Graphic Novels

Hard to believe that I have not posted anything to this blog since the beginning of January, but then between teaching and traveling the time gets away fast. It is not that I never think about posting, but the topic often grows to where posting would take too much time. The trouble with a blog is that it is a more or less permanent, public record, which means that the juicy bits of gossip that one might indelicately slip into email must be left out. My colleague Elke Greifeneder makes some interesting observations on this in the next issue of Library Hi Tech.

Anyway the topic of this blog is graphic novels. I was talking with my students about them last semester, and they knew so little about them that I began looking for examples. There are plenty of Japanese style graphic novels in the bookstores in Berlin, but I wanted something that would persuade them to take the genre seriously.

One book in this genre that has made headlines is Art Spiegelmann's Maus. While looking for it in a bookstore my wife suggested Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. Both use drawing to create a visual context for thought and speech and have been very positively reviewed. When I asked my students whether any of them would want to do a paper using graphic techniques, no one seemed interested. The ability to do more than just text is one of the key advantages of the web. Drawing is, however, not much taught in schools and without drawing it is hard to do a graphic work of this sort.

Since we were in the Metropolital Museum in NYC on the day we flew back to Berlin, I took the opportunity to practice drawing a Franz Hals portrait (see right).