From the March/April 2006 issue of
The Horn Book
Magazine
Graphic Novels 101: FAQ
By Robin Brenner
By day a mild-mannered library technician at Cary Memorial
Library in Lexington, Massachusetts, Brenner is the creator and editor-in-chief
of “No Flying, No
Tights,” a website reviewing graphic novels for teens, and “Sidekicks,” its sister site for kids. Here are her answers to
some frequently asked questions.
Q
What’s the difference between a comic book and a graphic
novel?
A Most simply, length. A
comic and a graphic novel are told via the same format, officially called
sequential art: the combination of text, panels, and images. Comic
strips, comic books, and graphic novels are in this sense all the same thing,
but comic books stretch a story out to about thirty pages, whereas graphic
novels can be as long as six hundred pages.
Q
What’s the difference between American comics
and Japanese manga?
A There are a few key
differences between American graphic novels and Japanese graphic novels, or
manga. While superhero comics still dominate the U.S. market, in Japan there is
a much wider diversity of topics, from romantic comedies to historical fiction
to how-to comics, and they are published in both weekly and monthly
installments. Japanese comics work with a complex language of visual signals,
from character design to sound effects to common symbols. The biggest difference
is obvious: Japanese comics are from another culture and were never intended for
export. In some ways, Japan’s pop culture is like ours, but in many ways it’s
not, and learning the secret code that opens up those stories for us is one
thing that makes manga so appealing to American readers.
Q
Are different graphic novels aimed at different
audiences?
A Most certainly! In
today’s market, graphic novels exist for almost everyone but are not
automatically for all ages. In the past, American comics were mostly aimed at
children and teens, but today there are graphic novels for everyone from
elementary school kids to seniors. It’s true that a higher percentage of graphic
novels and comics are still essentially aimed at men from teens to middle age,
while girls and women have fewer titles created expressly for their tastes.
Japanese manga creators, on the other hand, have a specific age and gender
audience in mind when working on their titles, and those age and gender
recommendations usually hold up.
Q
What are some common misconceptions about
graphic novels?
A Comics and
graphic novels are for kids. In reality, comics never were just
for kids. Even in the 1940s–1950s Golden Age of superhero comics, there were
crime, fantasy, and science fiction comics intended for teens and adults rather
than children. However, due to the hullabaloo started by psychologist Fredric
Wertham’s Seduction of the Innocent (1954), which drew a tenuous
connection between juvenile delinquency and comics, comics’ content became
watered down. Many adults are still under the impression that the format
automatically means juvenile content — but as the average age of a comics reader
is thirty, this is certainly not true.
Graphic novels are all full of violence and
explicit sex. On almost opposite tack to the idea that graphic
novels are for kids, many adults fear that they are full of sex and violence.
Like many previous formats, graphic novels are painted with the extremes of
what’s available. There are comics with R- or X-rated content, but they are not
the bulk of what’s available, nor are those titles intended for younger
audiences.
Comics and graphic novels are only
superheroes. Yes, superheroes are still the bread and butter of
the big companies, but genre diversity is increasing every day with more and
more independent companies publishing a range of genres, from memoir to fantasy
to historical fiction. This is partly what has allowed graphic novels to truly
break into the book market. On the other hand, this distinction could also lead
to the mistaken conclusion that there is nothing of value in superhero comics. A
few years ago, many dismissed fantasy as a lesser genre, but the success and
popularity of Harry Potter has reminded the reading public that genre
does not define quality.
Graphic novels are for reluctant readers.
One of the biggest benefits of graphic novels is that they often
attract kids who are considered “reluctant” readers. This is not just hype — the
combination of less text, narrative support from images, and a feeling of
reading outside the expected canon often relieves the tension of reading
expectations for kids who are not natural readers, and lets them learn to be
confident and engaged consumers of great stories. That being said, graphic
novels are not only for reluctant readers — they’re for everyone! It’s
a disservice to the format to dismiss it as only for those who don’t read
otherwise, and relegating graphic novels to a lower rung of the reading scale is
not only snobbish, but wrong.
Graphic novels aren’t “real” books.
This one’s a zinger and contains a bit of truth and a lot of
prejudice. The key to categorizing graphic novels is to remember that they’re a
format, akin to audiobooks, videos, and television, all media that have
struggled for acceptance. Graphic novels are not and were never intended to be a
replacement for prose. Sequential art is just another way to tell a story, with
different demands on the reader. So, yes, graphic novels don’t work exactly the
same way that traditional novels do, but they can be as demanding, creative,
intelligent, compelling, and full of story as any book.
Q
Why should kids read comics and graphic
novels?
A Graphic novels are
simply another way to get a story. They represent an alternative to
other formats, not a replacement. They are as varied as any other medium and
have their fair share of every kind of title, from fluff to literary
masterpieces. What they always involve, though, is reading — just as books, from
Newbery winners to the latest installment in the Animorphs series, do. Stephen
Krashen, who examines voluntary reading in his book The Power of
Reading, discovered that comics are an unrecognized influence on reading.
He found that not only were kids more likely to pick up comics voluntarily, but
the average comic book has twice the vocabulary as the average children’s book
and three times the vocabulary of a conversation between an adult and child. And
the very fact that a child chooses to read them gives them a greater impact on
that child’s confidence in reading.
Not only do graphic novels entail reading in the traditional
sense, they also require reading in a new way. To read a comic requires an
active participation in the text that is quite different from reading prose: the
reader must make the connections between the images and the text and create the
links between each panel and the page as a whole. This is generally referred to
as “reading between the panels,” and this kind of literacy is not only new but
vital in interacting with and succeeding in our multimedia world. If you’ve ever
struggled to make the connections in reading a graphic novel while a teen reader
whizzes through it, you’ve experienced how different this type of literacy
is.
seems to have been his first standalone graphic novel, and begins his autobiography; 
