Comics as Literature?

Reading Graphic Narrative

Author(s): Hillary Chute
Source: PMLA, Vol. 123, No. 2 (Mar., 2008), pp. 452-465
Published by: Modern Language Association
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 PMLA

the changing profession

Comics as Literature?
Reading Graphic
Narrative
COMICS?A FORMONCECONSIDEREDPUREJUNK?ISSPARKINGIN
TERESTINLITERARY
STUDIES.I'MASAMAZED
ASANYBODYELSEBYTHE
HILLARY CHUTE
comics boom?despite the fact that Iwrote an English department
dissertation thatmakes the passionate case that we should not ig
nore this innovative narrative form. Yet if there's promoting of com
ics, there's also confusion about categories and terms. Those of us in
literary studies may think themoves obvious: making claims in the
name of popular culture or in the rich tradition of word-and-image

inquiry (bringing us back to the illuminated manuscripts of the

Middle Ages). But comics presents problems we're still figuring out
(the term doesn't settle comfortably into our grammar; nomencla
ture remains tricky and open to debate). The field hasn't yet grasped
its object or properly posed itsproject. To explore today's comics we
need to go beyond preestablished rubrics: we have to reexamine the
com
categories of fiction, narrative, and historicity. Scholarship on
ics?and specifically on what Iwill call graphic narrative?is gain
ing traction in the humanities. Comics might be defined as a hybrid
word-and-image form inwhich two narrative tracks, one verbal and
one visual, register temporality spatially. Comics moves forward in
time through the space of the page, through itsprogressive counter
point of presence and absence: packed panels (also called frames)
narra
alternating with gutters (empty space). Highly textured in its
tive scaffolding, comics doesn't blend the visual and the verbal?or
use one simply to illustrate the other?but is rather prone to pres
ent the two nonsynchronously; a reader of comics not only fills in
the gaps between panels but also works with the often disjunctive
back-and-forth of reading and looking formeaning. Throughout this
essay, I treat comics as a medium?not as a lowbrow genre, which is
how it is usually understood. However, Iwill end by focusing atten
tion on the strongest genre in the field: nonfiction comics.
HILLARY CHUTE ?sa junior fellow ?n liter
ature in the Harvard Society of Fellows.
I'm particularly interested in how comics considers the problem
She iswriting a book on contemporary of representing history because my own work has centered on what
graphic narratives by women. the comics formmakes possible for nonfiction narrative, especially

452 2008 BY THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA

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 12 3.2 HillaryChute 453

on the ability of comics to spatially juxtapose in a 1964 newsletter circulated tomembers of y

fi
(and overlay) past and present and futuremo the Amateur Press Association, and the term
?
ments on the page. Further, I'm interested in was subsequently borrowed by Bill Spicer in y
s?
how comics expands modes of historical and his fanzine Graphic StoryWorld. Many think 3
W
personal expression while existing in the Will Eisner invented the term because he used 3*
CTO
field of the popular.1 How does contemporary it in amore commercial context, to sell A Con
o
comics approach devastating public histo tract with God (1978) to publishers. A series 0
ries?Why do female artists blur the distinc of four serious, linked vignettes chronicling
tion between "private" and "public" histories? the sordid circumstances and assimilationist
The aesthetics and narrative impact of com desires of immigrants in a Bronx tenement in 5*
3
ics that address history are a large focus of the 1930s, A Contract with God was the first
MetaMaus, a book by Art Spiegelman about book marketed as a "graphic novel."3
the thirteen-year process ofmaking his Pu Decades later, we find "graphic novel"
litzer Prize-winning Maus: A Survivors Tale, sections in many bookstores. Yet graphic
which I am helping to edit. novel is often a misnomer. Many fascinating
works grouped under this umbrella?includ
ing Spiegelman sWorld War II-focused Maus,
Overview
which helped rocket the term into public
Three journals have devoted special issues to consciousness?aren't novels at all:
they
are

graphic narrative. Art Spiegelman recently rich works of nonfiction; hence my emphasis

taught a seminar at Columbia University here on the broader term narrative. (Indeed,
called Comics: Marching into the Canon. The the form confronts the default assumption
Norton Anthology of Postmodern American that drawing as a system is inherently more
Fiction includes comics. Outside the academy, fictional than prose and gives a new cast to

