Cranius wrote:Unfortunately, the pilots had left the tannoy on and we could hear them shouting things like,"For fuck's sake", and "Fuuuuuck!", as the plane landed quite hard on the tarmac.

sparky wrote:

daniel robert chapman and earwicker wrote:graphic novel

The antipathy towards them makes me sad, as the form as a lot to offer, despite the overwhelming dross content. Your antipathy to the form might be lessened were you not exposed to this terrible term, used to sell glossy and violent Batman comics. Phrase "graphic novel", I shake both fists at you.

An unasked for infliction is being PM'd to you both just for me to be extra rude in forcing my opinion.

Cranius: I am indulged, and sated; thank you.

daniel robert chapman wrote:At bottom, though, I just really love language and words and that is why I read. Even at their best I feel graphic novels remove a part of the reading experience that I really enjoy.

Earwicker wrote:I was speaking to someone who writes graphic novels just a couple of days ago and she said she regards the it as a visual medium rather than a literary one.
Not sure what I think about that - if anything - but perhaps the better comparison would be to film rather than literature?

daniel robert chapman wrote:And if I read graphic novels, won't I look like a nerd? (I wink! I kid!)

sparky wrote:
What I sent - Brought to Light ... is more of a short, surrealist horror rooted in the second half of the last century. It has to be short, as it is incredibly dense, both in terms of information and imagery (visual and written).

Hope ya like it!

Earwicker wrote:

sparky wrote:
What I sent - Brought to Light ... is more of a short, surrealist horror rooted in the second half of the last century. It has to be short, as it is incredibly dense, both in terms of information and imagery (visual and written).

Hope ya like it!

Just read the first part and I did like it (though it didn't tell me much I didn't know). The artwork is beautiful and I like the tone of it but one thing is lacking (which may, again, fit better in another thread (but then maybe not - this is book talk after all)) I think it would have got me more had I had it in my hands.
There's something to be said for the tactile aspect of reading a book. This goes for all books but I wonder if - maybe - it goes even more so for a graphic novel.

Anyways, cheers for sending it over and I look forward to reading the other part.

Britain Embraces the Graphic Novel
By TARA MULHOLLAND

LONDON — For a country that prides itself on its visual satire and that has produced celebrated social and political cartoonists like William Hogarth, George Cruickshank and George du Maurier of Punch magazine, Britain has, until lately, taken a relatively lackluster approach to comic art, at least in graphic-novel form.

Such narratives, from “Batman” to Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” form a cultural reference point in the United States; in France, the bande dessinée, or comic strip, has won status as the neuvième art, or the ninth art; and in Japan manga is a dominant cultural force. But in Britain the form has long been considered, well, just a bit juvenile.

“On the Continent graphic novels have been as accepted as films or books for many years,” said the author Raymond Briggs in a 2005 interview with the newspaper The Observer, “but England has had a snobby attitude towards them. They’ve always been seen as something just for children.”

But things have started to change.

First came the surprise successes of “Ethel and Ernest,” Mr. Briggs’s 1998 word-and-image biography of his parents, which sold more than 200,000 copies, and “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” the American artist Chris Ware’s graphic novel, which controversially won The Guardian’s first-novel award in 2001. Since then, the graphic novel — loosely defined as a novel whose content is displayed in both images and text — has begun to break into the British mainstream.

Leading the pack, Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House UK and the British publisher of “Jimmy Corrigan” and “Ethel and Ernest,” has more than tripled its graphic novel output over the past year, publishing nine new titles since July 2006. Dan Franklin, Cape’s publishing director, said he hoped to increase this number.

“When we started about nine years ago with ‘Ethel and Ernest,’ I said that we wouldn’t do more than one a year,” he said. “And they’ve been so successful that I am now doing potentially up to 12 a year, if I can find them.”

Last year Random House also started Tanoshimi, a manga line that has already printed more than 40 titles.

In July HarperCollins UK released its first series of graphic novels: the “Agatha Christie Comic Strip Editions,” graphic adaptations of those quintessentially British crime stories. Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of the London publisher Orion Books, is bringing out its first graphic novel, “Shooting War,” in November, while Faber & Faber, on the heels of its success with a graphic-novel version of Paul Auster’s “House of Glass” in 2005, has signed a three-book deal with the American graphic novelist Adrian Tomine (“Optic Nerve”), and is publishing the first in that series, “Shortcomings,” next month.

