I joined a whole slew of listserves a while back and soon they devoured my inbox. I have since quit all but one and still have thousands of backlogged emails from that short stint. I stayed on GNLIB, because I know nothing about graphic novels and I'm realizing more and more I need to. Usually, I have to weed through endless arguments that don't seem to matter to me personally or make much sense, but today I stumbled across a gem. Someone posted the article,
Drawing Power, by Bob Thompson which features everything I could have wanted to know about graphic novels and more, detailing what they are, what they represent and what they can become. It is lengthy, but definitely worth checking out. Here is a brief list summing up what you can find on each of the five pages:
- Introductions/expectations
- Scott McCloud's quotation on what makes a graphic novel
- Mouly Spiegelman and the early days of graphic novels
- Discussion of up-and-coming ToonBooks
- A whole bunch of other gloriousness I won't summarize because I'm evil and making you check it out if you're interested!
One of my favorite quotes comes from Scott McCloud, on page two of the article:
"What they are is a publishing shorthand that says: big fat comic with a spine -- and people get that." --Scott McCloud on the term graphic novel
Five pages of an online article may be a bit much for your time budget, so you can check out the highlights in comic form. Some of the text is a verbatim quote from the article. You can access three out of the four strips without registration, but it requires registration to view the first for some unknown and probably idiotic reason. However, if you can, I highly recommend reading both, the prose and comic versions of this article as they are equally enjoyable!
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1 comment:
I'm bookmarking this for my class - thanks for sharing! (I use Scott McCloud in YA, but not in children's, partially because I try to avoid overlap, but also because GN's always tend to get combined with a billion other things in children's, as I run out of time at the end of the semester. :P)
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