graphic narrative is coming to the forefront
of literary-critical and cultural conversations:
Time magazine,
a mainstream barometer,
named Alison Bechdel's
graphic narrative
memoir Fun Home:
A Family Tragicomic its
best book of 2006?the same year Houghton
Mifflin, which publishes the Best American
series, inaugurated the first Best American
Comics volume. The New York Times Maga
zine, in cover article in July2004, asserted
a States before the twentieth century, ranges
that this "new literary form" is "what novels
used to be?an accessible, vernacular form
with mass appeal" (McGrath 24).
Graphic novel is a much more common
and recognizable term than graphic narrative.2
Graphic novel?which took shape as amarket
ing term?has a specific history in the second
half of the twentieth century. Part of the impe
tus came from a vital
underground publishing
community that wanted works with greater
impact in the medium of comics: the first
public use of the phrase, by Richard Kyle, was
what we consider fiction and nonfiction.) In
graphic narrative, the substantial length im
plied by novel remains intact, but the term
shifts to accommodate modes other than
fiction. A graphic narrative is a book-length
work in themedium of comics.4
There are many formats for comics,
which all carry unique cultural baggage. The
comic strip, which emerged in the United
from less than one page to several pages or
more. This is a comics segment that can be a
minimal unit or what we might think of as a
short story. The comic book, which emerged
in the 1930s, is typically thirty-two pages
long
and either is a collection of comic-strip stories
or ismade up of one sustained story, often an
installment in a series (see Lef?vre).5 (Comics
inhabits all kinds of serial forms and contexts,
fromweekly or daily strips tomonthly comic
books to serial characters represented across
formats; I argue elsewhere that the comics

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454 Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative
?
page itself is a material register of seriality, a
.2
in narrative architecture built on the establish
Hm ment of or deviation from regular intervals
O
im of space.) As a form, comics differs from the
a
cartoon, since cartoons are
single-panel
im
c both forms often involve a similar
ages. While
w
s: visual-verbal punch, comics, usually unfold
ing over multiple frames, carries a different
w
narrative push than a cartoon does. Yet com
? ics authors are still routinely called cartoon
ists; in fact, the historical definition of cartoon
continues to resonate with authors who em
brace themass reproduction of comics?the
aspect of the form that keeps comics from be
ing considered "fine art." Cartoon comes from
the Italian word cartone, meaning cardboard,
and denotes a drawing for a picture or design
intended historically to be transferred to tap
estries or to frescoes (see Harrison; Janson;
Harvey, "Comedy" and "Describing"). Yet, as
Randall Harrison points out, "with the com
ing of the printing press, cartoon' took on an
other meaning. Itwas a sketchwhich could be
mass produced. Itwas an image which could
be transmitted widely" (16).6
But what is the comics form?its prop
erties, purviews, abilities? Even comics afi
cionados might say, as Justice Potter Stewart
did of pornography, that one simply knows
itwhen one sees it.Comics is a creative and
expansive form that has always been con
strained?unlike, say, the artist's book, which
has a parallel history in the twentieth cen
tury?by formats dictated by commercial
en
terprise.7 The question ofwhat Scott McCloud
calls "functional descriptions" fuels an area
of comics criticism,8which is almost gleefully
free of institutionally entrenched definitions.
McCloud's 1993 Understanding Comics, the
first book to theorize comics in themedium
of comics, suggests a deliberately broad?and
provisional?definition. His analysis of the
form includes but is not limited to the print
context, which many practitioners and critics
understand to be essential (e.g., Kunzle, Early
Comic Strip; Dowd and Reinert).
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PMLA
McCloud defines comics as: "juxtaposed
pictorial and other images in deliberate se
quence, intended to convey information
and/or produce an aesthetic response in the
viewer" (Understanding 9). ("Before it's pro
notes, "film is just a very
jected," McCloud
very very very slow comic" [8].) The weight
placed on sequence here allows McCloud to
track a prehistory including pre-Columbian
the Bayeux tapestry,
picture manuscripts,
and "The Tortures of St. Erasmus" (1460),
among other seemingly unlikely cultural an
tecedents. Writing in 2001, Robert Harvey
disagrees with McCloud's notion that comics
do not have to contain words (see also Smol
deren, who rejects sequence as the defining
property of comics and analyzes the "swarm
ing effect" in single images from illustrated
Bibles and Bosch and Brueghel up through
children's books). Harvey counters, "It seems
to me that the essential characteristic of
comics'?the thing that distinguishes it from
other kinds of pictorial narratives?is the
incorporation of verbal content.... And the
history of cartooning?of comics'?seems to
me more supportive of my contention than
of his" ("Comedy" 75-76). Harvey's history
starts in the eighteenth century and is located
in figures including Hogarth, Gillray, Row
landson, and Goya (see also Katz; Sabin).
McCloud's and Harvey's positions are not
so contradictory. The form of comics always
can be traced
hinges on the way temporality
in complex, often nonlinear paths across the
space of the page; largely this registers in both
words and images, although itdoesn't always
have to.As Spiegelman suggests, comics works
"choreograph and shape time" ("Ephemera" 4).
And while many forms do and have done this,
it is in the specificity of how this is accom
can locate what is often most
plished thatwe
formally interesting about comics. Panels?
which McCloud calls "comics' most important
icon" and which are a "general indicator that
time or space is being divided"?are themost
basic aspect of comics grammar, because, as
 123 HillaryChute 455

