, battered copy of A Game of Thrones has been signed by GRRM.

But, I worry that the series is going the way of The Wheel of Time, and I don't mean I'm worried that Martin is going to die before he finishes it. (It's not impossible, but he seems to be in very good health by all accounts.) I mean that it's been going for nearly twenty years and there's still no ending in sight. It was initially conceived as a trilogy and is now projected to run to seven books, though Martin hasn't ruled out the option of extending it even further. It's alarmingly reminiscent of what happened with Robert Jordan's series, originally meant to be six books but bloating to 14 by the time it finished.

For the record, I think The Wheel of Time is vastly inferior to A Song of Ice and Fire for any number of reasons which I won't get into here. Yes, I know it's meant to get better as it goes, but the first 800-page tome bored me almost to tears and didn't exactly inspire me to read 13 more of the damn things. A Game of Thrones, on the other hand, was gripping from start to finish and ended on a cliffhanger which almost physically compelled me to rush out and buy A Clash of Kings. And A Storm of Swords (both parts). And A Feast for Crows. And then, eventually, A Dance with Dragons.

As great as Martin's story is, the unfortunate truth is that a story is only really satisfying once it's ended. And as much as I love Ice and Fire – and I love it dearly; it's possibly my favourite series of novels – it's no closer to ending than it was when the first book was published back in 1996. The story's scope and scale, one of the things I most admire about it, has simply got out of control.

In the first book, there are (I think) eight point-of-view characters, and four storylines: the Wall, Winterfell, King's Landing, and Dany. As of book five, there have been somewhere in excess of 20 POV characters, and even if several of those have been immediately doomed prologue or epilogue characters, it's spread the story too wide. Four storylines is a lot to keep track of in itself, and I don't even know how many are going on simultaneously now. To quote that most famous of fantasy novels, it feels thin, stretched, like butter scraped over too much bread.

Feast and Dance were by no means bad books, even if Feast did suffer from missing almost all the best characters, but there's no denying that not an awful lot actually happens in them. Yes, Dance ends brilliantly, and the last quarter really picks up the pace and starts delivering on the sort of excitement that was present all the way through Storm, but it takes a hell of a long time to get there.

As much as I hate to say it, at this point we almost need another couple of Red Wedding-style bloodbaths to thin the ranks of the characters and bring some focus back to the story. The intricacy of Dance's plotting and the skill that must have gone into constructing and editing it are nothing short of staggering, but at this point the story is simply too big and spread over too wide a space. There are too many characters, is the bottom line, and as much as I love them – writing believable characters is one of Martin's greatest talents as a writer, and to my mind the main reason the series has become so wildly popular since the TV show – he really needs to kill some of them off.

And I have no doubt that killing characters off is well within Martin's abilities. If The Winds of Winter is as bleak as its title suggests it will be, maybe the story will be back on track by the time A Dream of Spring comes out. I just hope it doesn't take Martin six years to finish it.