Campbell: “Comics were supposed to have grown up”

In a 2008 interview with Tom Spurgeon, comics creator Eddie Campbell responded to a question about his “take on the New York publishing world, and how they may be slowly revamping the comics industry into an adjunct of the children's book publishing business”:

This is something that has been bugging me for some time. The latest news to come down is that First Second Books, the publisher of my last three books, are now under the umbrella of Macmillan's Children's Group. I'm not surprised, because the book world, by which I mean the mainstream book publishers as well as the libraries and the Library Association, has been viewing "the graphic novel" as a young reader's genre for quite some time.

In part I think it's because the part of a publishing house that is likely to be interested in bright illustrated narratives is the children's books department, and in part also because those publishers, and America's libraries, see the "graphic novel" as a way of grabbing a part of the literate populace that has hitherto proved elusive.

Now, I have no objection to young folks having their own literature specially designed for them, though when I was a young 'un myself I would have been highly suspicious of anything that the adult world thought I should read because it was supposed to be good for me. Let's not forget that this is one of the things that drew us to comics in the first place, the very fact that they were not approved by our adults; they were our visual rock'n'roll, the things we knew that they didn't. However, let's not get bogged down on that point.

The problem with this development is that comics were supposed to have grown up and become the "graphic novel," but now we are apt to find articles telling us that the "graphic novel has grown up." In other words we're back where we started.

Campbell then added a quote from “a relevant blog post” by, um, me.

That was rather exciting to stumble across. It’s also rather circular, since my thoughts on how our culture perceives the comics form had been pushed along by earlier comments from Campbell. So maybe it’s just the two of us muttering about this on opposite sides of the world.

But if you Google the phrase "graphic novels aren't just for kids", over 1,500 hits come up. With almost 500 more for "graphic novels not just for kids". And a lot of those hits are library sites.

In any case, let me reiterate how I enjoyed Campbell’s autobiographical Alec: The Years Have Pants, especially the pages that deal with the British comics scene of the 1980s and with parenthood. It’s fine work, and adult.

Comics Memoirs about Comics History

Late last year I read both Eddie Campbell’s How to Be an Artist and Will Eisner’s The Dreamer. Both are lightly fictionalized memoirs about being part of a momentous scene in the history of comics.

Both were originally published on their own, but have been collected in thick volumes: Eisner’s Life, in Pictures and Campbell’s Alec: The Years Have Pants.

In Eisner’s case, the scene is about 1937-42, what was later called “the Golden Age of Comic Books.” It involved cramped offices, unreliable publishers, and both Depression and World War. Though the stories that Eisner and his colleagues produced were mostly about heroism, his own story is mostly about money, or lack of it.

Campbell’s topic is the British graphic novels movement of the late 1980s. It’s a picture of what Brian Eno has dubbed “scenius,” when people and circumstances come together to produce a flowering of innovation. I was pleased to read in this Comics Worth Reading review that Campbell’s never-named but vital “Man at the Crossroads” is Paul Gravett, recognized for his Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. (I read that last year, too.)

Both Eisner and Campbell depict themselves as well-meaning, befuddled strivers, just trying to make enough money to live off this art thing they like doing. Their colleagues are more colorful; their women mysterious; their successes serendipitous, surprising, and often short-lived.

While Campbell and his crowd have no more money than Eisner’s, they’re focused on art. The stories they tell tend not to be heroic, unless they’re working just for the (American) money. Instead, the heroism in How to Be an Artist comes in pushing against the conventions of the comics business as it had been set up back in the “Golden Age.”

Here’s Campbell’s own review of Life, in Pictures, which focuses on Eisner’s late artistic development rather than his early experiences.

Blades

Two highly compelling book-length comics that I found in the Young Adult Graphic Novels section of my local library, though I'm still not convinced they belong anywhere near there—

Clyde Fans, by Seth, because there's nothing teenagers like to read more than delicately paced studies of two brothers who tried to sell electric fans to Canadian retailers midway through the last century.

From Hell, by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell, because there's nothing parents like their teenagers to read more than a depiction of the Jack the Ripper murders in all their bloody, full-frontal, sex-and-gore detail.

Yes, this is part of my ongoing meditation/grouse about how in America the comics form makes people think that books are more appropriate for younger readers than their subjects, stories, and styles should really indicate.

Though I wonder if the real explanation for that shelving is that the YA librarian was more aggressive about buying well-reviewed graphic novels, just to make sure they got into the collection.