Comic Books and Graphic Novels (continued)

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He thinks the golden age of comics was the 1930s when the Sunday supplements devoted whole pages to Prince Valiant, Tarzan, and Gasoline Alley. In the 1920s, cars were still relatively rare and people were obsessed with them, which made Gasoline Alley as exciting for its time as space travel is today. When he mentioned Skeezix as the first baby to grow up in the comics, several people in one of his "older" audiences smiled because they remembered babies in their own families being called Skeezix.

One of the points Feiffer made was how important writing is to comics. Of course the drawings are what people see first, but the comic strip has its own form of language. He said that when he first read Samuel Becket's Waiting for Codot, he recognized it as comic strip dialogue. He couldn't believe the way it resonated with him, the way the phrases stuck in his head. Becket was the best cartoonist he ever read-even though he did not draw.

Feiffer said he learned a lot from Becket, including that what you're not telling the reader is as important as what you reveal. Suspense is when you don't know what's happening. In Waiting for Godot, nothing is happening, like in Seinfeld, which would never have been on the air if it had not been for Samuel Becket. In a similar way, Star Wars would never have been made if not for Alex Raymond's Flash Gordon.

Another aspect of comic strips that he finds fascinating is the crossover among genres. Milton Caniff, with his Terry and the Pirates, was a genius when he created the adventure strip by turning comic art into a storyboard. His Dragon Lady came straight from the movies and for generations circled back around in the popular culture. Soldiers in Vietnam were still using her as a reference point, and Anne McCaffrey (see her Margaret A. Edwards Award, p. 225) jokingly refers to herself as the Dragon Lady.

Comic books were a natural outgrowth of comic strips and almost from the very beginning newspapers began reprinting their strips, binding them together, and selling them through newsstands on a monthly, bimonthly, or quarterly basis. The term "comic magazine" was also used. It was the 1930s before original material was prepared and whole books were devoted to single characters.

The terms comic strips and comic books became so firmly entrenched that they continued to be used even when creators moved away from the kinds of humorous events and jokes that had been the norm in such "innocent" strips as Mutt and Jeff, The Yellow Kid, and Krazy Kat. What comic books have in common is their format and binding, not the subject matter or the attitudes that their creators take toward their stories. Every possible genre—adventure, romance, tragedy, informative nonfiction, horror, science fiction and fantasy—has been treated in so-called comic books.

Graphic novels are comic books that have gone off to college and come back with new sophistication and respect. Actually, many of them are not so different from comic books except that they have more durable bindings and cost more money. One of the reasons that the new term is coming into popularity is that it is more accurate because it focuses on what such books have in common, which is the drawings. The Merriam Webster Collegiate Dictionary (tenth edition, 2001) dates the term graphic novel at 1978 and defines it as "a fictional story for adults that is presented in comic-strip format and published as a book." Feiffer said while many graphic novels are junk, they are still the place where the most interesting forms of cartooning are being done today, especially with the alternative presses.