McCloud writes, "[c]omics panels fracture (Kunzle, Nineteenth Century and Father; Wil y
ft
both time and space, offering a jagged, stac lems). In 1832, extolling T?pffer's work, Goe n
cato rhythm of unconnected moments"; they the praised themass-culture potential ofwhat y
alternate on the page with blank space (Under had come to be called "picture-novels."9 3
(g
a
standing 98,99,67). A comics page offers rich Even in this early incarnation, comics was 3
CTQ
temporal map configured
as much by what understood as an antielitist art form.Yet Amer
Xi
isn't drawn as by what is: it is highly conscious ican comic strips are set apart from the earlier n
0
-h
of the artificiality of its selective borders, European form?which was never a mass

which diagram the page into an arrangement
of encapsulated moments. McCloud alleges
that the empty space, called the gutter, "plays
host" towhat is "at the very heart of comics"
and that "what's between the panels is the only
element of comics that is not duplicated in any
other medium" (66; "ScottMcCloud" 13).
market product in the same way?by their use
5*
of continuing characters and their appearance 3
inmass-circulatednewspapers (see Gordon). It
is commonly accepted that inAmerica comics
were invented in 1895 for Joseph Pulitzer's New
YorkWorld (the same year the Lumi?re broth
ers invented narrative film in Paris) with Rich

Among these learned scholars and critics,
a history of comics is being assembled as a way
of carving out a tradition, in a rich history of
forms, that leads to a contemporary excitement
about graphic narrative. The following abbre
viated history points to several key figures and
events (here I offer a context for American
work but do not emphasize the development of
the commercial comic-book
industry, which
is dominated by two superhero-focused pub
lishers,Marvel and DC). Even while McCloud
and Harvey are at odds, they affirmHogarth's
importance to comics
(Understanding
ard Fenton Outcault's The Yellow Kid, which
focused on contemporary urban immigrants
and featured an endearing, obnoxious child
resident of an East Side tenement.10Pulitzer re
alized that the stripwas a circulation booster;
the struggle that ensued in the sensational
press between William Randolph Hearst and
Pulitzer over The Yellow Kid reportedly gave
birth to the term yellow journalism, after the
Kid and his recognizable yellow gown.
Unlike modernist fiction that developed
around the same time, themedium of comics
16; was marked from the beginning by its com

"Comedy" 77). As I and Marianne DeKoven modity status. However, it is still largely un
write inModern Fiction Studies, for works recognized that the comics in the firstdecades
such as A Harlot's Progress?which, like com of the twentieth century was both a mass
ics, represents framed moments in market and one that influenced and
punctual, product
an understand was influenced
ongoing narrative?"[w]e may by avant-garde practices, espe

Hogarth's influence by reading his work as ex cially those of Dada and surrealism (Gopnik
tending ut pictura poesis from poetry to the and Varnedoe; Inge). It is also little known
modern genre of the novel: he introduced a that in the late 1930s, while comic books be
sequential, novelistic structure to a pictorial gan their ascent on the back o? Superman, the
form" (769). Later, in the nineteenth century, firstmodern graphic narratives, called "word
when a Swiss schoolmaster who is considered less novels," had already appeared: beauti
the inventor ofmodern comics, Rodolphe T?pf fully rendered woodcut works?in some cases
fer (1799-1846), established comics conven marketed as conventional novels?that almost
tions?he created what he called a "pictorial entirely served a socialist agenda and that in
language," an abbreviated style hinging on the corporated experimental practices widely as
appearance of panel borders on the page?he sociated with literary modernism (Joseph).
described his work as drawing on two forms: Although called wordless novels, these works
the novel and the "picture-stories" ofHogarth often did incorporate text,but not as captions

