For someone who teaches about the graphic novel,
compiling an all-time top five list is challenging. It’s not just the way that
such a list is compiled, making agonising decisions over which favourites to
exclude, but also because it raises tricky questions of definition. That the
term refers not just to fiction but to life-writing, as in all manner of
memoirs, diaries and so on, is accepted – but beyond that there is little
consensus.
If there are multiple volumes (as with Neil Gaiman’s The Sandman or
the Hernandez brothers’ Love and Rockets
series), should the whole series be counted as one epic graphic
novel, or should only individual volumes be eligible?
And what about a book like Phoebe Gloeckner’s The Diary of a
Teenage Girl(2002), which tells the story of an authorial alter-ego,
Minnie, through a combination of prose diary entries, illustrations with
captions, comic-strip narratives, letters, poems and photographs? Or Joe Sacco’s comic-strip documentary
journalism?
I’ve chosen five books that I (and many others) regard as
central to the graphic novel canon. They are all richly textured, powerful,
nuanced books that are immediately arresting but also reward repeated
re-reading.
1. Watchmen (1987)
Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen works
on so many levels – it is, among other things, a whodunnit, a love story, a
commentary on Cold War politics and an exploration of fundamental philosophical
and ethical questions.
Watchmen is an homage to – and a deconstruction of – the
classic superhero comic-strip narrative, which in turn has inspired numerous
subsequent revisions of the genre, from Pixar’s The Incredibles (2004)
to the Marvel Comics (and later MCU’s) Avengers civil war storyline.
Shifting points of view, disrupting chronology, layering
texts within texts, Watchmen is a hugely ambitious narrative that discloses new
details with every fresh reading. It’s also a real page-turner.
2. Maus (1991)
Art Spiegelman’s masterpiece, Maus,
probably did more than any other graphic novel to make readers and critics take
this genre seriously.
It’s the story of the author’s father, Vladek, who
survived Auschwitz, as well as the story of Spiegelman’s relationship with him.
Controversially representing Jews as anthropomorphised mice, preyed upon by
German cat-people and often betrayed by Polish pig-people, Maus nevertheless
resists stereotypes. The novel represents both its author and his father as
flawed, complex individuals who struggle in different ways to deal with the
legacy of a trauma that makes itself felt in every aspect of their lives.
3. Ghost World (1997)
Daniel Clowes’ Ghost World is the shortest – and
at first glance the most straightforward – of my choices. It’s a bittersweet
tale of the friendship, and gradual estrangement, of recent high-school
graduates Enid and Becky.
Cynical and vulnerable, with a sardonic sense of humour
and a nostalgic streak, Enid is, in part, a portrait of the artist as a young
girl grappling with her sexuality, ethnicity and her conflicting expectations
of herself.
But Ghost World is also a powerful evocation of what it
is like to drift, ghost-like, through a nondescript, soulless urban environment
that is itself ghostly. Full of quirky characters and memorable images, Ghost
World manages, paradoxically, to represent boredom and ennui vividly and
entertainingly.
4. Jimmy Corrigan, the
Smartest Kid on Earth (2000)
Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan was
the first graphic novel to be awarded major literary prizes on both sides of
the Atlantic – the American Book Award and The Guardian First Book Award.
Like Watchmen, Jimmy Corrigan has a complex, non-linear
structure and subverts conventional notions of (super)heroism. Like Maus, it is
a book about fathers and sons; and like Ghost World, it has a protagonist who
is drifting aimlessly through life, alienated from the world around him.
Yet it is visually and formally more radical than any of
the other books on this list. Chris Ware’s dark palette and landscape format
and his use of diagrams, instructions and definitions make the book, as an
object and text, highly unusual. In terms of narrative, too, Ware is a great
innovator – the absence of exposition and page numbering, the abrupt
transitions between a historical narrative focusing on Jimmy’s grandfather and
the present-day narrative focusing on Jimmy, the use of surreal dream sequences
and the disruption of conventional panel sequencing all make Jimmy Corrigan
challenging.
But it’s well worth the effort. It is a beautiful,
heartbreaking story that has been much imitated but never bettered.
5. Fun Home (2006)
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home is
a self-consciously literary coming of age novel that pays homage to James
Joyce, Marcel Proust and Oscar Wilde, among others.
It is a moving memoir about the author’s relationship
with her father, whose queer sexuality finds an echo in her lesbianism, and
whose (possible) suicide haunts the book.
Adapted as an award-winning musical, Fun Home reached an
audience that might never have encountered the bestselling graphic novel. Yet
while Fun Home the musical is fun, just like the film adaptations of Watchmen
and Ghost World, it can’t quite do justice to the complexity of the original.
