What “Agonized ‘Arts & Ideas’ Articles”?

Earlier this month Dan Kois gave New York magazine a catch-up review of two novels for kids that have already been on the bestseller and awards lists for months: Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret and Jeff Kinney's Diary of a Wimpy Kid volumes.

Kois linked those books to yet a third set of successful kids' books with lots of art: manga, and comics-style books in general. And then he tried to expand the whole thing into Significance by calling all this "the incursion of comics into 'respectable' children’s fiction."

Kois is quite right that "for typical young-teen readers, graphic storytelling [i.e., comics] is now as familiar a language as traditional chapter books." But I think only the manga fit the comics form. I've already made my case that the graphic elements of Hugo Cabret work differently from the graphic elements of comics, more like the images of cinema.

As for the art in the Wimpy Kid volumes, there's a lot more of it than in a typical middle-grade novel, but it functions in a traditional way. Kinney's drawings usually comment and supplement his text but don't replace it. The pictures have more in common with single-panel gag cartoons than with "sequential art." In number and style, the Wimpy Kid illustrations don't fit the usual model of an illustrated children's novel, but they're a lot closer than Kois's other examples.

I appreciate the scarequotes that Kois put into his phrase "'respectable' children's fiction." At the same time, I think he wildly overstated the walls around that respectability when he concluded that:

Cabret and Wimpy Kid [are] books whose success might ten years ago have provoked agonized “Arts & Ideas” articles about the debasement of children’s literature.

Yes, given its style of art and humor, Wimpy Kid would probably be seen as "product" in nearly any era (including, perhaps, ours)--not that it debases anything. But I find it hard to imagine that Hugo Cabret would have raised eyebrows very high, much less "agonized" folks in the field of children's literature, ten or even twenty or thirty years ago.

Hugo Cabret is, after all, historical fiction. It comments on Art. It ends with a sense of hope (more hope than poor Greg Heffley enjoys). It's the sort of story for children that has always won admiring reviews and awards, and the fact that it contains pretty pictures that can also be analyzed as Art only increases its "respectability."

What A Glorious Thing the Turning of a Page Can Be

Yesterday I stated my first hallmark of the comics form as opposed to the picture-book form: more pictures on each page. Of course, a preschooler could see that. Is that insight really a good use of a college degree and twenty years of editing books?

No, but I think the implications of that basic fact send comics and picture books on somewhat different paths up the storytelling mountain. As I wrote yesterday, most comics appear to be organized in units of pages while most picture books are conceived in terms of page spreads. And today I'll posit another way the two forms work differently because of the different image-per-page ratios.

In comics, the vast majority of transitions from one image to the next occur through readers simply moving their eyes across the page spread. Both pictures remain visible. There's no other physical action necessary, and the time is quick.

In contrast, in picture books the vast majority of transitions from one image to the next take place through a page turn. One picture replaces another. There's a physical action, and a slight transition time.

The page turn has thus become a dominant element in how picture-book creators plan their pacing, suspense, surprises, scene changes, mood shifts, and more. In his interview on the National Book Award website after The Invention of Hugo Cabret was nominated for that award, Brian Selznick said:

There are graphic novels of course, but these don't usually take full advantage of the idea of the page turn. What a glorious thing the turning of a page can be!

Selznick's quotation shows the importance that picture-book artists give to the page turn. As I wrote about Hugo Cabret, its visual scheme depends entirely on page turns: there are never two pictures side by side.

Other remarks on the importance of the page turn in picture books:

• Darcy Pattison's "Picture Books 101".
• Jennifer Jensen's "Planning Picture Book Page Turns".
• Margaret Mackey's analysis of Beatrix Potter's Peter Rabbit.

In essence, most picture books take the fuel that drives readers through every story--the wish to know what happens next--and inject it into page turns.

That said, Selznick is wrong to suggest that page turns don't play a big role in graphic novels. A very traditional comics volume I read earlier in the week--the superhero brawl The Insiders--has many dramatic page turns. In fact, the trope becomes rather predictable: you turn the page and find a big panel of a villain or two looming in the sky, energy crackling out of their eyes.

