[HN Gopher] What is the first American graphic novel?
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What is the first American graphic novel?
Author : paulpauper
Score : 44 points
Date : 2024-10-27 16:16 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (haljohnsonbooks.substack.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (haljohnsonbooks.substack.com)
| pessimizer wrote:
| Why doesn't this set up specific criteria at the beginning based
| on references to the people who came up with the term, and apply
| those criteria to each work it goes over? [Also, why aren't there
| links to the works that are out of copyright?][ _Correction:
| there are, they 're just all collected at the end. Makes the
| article completely worthwhile actually._]
|
| Instead it starts with a random NYT-genre list of "acclaimed"
| comics, says almost nothing about what they have in common other
| than that people might have heard of them, then applies shifting
| criteria for a "graphic novel" as it goes through a list of old
| comics. I would call this half-assed, but they clearly put some
| work into it.
|
| But why tell me that something is not a graphic novel because it
| is too short, never having previously established a specific
| length requirement, without saying how short the thing is, and
| without providing a link to the thing if it is out of copyright?
|
| > Do you believe me if I say that these panels are different from
| the panels of Saddlebags? I hope so.
|
| And I'm supposed to just trust the author that the two Clowes
| panels are subtly different than the panels from the item above
| (judged a non-"graphic novel"?) Is it because they didn't have
| time to explain such subtlety?
|
| The list may be good (I have no idea how comprehensive it is or
| how much was ignored), but the commentary is bad.
|
| edit: honestly, this sort of random rambling seems like more work
| than just being clear about what you're looking for and specific
| about why you haven't found it.
| Nevermark wrote:
| > But why tell me that something is not a graphic novel because
| it is too short, never having previously established a specific
| length requirement
|
| Because this (personally driven) discovery of the first
| American graphic novel, is itself, written as a narrative of
| thought.
|
| I expect many, if not most, definitions of the first species of
| some group were defined in response to the search for some
| intuited threshold in the same way.
|
| We get "clean" seemingly obvious definitions after the fact.
| That hide how much the definition got crafted to fit the
| emergent particulars, instead of the particulars being sifted
| through a preceding clear definition.
|
| Unlike math & physics, delineations in history emerge from
| accumulations of happenstance, not fundamental principles.
| mamcx wrote:
| I like it how is done in
| https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UrExample
| Often, an Ur-Example doubles as the Trope Maker -- but not
| always, and far less often with ancient tropes, which often
| evolved over a long period of time rather than suddenly
| bursting forth from someone's head, fully formed. When
| they're distinct, a Trope Maker differs from an Ur-Example in
| that the latter is realized to have met the definition of the
| trope only after later storytellers started doing it on
| purpose.
|
| The _started doing it on purpose_ means that something arise
| first but could take some time to get into the `shape` we
| recognize as such.
| fsckboy wrote:
| with written literature, did anybody ever tell you the specific
| difference between a short story, a novella, and a novel, or
| did you just pick it up from repetition of contexts?
|
| is it hard for you to imagine that those concepts couldn't be
| naturally transferred to graphic literature, with mutatis
| mutandis as your modus operandus?
| furyofantares wrote:
| > So let's look back; all the way back. The first comic printed
| in America is The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which appeared
| as a newspaper supplement in 1841 and a book in 1849. At eighty
| pages of continuous picaresque story,2 it's certainly a novel.
| But it is immediately disqualified for not being American. It's
| an unlicensed ripoff of an unlicensed British ripoff of a Swiss
| comic by Rodolphe Topffer! You can't just make your Eurocomics
| American through translation and crime!
|
| No argument re: translation, but crime? Was there international
| copyright at the time? Not at all an expert but it looks to me
| like there wasn't before this
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
| Nevermark wrote:
| > No argument re: translation, but crime?
|
| The bar is clearly set to "no caveats", and European sourced or
| copied or adapted from are all more European than "first
| American" is allowed to bear.
| Waterluvian wrote:
| That kind of turns this into a subjective semantic pursuit.
| Nevermark wrote:
| Or it always was that?
|
| Someone wondering when things "like A" "first" morphed into
| things "like B" is going to get involved in a lot of
| discovery driven judgement calls along the way.
