Dartmouth College Associate Professor of English, Michael Chaney, presents a survey of contemporary graphic novels.
Michael Chaney: Hello, hello. So most people upon learning that I study graphic novels, which is the highfalutin term for comic books – a graphic novel is really just a comic book that takes itself seriously. Most people upon learning that and maybe stifling some ridicule or laughter, may not realize that comic books have grown up.
In comic books it is my argument that we have unique opportunities for seeing the social and by that I mean the way that comic books often depict a single figure in proximate relationship to depictions of community. But before we get to anything so romantic and abstruse and grandiose as that most people want to know about the movies.
Hey wasn’t that one film “From Hell” originally a graphic novel? It was. Wasn’t that one movie “A History of Violence” originally a graphic novel? Yes. Yes again. It was.
It turns out that there are a lot of movies that take graphic novels as their templates. And some of us who know comics and graphic novels quite well are sometimes a bit disappointed when we see that even those scenes in the films that are the most poignant to see are taken directly from the comic book on which they’re based.
Leads us to ask: Why is it that so many films these days are based on comics? I think one answer has to be that comics provide incredible opportunities for identification. We heard a talk earlier that suggested that the human brain is ideally trained to recognize mind in faces.
Comic books love to give us the doll face and imbue the doll face with mind because we don’t just have images we also have words and the words are usually accorded to some kind of mind activity.
However, another reason is a practical one. The problems that anyone might encounter in telling a story pictorially have already been solved in the graphic novel.
1. Michael Chaney defines a graphic novel as