By Wendell Riley (wendellriley@threequartercomics.com)
 
Ever since we launched Three Quarter Comics and began working on properties like Southern Exposure and the continuation of the Terror of the Midnight Robber series, people have been using the term Graphic Novel to define our work.  As in, “You write Graphic Novels, right?” or, “Check out this website, these guys do great Graphic Novels…”.  I would like to implicitly state for the record that I have never written a Graphic Novel in my life, and I’ve never sat down and said to myself, “This idea will make a great Graphic Novel”.  If I sound a little nit-picky and a tad touchy about the whole thing allow me to explain further and hopefully shed some light on the subject with a bit of history.  Please don’t misunderstand my intentions either.  We appreciate the publicity, but this is an issue that runs much deeper than simple nomenclature, and is a problem that seems to be getting worse as time goes on.  

The term Graphic Novel was created as a marketing gimmick in the late 70’s to make a few comic books stand out from the rest of the pack.  The term was used in the 80’s and early 90’s by Marvel and DC to describe larger, glossy, more expensive, self-contained stories produced by top industry talents featuring established or sometimes original characters. These books were like glorified one-shots, often expertly written, beautifully illustrated and monumental (Marvel’s ‘first’ Graphic Novel featured Captain Marvel succumbing to cancer).  Others were pure sh!t, but that was okay.  Then came the late 90’s and early 00’s and the industry, on life support after its own bubble burst and desperate to create viable revenue streams, began slapping the term Graphic Novel on anything that had pictures, words and a cover price over five bucks.  Want to reprint a run of a series and sell it at Barnes & Noble?  Graphic Novel!  Have a collection of short stories that doesn’t fit into traditional publishing models?  Graphic Novel!  Want to get the attention of Hollywood, Television, or the Literati? Graphic Freaking Novel.
 
Time Magazine listed Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen as one of the best American novels of the last century, a plaudit that DC Comics has proudly listed on the back of every Watchmen reprint for the last decade or so.  Every time I see it I feel a little uncomfortable.  Look, I love comic books, I love them to death, but they aren’t novels.  In fact, calling them novels is kind of a ‘f*ck you’ to novelists everywhere. That is not to say that comics are lesser creations; they are just different literary beasts and they certainly require different creative tools to produce.  A novelist has the opportunity and burden to lead a reader with words; to guide them in imagining every detail of a situation through description and dialogue.  There are techniques that can be used to vary the depth and volume of the prose that is used (and certainly style is a factor here) but when broken down to its most basic technical level, what you read is what you get.  A comic book writer’s approach is slightly different.

Sure, the comic writer has to create the story, plot it and then script it, but beyond that phase he or she can rely on the artwork to enhance the text on a page.  However, this reliance also mandates that he or she must know when to get out of the way and let the art shine.  Economy of word use is vital to comic writers, as they must put their creative trust in the artist to create a synergistic fusion of the words and images on a page.  It is no easy feat.  The pace of telling a story with images is far different than with prose, and though it liberates you creatively on one hand it demands compromises with its rhythms and beats.  A character in a novel can digress for entire chapters on the very nature of a speck of dust, but such exploration would certainly wither on a comic book page.