I must confess that at the beginning of the semester, when one of my English professors assigned a graphic novel as required reading, I was a little bit nervous. Weren’t graphic novels just elongated comic strips? Doesn’t the position of illustrators on the artistic fringe suggest something about the level of high art that might be limited in such a medium?If I were to associate myself with a graphic novel, would I become subject to connotations of weird science fiction and other longtime disregarded genres of literature? These were the questions that made me realize the many problems each question imposes on sub-mainstream artistic genres. And as I discovered the many fallacies in each supposition, I was able to understand the importance of the medium’s contributions to visual and literary art.The novel, Alison Bechdel’s “Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic,” is, first of all, unlinked to any elements of science fiction, which threw off my original conception of the graphic novel medium.Furthermore, I realized it delved into very deep literary waters, as the style narrates a highly complex and realistic tale – much unlike the idea of the comic book hero’s supernatural, episodic adventures. These disparities caused me to reevaluate my prejudiced stance on graphic novels and, in the true fashion of artistic deconstruction, go to the history of the graphic novel as my primary resource.Around the 1920s and 1930s, a revival of the medieval woodcut tradition in Northern Europe occurred, which led to developing American techniques in comic illustration. As a result, long-form comic narratives emerged in newsprint, predating the modern comic book that became an enormous form of popular entertainment by the 1950s.The graphic novel diverged from the comic book around this time as a means of creating a more complex, mature narrative style and character development that sets it apart from comic books from an art history perspective. However, this taxonomic distinction should not be seen as an illegitimacy imposed on the comic book.In its modern form, the graphic novel covers the gamut of genres and subgenres, including the increasingly popular novels “Maus” and “V for Vendetta.”In this evolution of an artistic medium, we see the typical melding of multimedia that is responsible for the emergence of great art. The graphic novel fuses popular American literary and visual traditions and has brought about a new way of looking at a form associated inappropriately with “low art” of science fiction and mass print. This association is not inappropriate, because the graphic novel is not connected to science fiction, but rather because this connection between fine art and popular entertainment speaks for the devalued cultural feats accomplished by the medium’s origins.
