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Alexandru Oprescu : "The Graphic Novel" (7)

Conclusions

Alexandru Oprescu

The great contribution that the comic book, and later its ‘cousin,’ the graphic novel, has had on pop-culture makes it a subject that needs to be analyzed with much more rigorousness, especially the way in which it has drawn from the literary and visual arts and created a new medium of expression. Through this endeavor, not only the result of this metamorphose of arts is to be discovered, but it also highlights the almost infinite metamorphic value that literature, drawing, painting have, alone or, in this case, combined—ultimately the human imagination channeled through more and more different forms of expression.

It is in the capacity of no other art currently known to put to use, with an exquisitely natural result, the other arts of human culture, and this is why the graphic novel can be considered the ultimate metamorphosis of the visual-textual dimension.

Alexandru Oprescu: "The Graphic Novel" (6)

4. The Spatio-Topical Realm

4.1 The panel and its elements

The fundamental part of any comic is the panel. It is the atom, in the Greek sense of the word a-tomos­, the smallest and indivisible part of a comic book that any research should start at. The panel has, indeed, its more minute details and characteristics such as composition, color or placement, but analyzing these parts alone, devoid of the larger context the panel offers, has proven to be an infructuous endeavor.

A comprehensive definition of a panel and its major importance in the economy of a comic book can be found in the System of Comics:

In its habitual configuration, the panel is presented as a portion of space isolated by blank spaces and enclosed by a frame that insures its integrity. Thus, whatever its contents (iconic, plastic, verbal) and the complexity that it eventually shows, the panel is an entity that leads to general manipulations. (Groensteen, 2007)

Alexandru Oprescu: "The Graphic Novel" (5)

3. Forms of Comics and the Cognitive Process of Reading Them

3.1 The misleading of terms

Will Eisner

The word comic is misleading in itself, setting the prejudice that the main theme or aim is the gag, or the joke, while, for a large number of contemporary comic strips humor is not a primary target at all, or, in some cases, it is achieved in a more profound, literary sense. The United States has adopted the comic or comic strip terms around the 1900’s, when there was indeed a period of humorous publications of naïve inspiration, and stuck with it to define the whole sequential art, as Will Eisner would call this art form in the mid-80s, in his own attempt to devoid this art form of any prejudice.

In contrast, the Franco-Belgian term is bande dessinée, which translates into “drawn strip.” BDs, in short, are the mirroring phenomena in Europe, having a great success in the francophone world and still attracting a lot of fans nowadays. Using the same morphology, Germans used Bildergeschichteor Bilderstreifen, which is along the lines of “picture story” and “picture strip,” respectively—although they later taken over the American term.  These two terms are free of the aforementioned prejudice, but they are still loose terms, which, in the given situation, isn’t that bad. The insistence of trying to keep comic strips and graphic novels two different genres also comes from an American cultural and academic prejudice that comics are somewhat sub‑literature or juvenile at best. This problem is inexistent in Europe, where BDs are a well‑established literary and artistic form. Thanks to this, there is no true equivalent of the graphic novel present, the bande dessinée encompassing both the adult comics and the ones for children, everything living harmoniously under the same roof.

Alexandru Oprescu: "The Graphic Novel" (4)

2.4 The Golden Age of Comics in America

 The success of reprinting the old, serialized comic strips from the daily newspapers took the publishers by surprise. By 1935, the material runs out and the companies find themselves in the situation of seek for new, original material to satisfy the growing need for comic books. June 1938 is the date where all comics historians converge in opinion, that the Golden Age for the comic book beganin the first issue of Action Comics, a comic book anthology.Two artists that got rejected for years with their original comic concept, Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, get published with what is to become a national and world-wide phenomenon: Superman. A copy of the first issue of Action Comics, featuring the archetypal superhero, would end up selling in 2010 for the fabulous sum of $1.5 million, an indisputable evidence of the scale and influence Superman has had over pop‑culture since its creation over 70 years ago. With the immense success of this ew type of character, the demand for superheroes in comics became overwhelming, this breed of vigilantes ending up to dominate the industry completely during and after the Golden Age. Heroes like Dick Tracy or Flash Gordon captured the imaginations of young Americans. Over the next years, Detective Comics (which is the huge DC Comics company nowadays) create iconic superheroes like Batman, Flash, Green Lantern, Hawkman or Aquaman.

1939 is the year when Timely Comics was founded, which later became Marvel, another giant in the industry to this date, and top rival of DC Comics. Superheroes like The Sub-Mariner, the Human Torch or Captain America were selling millions of copies.

While in ’39, the number of companies that published comics was 7, printing around 50 comic book titles, in 1940 the number of original titles reached a staggering number of 250, published by 24 firms.