CSotD: Those Other Comics, if that’s what they are
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At Comics Reporter, Tom Spurgeon makes a plea to National Cartoonists Society members today to step outside their accustomed pattern and nominate Raina Telgemeier for the Reuben this year.
The NCS' big award, the outstanding cartoonist of the year aka The Reuben, has mostly gone to newspaper strip cartoonists. That makes sense given its provenance and emphasis. The thing is, though, it's actually open for people in all expressions and some of its best winners come outside the newspaper strip realm.
With that in mind, why wouldn't you want to give one to Raina Telgemeier? She absolutely fits the profile of past winners in terms of her broad appeal and commercial reach, there is an undeniable power that her work has with her fans that is the envy of nearly everyone, and she's flat-out historically important.
It's an interesting proposal, particularly when you can still see the heelmarks from a few years ago, when NCS was finally dragged along by popular demand and a bit of logic to recognize webcomics.
It's also, on a much smaller scale, interesting that I would endorse the idea, since my main interest is in strips and, as I look to clean up and reorganize my morning bookmarks, I've been thinking of eliminating the comic book sites because my interest in superheroes is pretty much nil.
But, then, the issue of defining cartoons is at the heart not only of Spurgeon's proposal but of a development that is causing great distress within the graphic publishing business, which is the New York Times' decision to cut down their lists of Best Sellers and eliminate both the graphic novel and manga listings.
Michael Cavna covers it there, and Heidi MacDonald comments here, and Publishers Weekly covers it here.
If your eyes are starting to roll up at what sounds like a lot of insider baseball, stick with me, because, while I do like comics, I'm still not sure how much it matters, or, at least, how much I care.
Perhaps one factor to toss in at the start is that, as best I recall, the split of the NYT Best Sellers from fiction and non-fiction into subcategories began when Garfield reprints began to dominate the fiction list. Or it may have been "101 Uses for a Dead Cat."
But it wasn't "Maus" and it wasn't literature in the sense of anything that was going to challenge the mind.
Which is fine with me, until you then decide that "Maus" and "101 Uses for a Dead Cat" belong on the same list because … oh, you tell me why, and please don't start with "Comics: They're Not Just For Kids Anymore!"
And, as you explain it, include in your rationale the fact that, while both Dostoevsky's "Notes from Underground" and Bob Hope's "I Owe Russia $1200" were told entirely in words, with no pictures, they are generally not considered to be in the same category, or even the same subcategory.
Whiz! Bang! Pow! Russian Literature! It's Not Just Depressing Anymore!
By the same token, I don't think "graphic novel" is a particularly useful category in itself, particularly since so many "graphic novels" turn out to be "graphic memoirs."
Or "hybrids" or "illustrated novels," which is where publishers quarrel over what to call "Diary of a Wimpy Kid" and "The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian," which are told partly in words and partly in pictures and so logically are the same thing.
It reminds me of people who go on and on about Panama Red and Acapulco Gold and just how it was grown and what particular high it would impart, and the time a less philosophical friend interrupted with: "There are only two kinds of grass: The kind that gets you off and the kind that doesn't. I like the kind that gets me off."
There are several types of books that utilize graphics either entirely or in large part. Some of them get me off, and some don't, but I kind of doubt the NYTimes or anyone else is going to adopt that standard.
But it's handy that Raina Telgemeier's name has come up, because she is not only known for her own graphic non-fiction but as the adaptor/illustrator for the Babysitters Club series, which is not only fiction rather than non-fiction but is, with all due respect, piffle.
Entertaining, well-done piffle, but hardly on a literary/life-changing scale with her non-fiction.
I found "Smile" good reading, and not in the remote, nostalgic way you might enjoy "Where the Wild Things Are," but on its own merits, as you might enjoy the Little House or Narnia series.
As for the piffle which is part of this undefined category, there is the notion that "at least they're reading something," but I'm not seeing that graphic novels are more apt to inspire an appetite for reading books without pictures than were Superman and Batman comics a few generations ago.
As a kid, I read comics and I read books, but I never thought of them as the same thing or even closely related.
But here's where the NYTimes issue comes in: None of my gang, as far I know, reads the NYTimes, and, if they include in their reviews that a book was on the list, it's because they saw that on the cover, not because the listing drove them to the book.
I suspect it also goes back to the marijuana analogy: When someone had a load of grass that got you off, word spread.
And, logically, how does a book find its way onto the best seller list in the first place?
Kids — and adults — talk to each other about what they like. Word spreads.
It's not all word-of-mouth. It involves a lot of marketing.
But the initial burst of sales comes before that listing, and I would suggest that publishers look to that element and not get too worked up over graphic novels and graphic memoirs and hybrids and illustrated novels and what is listed where.
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