| furyofantares wrote:
| My question is only if it was a crime. It's OK to question
| evidence without being for the thing being evidenced against.
| WillPostForFood wrote:
| and according to that wiki page, the US didn't join the Berne
| Convention until 1988!
|
| _The United States acceded to the convention on 16 November
| 1988, and the convention entered into force for the United
| States on 1 March 1989_
| idoubtit wrote:
| The OP's definition of "US graphic novel" is apparently a comics
| that has a story similar to an adult's novel. In France, a "roman
| graphique" also means something akin to "film d'auteur". I
| thought that meaning was also present in the USA. Emblematic
| authors of the genre, like Eisner and Spiegelman, certainly point
| to this direction.
|
| If you require that a graphic novel should be a creative and
| personal work, I doubt the OP's choice fits. A "trashy melodrama"
| whose first goal was "to cash in on the rise of mass-market
| paperback books" did try to expand the comics genre of its time,
| but it was more a commercial step than an artistic novelty.
| fsckboy wrote:
| in a tangential vein, what's the first "bible in pictures"?
| started with stained glass windows of course, but when did it
| really catch on in print?
|
| then there's the Bayeux tapestry, or stuff like the extensive
| mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily
| https://www.thegeographicalcure.com/post/guide-to-villa-roma...
| giraffe_lady wrote:
| Doesn't answer the question but pretty sure painted iconography
| and mosaics predate stained glass by a fair bit.
| karaterobot wrote:
| > Some people claim they reserve the term graphic novel for a
| book appearing originally as a bound volume as opposed to
| serialized in a comic. These people are probably having you on;
| they probably also claim to floss thrice daily.
|
| Okay, I know this isn't the point of the larger article, and that
| this makes me a literal Comic Book Guy. But, _actually_ , a
| graphic novel doesn't have to be released as a graphic novel
| originally, but it just has to be _written_ to be one. The
| difference between a graphic novel and an ordinary trade
| paperback bound volume is that the novel was originally conceived
| and composed as a single, long-form story, rather than being a
| collection (either a story arc, or just a series of disconnected
| issues) from an ongoing series.
|
| There are edge cases to this, such as whatever they call the
| comic equivalent of a stitch-up in book publishing. That's where
| you take a few stories that were all published separately, and
| turn them into a novel by adding a frame story, or editing them
| to seem like they were meant to form a single narrative the whole
| time. FWIW, those aren't novels by my definition, even if they
| seem like it, but I wouldn't get mad if somebody disagreed.
|
| I've never flossed three times in one day, if someone did that
| I'd assume they were a robot pretending to be a human.
| egypturnash wrote:
| I am a person who has made things that are unambiguously A
| Graphic Novel by any modern definition that wants to set them
| apart from other forms of "comics" and I am also very aware
| that I am making several orders of magnitude less off of my
| work than my friend whose "graphic novels" are collections of
| her comic strips that barely have three or four days of
| continuity.
|
| As a category in the world of _multinational book publishing
| conglomerates_ , two hundred pages of words and pictures that
| tell a coherent story aimed at a (young) adult reading level
| are just about indistinguishable from a hundred pages of words
| and pictures that tell a succession of one- to three-page-long
| stories aimed at a middle-grade kid. And from a collection of
| issues of Batman, whether or not those issues form a coherent
| story. We all fit into the same box on a publisher's
| spreadsheet. Most of it's taken up by the stuff for kids.
| BryantD wrote:
| I hate to miss a good chance to compliment an artist, so
| while it's off topic for your comment allow me to note that
| I've been enjoying your work for quite a while now -- thank
| you for what you do.
| egypturnash wrote:
| oh hey you're welcome! <3
| BryantD wrote:
| If you happened to enjoy this essay, you might also like Jess
| Nevin's new podcast on the history of comics; more global, less
| focused on graphic novels in particular, and Rodolphe Topffer
| appears in both. I believe his Patreon posts are public, and
| there are transcripts if you prefer reading to listening:
| https://www.patreon.com/c/jessnevins/posts
| sandworm101 wrote:
| The author skips right over the real heart of the definition: The
| difference between illustrated books and graphic novels is that
| the graphics are essential. Any text can be aided by
| illustrations, but one cannot understand a graphic novel without
| its associated graphics.
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