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456 Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative PMLA

e or as speech balloons (Beron?; see also Cohen). scene self-published work that?without
o
While they have not always been analyzed as commercial strictures?experimented with
&
Hm part of the history of comics, including them the formal capacities of comics. Out of this
O
in the development of graphic narrative, as culture, today's most enduring graphic narra
a
some have begun to do, allows scholars to tives took shape?serious, imaginative works
M
S demonstrate how graphic narrative early in its that explored social and political realities by
s: modern history combined formal experimen stretching the boundaries of a historically
JE tation with an appeal tomass readerships?a mass medium. (Autobiography, arguably the
y
& development crucial to the impact of the form dominant mode of current graphic narrative,
x mass was first established in the underground.)
today.11 In showing the tensions between
printing and artisanal practice and between Spiegelman provides a prominent exam
convention and experimentation, these works ple. His experimental underground comics
show theway early versions of graphic narra stories and his autobiographical pieces, in
tive responded to contemporary culture and as well as his
cluding the prototype "Maus,"
anticipated the elaboration of genres and the two magazines, Arcade (1975-76) and RAW
mixture of high and lowmodes we recognize (1980-91), translate and transvalue an anti
in present-day fiction. narrative avant-garde aesthetic for the popu
In the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, comics re lar and populist medium of comics. Initially
flected the seismic cultural shifts?often pro Spiegelman toyswith narrative expectations
duced by war?in American culture of those of temporal movement, working in opposi
decades; comics bridged the experimental tion to "diversionary" mainstream comics.
ism of literary and visual modernisms and In the later RAW, where Maus was first pub

mass-produced American
popular culture. lished serially, he expands this practice. We
Founded by the cartoonist Harvey Kurtzman see that as historical enunciation weaves jag
in 1952, Mad Comics: Humor in a Jugular gedly through paradoxical spaces and shift
Vein (laterMAD magazine) was a rigorously comics?as a form that
ing temporalities,
self-reflexive comic book deeply concerned relies on space to represent time?becomes
with comics aesthetics. With Mad, Kurtz structurally equipped to challenge dominant
man established the project of comics as a modes of storytelling and history writing.

critique ofmainstream America, particularly Maus, which won a "special" Pulitzer

the media; as such, Mad was an inspiration Prize and introduced the sophistication of
forunderground comics (often termed comix) comics to the academy, portrays Jews as
in the late 1960s and early 1970s. mice and Germans as cats. It tells the story
Like the fiction of the 1960s, comics of a cartoonist named Art Spiegelman and

during that period was dominated by oppo his father, Vladek Spiegelman, a Holocaust
sitionality. The full avant-gardism of
com survivor, by moving back and forth between
ics arrived with the "underground comix World War II-era Poland and New York City
revolution" in the latter years of the decade, a in the 1970s and 1980s. Maus has been writ
movement that explicitly termed itself avant ten about widely.12 It is an absorbing story, a
a is
garde. Underground comics, a reaction to moving portrait of flawed family. It also
the censorious content code that debilitated complex aesthetically and politically inways
specific to comics. Marianne Hirsch points
themainstream industry,were an influential
cultural vehicle, challenging and arresting out aspects of Spiegelman's text that are
because theymeditated on the violation of ta widely applicable to thework the graphic nar
boos. Rejecting mainstream publication out rative form can do. Spiegelman's use of pho
lets, the denizens of the underground comics tographs in his hand-drawn text, she argues,

