What do you think of when you hear the term graphic novel? I expect, like most people, your mind conjures up images of a psychologically tormented man dressed like a bat, or a teenager from Queens with the propensity to do whatever it is that a spider does, or maybe it’s just recent media has you in a cold sweat at the mere mention of the dreaded multiverse.
It’s very understandable – hell – I was one of those people who thought the medium of speech bubbles and fourth walls and gutters was reserved purely for those with shocking and fantastic powers. So, imagine my surprise when, at around twenty years old, a university lecturer pushed a copy of Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary into my hands and said there would be a pop quiz on the title later that week.
‘… but it’s got pictures? And this supposed to be a literature class…’ I wanted to say. Why were we wasting time going back to picture books? What was on the reading list next week, The Magic Key? We’re Going on a Bear Hunt? The novelisation of Pokemon: The First Movie? I wasn’t hugely excited, and unless this supposed meeting with the Virgin Mary was about to give Binky the ability to swing from a web, I doubted that my opinion would change.
And, honestly, I could not have been more wrong. Green’s narrative didn’t contain a motley crew of unlikely avengers, nor a giant blue beam shooting skywards. The story was simple; Binky Brown represented the struggles of a young Justin Green and the coming to terms with his obsessive-compulsive disorder diagnosis. Brought up in a Roman Catholic household and wracked with guilt from constant, intrusive, blasphemous thoughts (like the fact that everything presents itself as a penis to him) Binky leans into the ritualistic elements of his religion, developing a strict system of rules to follow and severe punishments for when he fails – ultimately becoming more disillusioned with the church as he begins to determine that it was the source of his neuroses, not the remedy.
The thing that struck me most was how Green refused to compromise art style – keeping all the cartoonish expressions and exclamations; bulging eyes, onomatopoeic words hovering overhead, excruciatingly detailed phalluses. Though the content was deeply confessional, Green’s classic illustrations could easily have been mistaken for The Beano, leaning more on the use of iconography and 60s pop-art style rather than hyper-realistic characters and environments that would, at least on paper, be better suited to the topics Green was discussing. And then it hit me; in the same way that superhero graphic novels brought fantastical characters and avengers-level threats into a world we, the reader, were familiar with, Green was bringing everyday details and recognisable struggles from our world into a new playground of fantastical possibility.
“she would often make tangents retreating into the worlds of Virginia Woolf, Sesame Street, Greek mythology”
So to recap; OCD, Holy Mary shaped like a penis, and total disenchantment with religion. The following weeks kept the pace up too – firstly with a whopping double-header from Alison Bechdel. The two titles, Fun Home and Are You My Mother? each related specifically to the relationship with one of her parents; in the former Bechdel explores her sexuality through the lens of her closeted father, and in the latter Bechdel traces infant-mother development alongside insights from psychoanalyst D.W. Winnicott.
Much like with Justin Green, Bechdel’s illustrations felt at odds with the content; the colours were muted greys and blues or pinks (depending on the parent-interaction), and she’d often make tangents retreating into the (much more detailed and vibrant) worlds of Virginia Woolf, Sesame Street, Greek mythology and the 1967 BBC television adaptation of The Forsyte Saga. I found it so curious how Bechdel decided to paint her ‘real’ world as drab and dreary, whereas her imagined ones were filled with colour and consideration; almost as if she were trying to say that the imagined ones were far easier to recall than her own childhood, which nicely aligned itself with Winnicott’s theories on infant trauma and the role of ‘good enough’ parents.
The next week, we were then blessed with the masterpiece that was Art Spiegelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus about his father’s experience as a Holocaust survivor – arguably one of the most important books written in the last century. If the 2022 decision of the Tennessee school board to unanimously ban Maus from its curriculum isn’t enough of a reason to ensure you’ve got a copy at home, I’m not sure what is.
Again, I witnessed a clash of content and style; Spiegelman blends the comic-trope of anthropomorphised animals as protagonists to compound the obvious emotional weight when discussing the horrors of the Holocaust – he even acknowledged the influence of Binky Brown when introducing autobiographical elements into his comic, but the art style is much more reminiscent of Bechdel in the lack of colour and use of black areas and white margins, leaning more on text to progress the story rather than successive images. Maus is also post-modern in its narrative approach, jumping back and forth between the modern day as Spiegelman interviews his father Vladek, and Vladek’s experience as a Jewish man in mid-1930s Poland. Even though Vladek is depicted as a mouse, hunted by German cats (with Spiegelman very cleverly taking advantage of the comparisons made in Nazi propaganda between vermin and the Jewish) the reality of his experiences never felt lessened or trivialised, instead using this absurdity to reflect the absurdity of race or faith-based discrimination.
Four weeks in, four absolute narrative masterpieces that perfectly married together their content and art style, one often helping lift the other. I had fully renounced my prior stance of superhero superiority. I had cancelled my membership with the Justice League, I had dismantled my shrines to Kirby and Ditko – so the next week when my tutor handed me a copy of G. Willow Wilson’s 2014 run of Ms. Marvel, I felt like I had landed right back at square one. Little did I know, it would have the most profound effect on me yet… but I’ll save that story for another day.
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