Bloomsbury, the British publisher of the Harry Potter books, is set next year to publish its first graphic novel, “Logicomix,” a book that the newspaper The Independent has already praised as “potentially, the genre’s ‘Sophie’s World,’ ” referring to the early-’90s pop-philosophy best seller.

It’s not just publishing hype. In 2005 Mr. Briggs and Posy Simmonds, two of Britain’s most respected graphic novelists, were inaugurated into the Royal Society of Literature, and last year they illustrated the front cover of the society’s magazine under the headline “The Invasion of the Graphic Novelists,” causing ripples within the literary establishment. Comica, a British comics festival that takes place at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, enters its fifth year in October, while British newspapers frequently publish reviews of graphic novels.

Meanwhile, sales are on the rise. Michael Rowley, the graphic-novel buyer for Waterstone’s, Britain’s largest bookshop chain, said sales of the books had increased 41 percent in the last year alone.

What is behind this sudden wave of enthusiasm for a genre that has previously been sidelined in Britain?

For Paul Gravett, the author of “Great British Comics” and one of the country’s foremost promoter of graphic novels, one of the primary reasons is simply the creation of the “graphic novel” category. “The word comics is laden with so many negative connotations, while the words ‘graphic novel’ give it a certain cachet,” he said.

The success enjoyed by Jonathan Cape with its graphic-novel line has also been an encouraging factor for other British publishers. “It’s becoming something that we need to pay attention to,” said Kelly Falconer, an editor at Weidenfeld & Nicolson. “We’re dipping a toe in the water — and if it works, then we’ll start looking for more.”

Those in the book business also agree that the recent success of a few breakthrough graphic novels — like “Jimmy Corrigan” and the Iranian writer and artist Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” the film version of which is currently being released worldwide — has significantly helped the genre. Meanwhile, the possibility of printing graphic novels cheaply in the Far East has helped free the market and allowed publishers to take risks on novels that would otherwise have been prohibitively expensive.

Timing is another factor. For many the publication of Mr. Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning “Maus” in 1986 signaled the opening for a wider acceptance of graphic novels, but that failed to materialize. To explain their popularity today, Mr. Gravett cites the Internet and graphic multimedia.

“I don’t think that it is a coincidence that graphic novels are coming into their own in an era where people are becoming acclimatized to taking in words and images together,” he said.

After a slow start, Britain is now keen to nurture artists working within the medium. Last month The Observer, with Jonathan Cape and the Comica festival, initiated a short-graphic-narrative competition to find new British talent. Angus Cargill, an editor at Faber & Faber, said he was “very definitely looking for new British stuff.”

With publishers in Britain still taking on works mainly from the Canadian graphic-novel publisher Drawn & Quarterly, as well as the American companies Pantheon and Fantagraphics, the incentive to find home-grown talent is high.

British graphic novelists are also embracing their heritage. Bryan Talbot’s “Alice in Sunderland” explores, in part, the history of the graphic novel in Britain, wending from the Bayeux Tapestry to Hogarth’s cartoons and Sir John Tenniel’s “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” illustrations.

Ms. Simmonds’s next work, “Tamara Drewe,” to be published in November, is loosely based on Thomas Hardy’s “Far From the Madding Crowd,” while her graphic-novel version of Dickens’s “Christmas Carol” is set to be published in January. Last March Self Made Hero, a London publishing house, brought out a line of Shakespeare manga to wide acclaim, beginning with a futuristic version of “Hamlet.”

And it looks as if the British public is now finally ready to support its local talent.

Mr. Franklin at Cape said the most successful books this year have been “Alice in Sunderland” and Simone Lia’s “Fluffy,” also British. He added, “People are coming out of the woodwork, and it’s fantastic.”

First came the surprise successes of “Ethel and Ernest,” Mr. Briggs’s 1998 word-and-image biography of his parents, which sold more than 200,000 copies, and “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” the American artist Chris Ware’s graphic novel, which controversially won The Guardian’s first-novel award in 2001. Since then, the graphic novel — loosely defined as a novel whose content is displayed in both images and text — has begun to break into the British mainstream.

simmo wrote:Whatever you do though, if your curiosity is stirred enough to delve in to this murky world, don't read "Blankets" by Craig Thompson, for fuck's sake.