Pet Peeves: Don't Shelve Comics With Books

On occasion, I will visit a library (or even a bookstore, although there it is far less frequently a problem) where comics and are shelved amongst the novels, all listed by author. so let me just put out this slightly pleading message to any who organize their establishment's shelves in this way:

DON'T DO IT.

I love comics. I love what the medium can accomplish, and the effects made possible by the heightened reality that particular styles of artwork can evoke. But that is precisely the point: comics are a different medium from books, and even when there is overlap among the authors contributing to both (e.g. Greg Rucka, Brad Meltzer), they are authors working in two different formats and adapting their writing to each format as appropriate.

In short, putting comics and novels on the same shelves just because both are printed on bound stacks of paper is like shelving CDs and DVDs together because they both come on discs.

Why I Hate The Term "Graphic Novel"

Page from Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

I hate the term Graphic Novel, but I hate the term Sequential Art almost as much, because each term has roughly the same problem. In the term Graphic Novel, the Novel element gets the emphasis. Not only does this sell the artist short, but it reeks of trying vainly to leech credibility from another medium that hardly has enough credibility to sustain itself. Call me cynical, but a medium that counts Dan Brown and Snooki among its most profitable contributors, no matter how old and venerable, is not one whose blood it is wise for even the most vampiric of mediums to imbibe.

But Sequential Art has roughly the opposite problem, in that it places the art in a place of exclusive privilege, making only a fleeting reference to the whole story element of what is ostensibly a storytelling medium.

If we are to describe this medium of words and pictures, Comics is as good a word as any. It is its own entity, not a hodgepodge of only tenuously related words meant to make the whole enterprise sound more credible.

Why Pacific Rim Should Have Been A Comic

Let's talk about Pacific Rim. I love this movie, and the thing that makes it for me is the world-building, the amount of thought that went into how this fictional world and its alternate history timeline would run.

But here is the thing: I missed most of that when I first saw it in theaters. Judging by what I have heard from most people who saw it, even people who loved it right from the start, they missed most of that element when first they saw it.

The question, then, becomes how this could have been avoided. In order to find an answer to that, we have to talk about world-building.

World-building is a bit of a peculiar beast. As I may have mentioned at some point before, world-building is best suited to the novel format because the novel - and, to a large though by no means equal extent, the graphic novel - is one of the very few mediums in which the reader-viewer-consumer-whatever has a great deal of control over the pace at which they read it. 

And so, for example, if you have something requiring a lot of world-building, you are going to be depending a lot on exposition. The most obvious advantage of the novel for this purpose is that you can deliver exposition in narration much more easily than in dialogue because you are already explicitly explaining things to the reader. 

You can't do that in film or theatre because in those formats your text is restricted to dialogue, and it is difficult to find an excuse for one character to explain to another character the kinds of concepts that the explainee really should already understand if they inhabit this fictional world. So there is an inevitable problem faced by films that novels solve just by their nature.

So because novels necessitate narration and description, they are very good at conveying the heavy exposition you need for world-building. The most important thing is still pace. If you read a paragraph in a novel and didn't understand it, you can just quickly cast your eyes back to the beginning of the paragraph without breaking flow, whereas if you miss a crucial line of dialogue in a film, then even if you are fortunate enough to be watching it at home, you still have to go through he rigmarole of pressing the rewind button and taking it far enough back to give it context and then watching it again in hopes that the second time around you will have slightly more idea what is going on. Crucially, this breaks flow. It breaks the ease with which the consumer of the media is able to consume the content. 

You don't have that problem in books or comics because you can very easily go back to something you missed without having to break flow. Which means that not only is it easier to integrate exposition, that exposition is also more easily understood because it can be painlessly repeated at the reader's discretion. 

Again, this all falls under the banner of the reader controlling the pace.The book only continues if you continue reading it, and it continues at your pace, which makes the delivery of exposition that world-building hinges on so much easier.

And that brings be back to Pacific Rim, which in many ways suffers from being a film. The prologue is well-shot and visually dynamic, but has to resort to 5-10 minutes of straight expostion dump in voice-over narration, conveying information that would have been much more easily dispatched in a book or, preferably, a comic - a lot of the world-building is in the design work, after all. 

But a strong indicator of this fact is how much the movie benefits from being watched on DVD, where you can notice more with each repetition, pause it for closer observation, pick through the meticulously constructed visual design. That is to say, if you watch it at the pace at which the movie delivers it, a lot of it will just pass you by because the information is not being delivered at a pace that works for you. 

The movie has to keep a fairly brisk pace, so it ends up whistling by a lot of material that we might have preferred to linger on and that might have enhanced the world-building.

Thus you run into really rather odd situations, like Coyote Tango, which was clearly meticulously designed, and they put out action figures for it, and you look at all the work that went into it and then in the film you only ever really see it in silhouette. You never see the thing in action, and you certainly never see the design in the film itself.

That is really the whole issue in a nutshell. You have this artifact that a lot of work went into, and that is really cool once you have the luxury of getting into the details, but you don't get to appreciate it in the moment because the mandatory pacing of film demands that you pass right by it on the way to the next part of the story.

Thus the film becomes an experience that you can only fully get if you watch it multiple times, creating a passable simulation of the pacing control you would get in a book or comic.

A Few Thoughts On the Advantages of Novels

I was just recently thinking about the differences between books and films, and brought one of my older thoughts a little bit further. I have long held that novels are best suited to stories that deal with the tension between narrator and narrative. By extension, first-person narration is often the best and certainly the easiest way to explore that tension, but that led me to take it a step further than that. I have noticed in my work that I tend to write for ensemble casts whenever I write for visual media, whereas my novelistic attempts tend to gravitate towards a single character, but only recently have I realized why.

I am becoming increasingly convinced that ensembles are just a better setup for visual media that do not have the opportunity to explore the internal lives thereof. I am also becoming convinced that this is because a good ensemble consists of a range of characters representing the different aspects of what would ordinarily be a real person. We contain multitudes, every one of us. We are different people in different company, that much is obvious, but we are also different people in the same company with only a change in situation required. You talk to your wife differently over dinner than while thrashing out your tax returns. And such behavior is not considered dishonesty, I daresay it is even expected. Using a casual, jovial tone with the tax returns or a pragmatic, businesslike tone over dinner would both be considered very odd indeed.

My point is that we are lots of different people, and really only with internal narration of the sort that novels allow us to indulge in can we explore those inner multitudes. Depending on how they are used, comics and stageplays can also convey this to some extent by creating associations between images through juxtaposition.