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 12 3-2 Hillary Chute 457

raises not only the question of how, forty "modernist moment of form... may be behind y
$
years after Adorno's dictum, the Holocaust us" (324).13 In particular, graphic narrative of
ft
can be represented, but also how different fers compelling, diverse examples that engage y
m
media?comics, photographs, narrative, with different styles,methods, and modes to 3
interact with each other to
W
testimony?can consider the problem of historical representa 3*
a more and multiple text 99
produce permeable tion. An awareness of the limits of representa
that may recast the problematics of Holocaust -0
tion?which not only is specific to the problem ?{
representation and eradicate any
0
definitively
of articulating trauma but also has become a ft
clear-cut distinction between the documen
uconditio sine qua non of all representations" w
taryand the aesthetic. ("Family Pictures" 11) 0
(Kunow 252)?is integrated into comics 3
through its framed, self-conscious, bimodal
Spiegelman publicly and successfully fought
the New York Times to get his book moved form; yet it isprecisely in its insistent, affective,

from the fiction to the nonfiction best-seller urgent visualizing of historical circumstance
that comics aspires to ethical engagement.
list. In competing or nonsynchronous nar
Some of the most riveting books out
rative layers of comics, he creates an intense
there?the ones waking up
level of self-reflexivity (seen in fig. 1). In the literary critics
the non represent often vicious historical realities.
graphic narrative,
additionally,
(Historians have been interested too?one
transparency of drawing?the presence of
of the best essays on Maus is in Oral History
the body, through the hand, as a mark in the
Review?but these visual-verbal texts are par
a
text?lends subjective register to the nar
rative surfaces of comics pages that further ticularly relevant to literary scholars because
of theway they represent history through nar
enables comics works to be productively self
rative.) For instance, three of today smost ac
aware in how they "materialize"
history (the claimed cartoonists, Spiegelman, Joe Sacco,
striking verb is Spiegelman's [Brown 98]). and Marjane Satrapi, work in the nonfiction
Discussing Mflws's place in the academy in a mode: Spiegelman onWorld War II and 9/11,
2003 interview, Hirsch noted, "As forMaus Sacco on Palestine and Bosnia, Satrapi on
and its acceptance in academia ... it's more
Iran's Islamic Revolution and war with Iraq.
than acceptance. Everyone is rushing towrite
This is not a coincidence. We may think of
about Maus" ("Marianne Hirsch").
graphic narrative, in the innate, necessary
formalism of its narrative procedure?in its
Contexts experimentation with the artificial strictures
of the comics form?as calling our attention
The study of one touchstone text,Maus, is towhat Shoshana Felman and Dori Laub call
into an area that
developing investigates the "textualization of the context": "the empirical
potential of the form at large. In his comment content needs not just to be known, but to be
that "the stylistic surface [of the page] was a read-The basic and legitimate demand for
problem to solve" inMaus, Spiegelman aptly contextualization of the text itself needs to be
characterizes the graphic-narrative approach
complemented, simultaneously, by the less fa
to style and form:
articulating stories through miliar and yet necessary work of textualization
the spatial aesthetics that the panels,
grids, of the context" (xv). Graphic narrative accom
gutters, and tiers of comics offer (Complete plishes this work with itsmanifest handling
Maus). Graphic narrative thus focuses atten of its own artifice, its attention to its seams.
tion on what W. J.T. Mitchell identifies as a Its formal grammar rejects transparency and
refigured political formalism, a "new kind of renders textualization conspicuous, inscrib
formalism" that is in front of us now that the the context in its
ing graphic presentation. In

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 458 Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative PMLA

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 12 3-2 Hillary Chute 459

Maus, for example, the context of the text?its possibilities forwriting history that combine y
ft
position as Holocaust cultural production de formal experimentation with an appeal to
?
mass readerships. Graphic narrative suggests y
liberately abdicating aesthetic mastery?is &
inscribed extrasemantically in the look of its that historical accuracy is not the opposite of 3
99
we register this rejection ofNazi creative invention; the problematics of what
shaggy lines: 3*
99
tropes ofmastery in how we read the text, in we consider fact and fiction are made appar 13
our perception of its lines' grainy texture. ent by the role of drawing. Comics is a struc t
0
?h
The most important graphic narratives turally layered and doubled medium that can ft
v?
boundaries ofwhat can v?
explore the conflicted proliferate historical moments on the page (as
be said and what can be shown at the inter we see in Spiegelman's panel shown in fig. 1, 5*
3
section of collective histories and life stories.14 in which
concentration-camp corpses word

Authors like Spiegelman and Sacco, engaged
with the horizon of history, portray torture
and massacre in a complex formal mode that
does not turn away from or mitigate trauma;
in fact, they demonstrate how its visual re
lessly invade a present-day SoHo studio).
To introduce some of today's promising
work, I'll briefly return toMitchell, whose
example of how the horizons of form and
politics intertwine is relevant to nonfiction

tracing is enabling, ethical, and productive. graphic narrative. Mitchell considers Edward
There is also a rich range of work by women Said's cross-discursive, word-and-image
text

writers who investigate childhood and the After theLast Sky: Palestinian Lives, a collabo
body?concerns typically relegated to the ration with the photographer JeanMohr, and
silence and invisibility of the private sphere. emphasizes its focus on "spatial aesthetics"

