Quotations (a work in progress)
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Coulton Waugh writes:
Shortly before beginning the strip [Steve Canyon], Caniff sketched the outlines of his new project to Helen M. Staunton of Editor and Publisher, from whose column the following quotations are made with her permission:
"'Actually this isn't an airplane strip at all,' said Caniff. 'That's merely a means of getting them somewhere.... Essentially this is a novel... a picaresque novel'" [bold added]. [Coulton Waugh, The Comics (New York: Macmillan, 1947; University Press of Mississippi, 1991), p. 276]
For our purposes here, the important bit in that quotation is Caniff's early use of the term "novel" to signal his ambitious plans for his new comic strip; in the current environment, one can easily image a beautifully packaged complete reprinting of Steve Canyon subtitled A Picaresque Graphic Novel, the term "graphic" indicating that the particular type of "novel" on offer in essence depends upon the author's (and his collaborators') skill in the graphic arts--illustration/cartooning, typography, graphic design, etc.--as well as his skill with words.
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Here's a mildly interesting exchange between the Comics Journal's Dirk Deppey and graphic novelist Eddie Campbell:
DEPPEY: But just to play devil's advocate, when you start trying to define away the graphic novel, you're doing the same thing. You're kind of puffing up your own chest and saying, "Ignore that guy in the underwear over there. I'm what's important around here."
CAMPBELL: But remember, I said earlier that I think a failed graphic novel is a much less interesting thing than a good comic book. I'm not implying that it's some badge or medal that you can award. I think we're just talking about different models. For instance, when I do Bacchus I do comic books, if I do Fate of the Artist, I'm taking a stab at the graphic novel. From Hell is a graphic novel. I think we should be talking about ideas, and that was my proposal, that we start by talking about the graphic-novel sensibility, and what the key marks are that help us understand what that is about. We all know what comic-book culture is. It has its great moments: We love Kirby, we love Miller's Daredevil, and we're not saying the graphic novel isn't comics. It's all comics; it's a newer, more involved idea of a comic. That's all it is.
DEPPEY: A different permutation of the same metalanguage.
CAMPBELL: Yeah. Another thing I picked up recently in that book Raeburn did on Ware, quoting Spiegelman on another aspect of the new sensibility. Spiegelman said, "In order for comics to go forward, they first have to go back." This is another aspect of the new sensibility: this respect for the pioneers of comics -- I mean the old ones.
For instance, Walt and Skeezix. Gasoline Alley is reprinted, but it's dressed up lovingly by graphic novelist Chris Ware. Now, the book has been assembled and produced within the sensibility of the graphic novel. To take that and say, "Yes, but this is daily strips," and then file it in the library in the humor section next to Garfield is not a productive thing to do. You would take Walt and Skeezix and file it with the graphic novels because it belongs to that sensibility.
DEPPEY: But it seems like you're imposing a modern definition of something that... I don't think Frank King really considered the question.
CAMPBELL: No, I'm not saying it is a graphic novel, because the graphic novel doesn't exist. "Graphic Novel" is an abstract idea. It's a sensibility, it's an advanced attitude toward comics. We're interested in this, we're less interested in that. Put that over there, put this over here. Doesn't mean that everything over here is a graphic novel, I'm just saying that the culture of the graphic novel respects this, respects that, admires that and venerates this other thing. The graphic-novel sensibility is more interested in Frank King than it is in Jim Steranko, whereas comic-book culture is more interested in Jim Steranko than it is in Frank King. And Paul Gravett's new book, Graphic Novels, in fact manages to survey the entire history of comics, but from the position of a graphic-novel sensibility, which is to say that all the emphases are now different compared to any history that may have been written 40 years ago, and the angle of foreshortening has caused a lot of stuff to be obscured from view. For instance, all the stuff that Arlen Schumer celebrates in his The Silver Age of Comic Book Art. Do you see what I'm saying?
DEPPEY: Yeah. Basically, if we're going to take a term of convenience like this, let's at least make it convenient to our aims.
[Eddie Campbell, interviewed by Dirk Deppey, The Comics Journal 273.]
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"In short, 'Epileptic' constitutes something new: a graphic intellectual history. A design-oriented history of ideas. There are entire dreams illustrated here in a disturbing and rococo illustrative style, with interpretations included, as if David B. were channeling Jung's 'Memories, Dreams, Reflections' or Freud's writings on the oneiric. There are allusions to May 1968 and the role of the French intellectual in contemporary Gallic life, and there are ghosts in profusion, ghosts of Europe past. These include the ghost of the author's grandfather, a man of somewhat dubious ideas, depicted so he resembles one of those beaked denizens of hell you find in Hieronymus Bosch" (bold added). --Rick Moody, "Disorder in the House," review of David B.'s Epileptic, The New York Times (January 23, 2005)
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"What is behind this sudden wave of enthusiasm for a genre that has previously been sidelined in Britain?
"For Paul Gravett, the author of 'Great British Comics' and one of the country’s foremost promoter of graphic novels, one of the primary reasons is simply the creation of the 'graphic novel' category. 'The word comics is laden with so many negative connotations, while the words ‘graphic novel’ give it a certain cachet,' he said." --Tara Mulholland, "Britain Embraces the Graphic Novel," The New York Times (September 5, 2007): page 1.
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"Yet there are signs that graphic novels - book-length comic books - are finally achieving mainstream recognition in Australia." --Simon Castles, "The Panel Beaters," The Sydney Morning Herald (September 7, 2007), page 1. Castles' off-the-cuff definition of "graphic novels" as "book-length comic books" is an unintentionally comic reminder of the fact that "comic books" are neither always comic nor are they books.
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"Now living in Brisbane, [Eddie] Campbell remains committed to the idea of the graphic novel, though he's not a big fan of the term itself, believing it is widely misunderstood. 'Essentially, it's the idea, the challenge, to write the great novel of our time using the language that was invented for writing cartoon jokes in the newspaper,' he says. 'There is buried within the three-or four-panel comic strip the entire lexicon, the entire linguistical complexity, to write the novel of our times. Seriously. And that essentially is what the form is about - to take those simple nuts and bolts and extend it, elevate it.'" --Simon Castles, "The Panel Beaters," The Sydney Morning Herald (September 7, 2007), page 2.