Both picture books and today's comic books seem to put particular weight on the final page turn, though in different ways. In picture books, that final step brings the story to a close, as in Where the Wild Things Are: the last page is simply text that says, "And it was still hot." Today's comic periodicals depend on interlacing, never-ending stories and multi-issue "arcs," so a final page often leads into a dire new conflict or emergency, cuing readers to buy the next issue.

The reason Selznick might perceive graphic novels as not taking full advantage of the power of page turns is that that type of transition isn't the primary mover of comics. In comics the most common transition between sequential images is perforce the eyeball shift from one panel to its neighbor. That doesn't require as much time and effort from the reader, and therefore seems less dramatic. (But tomorrow I'll discuss how that transition allows some visual techniques that picture books use more rarely.)

Visual storytellers might have to make a choice between a single image on most page spreads and lots of images, without much middle ground. My writing-group colleague Marilyn Salerno is also a first-grade teacher, and thus experienced in sharing picture books for beginning readers. She says that when she shows her classes books with two or three images on a page spread, the kids' eyes go zzzzzip! across the images to the one on the right. (Presumably the opposite occurs in Japan, Israel, and other countries that read right to left.) These young readers are all interested in the latest event, not in chewing on what came just before.

Why don't we zzzzzip the same way to the lower right of a comics page? I think a coupla things slow us down:

• The large number of images on a page--not just two or three but eight or ten or twenty.
  
• The integration of words into those pictures, which I'll discuss later in the week (plus, in this example, the fact that Ms. Salerno is not reading those words to us).

Those two elements of comics remind us of how much information we'd miss by skipping to the last image. Comics readers learn to be more patient than a first-grader.

TOMORROW: Picture books, comics, and visual variety.

The Weight of Hugo Cabret

Yesterday I discussed how I think the illustrations and text of The Invention of Hugo Cabret work together cinematically, unlike pictures and words in picture books, traditionally illustrated novels, or comics. Today I'll discuss how well the book worked for me.

The story surely qualifies as a novel, but it's no more complex than a lot of other middle-grade fiction. As a story it's fine but not great. The prose is often prosaic, and not just because I see my least favorite word, “excitedly,” on page 115. The point of view can suddenly shift (“Isabelle's foot felt like it was broken,” page 298), and a French boy comes out with, “OK.”

I will here acknowledge the obvious, that the prose in Selznick's first novel is much better than my drawings will ever be. And those drawings do make The Invention of Hugo Cabret a more interesting project to study, both as a reader and as someone who works on books. As an object, the book is undeniably impressive.

In the end, however, I kept wondering whether this novel was worth its extra weight in paper. It's 300+ pages longer than a typical middle-grade, but the story didn't seem more full. Furthermore, that paper is extra-thick and extra-white to preserve the rich blacks of Selznick's art. The binding, Selznick said at this winter's SCBWI conference in New York, is an innovative type that lets the book lie flat, with nothing swallowed into the gutter (more like a movie screen).

All that paper produces a thick brick of a book. Both Hugo Cabret and Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix are 2.1 inches thick, according to Scholastic’s web catalog, and about the same weight. But HP5 is 870 pages, and Hugo Cabret 544. (The official page count is 533, but the real count must be divisible by 16.) That means the same shelf space contains two-thirds the number of pages for storytelling.

Furthermore, many of those pages are, as I discussed yesterday, pictures meant to be looked at for just a second. Some might say that each picture is worth a thousand words, but in this case a lot of the pictures repeat information because they're inspired by a cinematic model: one image zipping by after another. At the end, for example, there are fourteen pages of the Moon fading; those spreads produce an impression, to be sure, but they're not the informational equivalent of 7,000 words, or even fourteen book pages. All-black pages punctuate scenes, like a movie fading to black. Again, that storytelling technique works by evoking cinema, but it also adds to the book's heft without adding much to the content.

As a result, for me Hugo Cabret seemed a little inflated. I won't be surprised if Hugo Cabret becomes a landmark in book design and graphic storytelling, but I kept wondering if it will turn out to be a children's favorite.

(Despite its size, Hugo Cabret is not burdened with a high price. Its $22.99 is about two-thirds of the jacket price of Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows for about two-thirds the pages. Looked at in another way, it's about the normal cost of an adult novel that's half as long. How is it economically possible for Scholastic to produce this book at that price? Hugo Cabret was printed in Singapore.)