Satrapi's account of her youth in Iran, Persep (324). In the book's introduction, Said writes,
olis, along with work by American authors "I believe that essentially unconventional,
like Lynda Barry, Alison Bechdel, Phoebe hybrid, and fragmentary forms of expression
Gloeckner, and Aline Kominsky-Crumb, ex should be used to represent us.... Double vi
emplifies how graphic narrative can envision sion informsmy text" (6).
an everyday in 1986, the same year as the
reality of women's lives, which, Published
while rooted in the personal, is invested and terrain-shiftingMaus, Said's call for generic,
threaded with collectivity, beyond prescrip disciplinary, and media crossing offersone ex
tivemodels of alterity or sexual difference. In planation forhis enthusiasm for comics, which
every case, from the large-scale to the local, he details in the admiring introduction to
narrative a traumatic side of Saceos 2001 narrative Palestine, an ex
graphic presents graphic

history, but all these authors refuse to show it
through the lens of unspeakability or invisi
bility, instead registering itsdifficulty through
inventive (and various) textual practice.
The excitement surrounding nonfiction
here is not meant to suggest that powerful
work isn't being done with fiction. Authors
such as Charles Burns (Black Hole), Dan
iel Clowes (Ghost World), and Chris Ware
(JimmyCorrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth)
have raised the profile of literary comics with
stories that are serious in scope and heavy
on style. But I would suggest that the com
pounding of word and image has led to new
ample ofwhat has been called "comics journal
ism." Comics contain "double vision" in their
structural hybridity, their double (but nonsyn
thesized) narratives of words and images. In
one frame of comics, the images and thewords
may mean differently,and thus thework sends
out double-coded narratives or semantics.
Sacco's work, in its detailed density, calls
attention to pace?a formal aspect that Said
suggests "is perhaps the greatest of [Sacco's]
achievements" ("Homage" v). Praising Pales
tine,Naseer Aruri even writes that "each page
is equivalent to an essay"?an appraisal of
density that is not restricted to the text's prose

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 46o Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative PMLA

c but rather indicates how the thickness of the
o
</>
verbal-visual form in Sacco's
4> mits what can feel like surplus information or
O
a?
plenitude (qtd. in Sacco, Palestine, back cover).
a
Few graphic narrative texts resist easy con
M
C
sumption more effectively than Sacco's; the
M
C formalism of his pages presents a thicket that
requires
a labor-intensive
"decoding"-?a
u
4) connoting difficulty, that both Spiegelman
and Said use to discuss comics (Said, "Hom
age" ii; Spiegelman, Interview 61). Sacco's
works push on the disjunctive back-and-forth
between looking and reading: this rhythm?
often awkward and time-consuming?-is part
of Saceos "power to detain," in Said's formu
lation, especially valuable in treating a subject
as politicized and ethically complicated as the
Israel-Palestine conflict. Said praises theway
Saceos bizarre formal matching of accelera
tion (the pages jump with urgency) and decel
eration (each page requires wading through)
"furnish[es] readers with a long enough so
journ among a people" rarely represented with
be a threat to literacy" (3). Fredric Wertham,
hands trans author of the incendiary 1954 Seduction of the
Innocent, which helped introduce censorship
in comic books, called comics reading "an eva
sion of reading and almost its opposite" (qtd.
in Schmitt 157). Yet commentators on comics
(e.g., McCloud, Understanding 66-93, 106;
term, Carrier 51) point out that because the form
represents punctual, framed moments alter
nating with the blank space of the gutter onto
which we must project causality, comics as a
form requires a substantial degree of reader
participation fornarrative interpretation, even
fostering a kind of interpretive "intimacy"
(McCloud, Understanding 69). And within its
panels graphic narrative, as my brief discus
sion of Sacco suggests, can require slowing
down; the form can place a great demand on
our cognitive skills. Justas an author's spatial
construction of the page can beg rereadings
and deliberately confuse narrative linearity (in
comics, reading can occur in all directions),
the basic narrative requires a high degree

