Picture It: The Diverse Possibilities of Graphic Novel Literature

While comics and graphic novels seem an easy format to couple with the 2011 Teen Read Week[TM] theme of Picture It, the diversity of viewpoints and genres the format supports can be mined for something deeper than simply offering the picture-positive. The part of graphic literature involves creative expression, may rely on other visual resources, can nimbly portray parody (a literary genre that resonates well with many teens), and allow narratives told from one viewpoint to be retold from another. Let's look at some fine examples of these, each of which offers teen readers an invitation to read for the fun of it--and for the discovery of visual impact on storytelling as well. Sid Jacobson and Ernie Colon have been working in the comics industry for decades. More recently, they have been collaborating on nonfiction projects in which pictures are essential to the narrative or provide key ways of understanding events that mere words cannot. Their most recently published project, Anne Frank (Hill and Wang, 2010), was sponsored by the Anne Frank House, an Amsterdam museum that preserves and gives public display to the World War II hiding place Anne's diary made famous. Anne's father, Otto Frank, was a lifelong amateur photographer, and it is many of his own candid snapshots of his family that are among the thousands of images the museum has collected in pursuit of continuing scholarship on the Jewish experience under Nazism. The watercolor images throughout Jacobson and Colon's work--which is a biography of Anne, not a retelling of her diary--are based purposefully on this photo archive. Because of that, the reader sees not just styles of the time, but the Frank family's actual clothing, not just the artist's interpretation of mood through posture, but the postures of the family members as they aged and became increasingly stressed. Jacobson and Colon also use the format to an advantage that is both subtle and uniquely edifying: the sequential art medium permits the writer or artist to present the personal as well as the public aspects of a historical moment as fully intertwined. Unlike a narrative text in which one reads one type of account and then possibly the other, or a film in which only the splitting of a screen--which itself requires a visual stunning of thought in preference of action--the historically based graphic novel text can move the reader from the personal to the public within a small amount of page space, requiring the mind to attend to what the eye shows: the personal has a public context, the public has a personal effect. In Anne Frank, this is effected through the use of panels that show what is going on outside the Secret Annex, cut between witnessing events as Anne and her family experienced life while in hiding. Picture it: we have our own lives, our own expressions and styles, and yet we are surrounded by a world that informs how we can express ourselves, where we can be seen--and when we must remain hidden. Lynda Barry, whose often quirky comics do not use the medium of photography as a basis, shares what amounts to a rich course in learning how to picture for oneself, in Picture This (Drawn and Quarterly, 2009). Barry gently taps the reader's creativity and encourages nascent visual expression through a series of nondogmatic exercises that feature a Near-Sighted Monkey, the long-established Barry cartoon character of Marlys, and Barry's own exercise doodles. Even those with no desire to create the visual will be engaged by her invitation to use one's eyes to do more than simply look, but to also gaze, stare, and otherwise see. Picture it: finding your inner visual artist can tap a supply of imagination such as you never realized you had. What happens when a contemporary artist is given a venue for collaboration with those from the past? France's great fine arts museum, the Louvre, contracted with comics publisher NBM for a series of graphic novels featuring art within the museum. …