Broken Frontier

Over the holidays I spent a week in Boulder, Colorado, my hometown. Whenever I’m in that neck of the woods I try to do a signing at Time Warp Comics, where I bought some of my very first SANDMAN trade paperbacks as a magenta-haired teenager.

This year the signing was especially fun--we sold out of AIR and VIXEN trades and I met old friends and made some new ones. Afterward, while I was browsing the racks, I picked up THE COLOR OF EARTH (First Second), the first book in Kim Dong Hwa’s trilogy about a mother and daughter in rural Korea. I thought of it as plane reading--something fun, pretty to look at and not too heavy. I figured I’d read a couple of chapters and then spend the rest of the flight back to Seattle watching Star Trek on my iPhone.

As it turned out, I didn’t watch any Star Trek at all. COLOR OF EARTH was the best OGN I’d read in years. The elegant manhwa-influenced art was well matched by a  slice-of-life storyline that was sweet and compelling without ever crossing the line into sugary pap. It was, in short, exactly the kind of ‘literary OGN’ that everybody talks about and nobody buys. And therein lies the problem.

For years, mainstream literary circles have been aflutter over graphic novels. (Jeeves, look! A book with pictures! How very Now.) Yet almost no graphic novels make it on to  bestseller lists, or even Best-Of lists. The few that do gain traction in the mainstream are treated with a kind of gracious condescension by its gatekeepers.

When PERSEPOLIS was hitting big, a short interview with Marjane Satrapi appeared in the New York Times Magazine that made me laugh out loud: the interviewer was surprised that Satrapi insisted her creation was a comic book, not a ‘graphic novel’, and flabbergasted when she said the headscarf was no worse than the miniskirt as a public symbol of female subjugation. (Good gracious me, Jeeves!) It was clear the interviewer didn’t quite know what to do with her, or with her book. Mainstream enthusiasm for GHOST WORLD and AMERICAN SPLENDOR was likewise half-apologetic, half-explanatory.

In more recent years the tide has begun to turn a liiittle bit, and confessional lit like FUN HOME and AMERICAN-BORN CHINESE has received mainstream praise and press with a minimum of underlying snootiness. This is excellent. However, the dent literary OGNS have made in literature is still too small to be self-sustaining. The built-in audience industry forecasters predicted would follow in the wake of PERSEPOLIS et al never materialized. Literature buffs seem to like talking about comics more than they like buying them, no matter how book-market-oriented the stories in those comics are.

To this day, the publication of a literary OGN by a mainstream comics company (like Vertigo’s dark, cheeky offering INCOGNEGRO) is hailed as a suicide mission by industry bloggers, and they’re usually right. (The sole one-star Amazon review for INCOGNEGRO complains that it’s “written like a comic book”. You can’t make this stuff up.)

A panel from Incognegro

Even those of us who read and love comics are, I think, subconsciously affected by the mainstream perception of the medium. Though THE COLOR OF EARTH is packaged and presented like a novel, when I picked it up I was not expecting a piece of literature. Afterward I felt sheepish about it. (Baa, Jeeves!)

I still don’t know what it’ll take to cross the blood-brain barrier between comics and lit, but I hope we figure it out soon. OGNs like Kim Dong Hwa’s magical trilogy deserve to be front and center on the shelves of even the most jaded book snob. Until that happens, whenever anybody says “You write comics? I read R. Crumb!” I will continue to feel a strong urge to throw him out of my house.