complexity and thoroughness (v).15A comics of cognitive engagement.16 In his Safe Area

page, unlike film or traditional prose narra
tive, is able to hold this contradictory flow in
tension, as narrative development is delayed,
retracked, or rendered recursive by the depth
and volume of texture.
graphic
To addressthe question of literacy pro
idea of "decoding" comics, we
posed by the
might consider Spiegelman's explanation of
the term. His comments attach a specific, ac
tive literacy to comics: "It seems tome that
comics have already shifted from being an
icon of illiteracy to becoming one of the last
bastions of literacy," he told the Comics Jour
nal in 1995. "If comics have any problem now,
it's that people don't even have the patience to
decode comics at this point.... I don't know
ifwe're the vanguard of another culture or
ifwe're the last blacksmiths"
(Interview 61).
Fig.2
This comment appears to depart from what
Page 93 from Sacco's
many still consider themedium to be: "Com
Safe Area GoraZde.
Used by permission ics as a reading form," writes Will Eisner
of JoeSacco.
Graphic Storytelling, "was always assumed
Gorazde, Sacco spatializes the elliptical prose
as Louis
style of avant-garde writers such
Ferdinand C?line, fragmenting boxes of text
and floating them over his images. Spatializing
the verbal narrative to dramatize or
disrupt
the visual narrative threads ellipses into the
of a medium already characterized
grammar
by the elliptical structure of the frame-gutter
frame sequence. We may note such an example
in one of Sacco's most disturbing pages in Safe
Area Gorazde, which represents the testimony
of Sacco's Bosnian friend and translator Edin
and depicts the dead bodies of Edin's friends,
fourmen who died in the first day of the first
Serb attack on Gorazde inMay 1992 (fig.2).
The anxiety about the visual thatMitch
ell wrote about when he identified a "pictorial
turn" in the 1990s?along with a suspicion of
a formmarked deeply by itspopular history
is evident in the negative reaction many in the
com
in academy have to the notion of "literary"
to ics as objects of inquiry. Hirsch, in her 2004

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12 3-2 HillaryChute 461

was with me
inschool
-for12yeans. "was with me
Ihere was four years in
dirt inhis the aime
stomach. class Senads
Probably fingershad
they'd cut been cut
open his one hand,'
-from
stomach. the otherwas
shut tight.
rJ?2C?&<.1kL\&aK

m^m^
'was prob
ably killed in
thefirst
attack, but "My best *
we ntvtr frSnds.
foundhis
was
body. He
married, he ?"Everyone |
had a. child... oftWj

"*?sa
' -t? <yin^
f.-^<L.-;.^c-:.-..
ffil/g4fr

/^?

' /
j=S*':?:*

Ri/M?,

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462 Comics as Literature? Reading Graphic Narrative PMLA

S
O Editor's Column "Collateral Damage," notes Notes
*?/? the fear in our profession "that in the current
& Iwould like to thank Roy Bautista, Marianne DeKoven,
media age our students (nevermind our pub Richard and Joe Ponce for
Dienst, James Mulholland,
O
w lic officials) have lost their verbal literacy and their suggestions. I would also like to thank Joe Sacco
a
have themselves over to an overwhelm and Art Spiegelman for permission to reprint images
w> given
c from Safe Area Gorazde and Maus.
ingly dominant, uncontrollable visuality that
*S 1.1 explore this in a forthcoming essay comparing fic
e impairs thought." But she also writes?intro tion and comics ("Ragtime").
X
y
ducing the contributions to a PMLA issue on 2. One reason that graphic novel as a descriptive term

literary studies and the visual arts, including is now so prevalent is that itbecame, however awkwardly,

4?? the four position papers on visuality in The an official catchphrase for a
huge stratum of work in the
medium of comics. Even just a few years ago, the term
Changing Profession?that these works "re
was in a practical sense as a label that
urgently needed
veal tome that our field has already moved
could distinguish serious, adult work from comics for
beyond this anxiety" (1210). children. Publishers Weekly, writing in 2003 about a

Indeed, now is the time to expand schol publisher-sponsored campaign to expand bookstore clas
sification systems so that they would?in the campaign
arly expertise and interest in comics. "What reflect the diversity of the comics
ers' words?"accurately
kind of visual-verbal literacy can respond to medium," noted, "Indeed, many retailers continue to be
the needs of the present moment?" Hirsch asks lieve erroneously that comics are either primarily about

(1212). Certainly, I wager?as does Hirsch, superheroes or are intended only for children." In a sub

who goes on to analyze Spiegelman's most re sequent 2003 article, Publishers Weekly reported that
Spiegelman and several comics publishers were success
cent book, In the Shadow ofNo Towers?that
ful in lobbying the Book Industry Standards and Com
some of themost
graphic narrative opens up munications committee, which generates categories that

pressing questions put to literature today: assist retailers in categorizing and shelving books, to

What is the texture of narrative forms that are "create a major category for graphic novels/comics, with
for fiction, non-fiction, anthologies, and
relevant to ethical representations of history? sub-headings
comic technique, among others." See Reid; Macdonald.
What are the current stakes surrounding the 3. This has been disputed; Harvey claims, for instance,
are the
right to show and to tell history?What that the first text to be identified as a "graphic novel" is
risks of representation? How do people un George Metzgers 1976 Beyond Time and Again, which he re
had the term on the title page and dust-jacket flaps. Eis
derstand their lives through narrative design ports
ner's 1978 book was published simultaneously in paperback
and render the difficult processes ofmemory
and hardcover, and, as he told Time magazine, the subtitle "A
intelligible? Graphic narrative has echoed
Graphic Novel" appeared only
on the cover of the paperback.
and expanded on the formal inventions of fic However, it is indisputable that Eisner?who claims not to
know the term had been used earlier?"was in a position to
tion, from modernist social and aesthetic at
as he puts it,because his
titudes and practices to the postmodern shift change the direction of comics,"
book was the first of itskind since the "wordless novels" of
toward the democracy of popular forms. In the late 1920s, the 1930s, and the 1940s to be published out
the narrative, we see an embrace of side the comics system as a work of literature. See Arnold.
graphic
as well as
reproducibility and mass circulation requires a
4. Comics, like the term for any medium,
verb. comics as a singular has become
a rigorous, experimental attention to form as singular Treating
standard; McCloud writes in his definition, for instance,
a mode of political intervention. Critical ap
that comics in form, used with a singular verb"
is "plural

proaches to literature, as they are starting to 9). See also Varnum and Gibbons (xiii),
(Understanding
do, need to direct more sustained attention to among numerous other scholars supporting this usage.
this developing form?a form that demands 5. Lef?vre usefully compares United States formats
with other international formats such as the European
a rethinking of narrative, genre, and, to use
"album" (which typically runs about forty-eight pages)
James Joyce'sphrase, today's "ineluctable mo and the Japanese manga magazine (which typically runs
dality of the visible" (31). three to four hundred pages).
6. Harrison notes that while cartoon and caricature
are often used interchangeably, caricature usually sug

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 12 3-2 HillaryChute 463

gests a representation of a specific person (54). Harvey's lated into her native Farsi and is sold only on the black
3"
two essays on comics taxonomy argue that the modern market in her home country. ft
usage of cartoon began in London in the 1840s, in refer 15.While Said's use of "detain" maybe charged, fram
ence to Punch, the London humor magazine, which of
ing and politicizing Sacco's work as a textual counterattack
fered a satirical send-up of a competition exhibit of the
3
on thematerial Israeli detainment of Palestinians, Said's W
as
cartoons, they were then known, of patriotic-themed introduction to Palestine does not clarify or expand on
decorations for the New Palace ofWestminster ("Com this notion, instead emphasizing, as I choose to do here,

edy" 77-79; "Describing" 24). the nonnarrativity and the closely packed aspect of Sacco's
7. Artists' books flourished during the twentieth cen pages, which obstruct a quick purchase on meaning.
tury'smost sustained periods of "utopianism," as Drucker 16. Eisner points out, "In comics, no one really knows
points out: during the period of the historical avant-garde for certain whether thewords are read before or after view
and in the 1960s. The history of artists' books, in thisway, have no real evidence that they are
ing the picture. We
is similar to the history of graphic narrative.
read simultaneously. There is a different cognitive process
8. McCloud uses the term at the suggestion of the between reading words and pictures" (Graphic Storytelling
writer Samuel R. Delany, who himself has written a
59).
graphic narrative, Bread and Wine (Interview 82).
9. Goethe's associates Johann Peter Eckermann and Fr?
d?ric Soret presented several of the Genevan's manuscripts
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