Drawing Power

COMIC STRIP

The Adventures of Prose Guy

Prose Guy can no longer ignore a growing force in the publishing universe. It's his day of reckoning with graphic novels' ... drawing power!

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Maybe Scott McCloud will help me sort this out.

I've been looking forward to the final "SPLAT!" offering, in which the man billed as "one of the great theorists of comics" will be holding forth. McCloud made his name 15 years ago with "Understanding Comics," a groundbreaking deconstruction of the cartoonist's art that itself takes the form of a 215-page graphic novel.

It's not really a novel, of course.

"Graphic novel" is "a goofy term," McCloud tells his listeners. "The first graphic novel that got a lot of play was Will Eisner's 'Contract With God.' The thing's an anthology. The next graphic novel that got a lot of play was 'Maus,' and it's a memoir. There are very few graphic novels that are actually graphic novels.

"What they are is a publishing shorthand that says: big fat comic with a spine -- and people get that."

Now McCloud is taking audience questions, and here comes one that seems aimed in my direction.

What about those still-numerous naysayers, he is asked, who resist the idea that books filled with word balloons should be taken as seriously as pure prose? Isn't there a way to educate those annoying old fogies -- perhaps through some kind of "adult literacy campaign for comics"?

Sounds good to me. After all, isn't education what I'm here for?

McCloud offers a different perspective. Some people will never get it, he says.

"And it's okay. They'll die."

'A Whole Lot of Little Seesaws'

It's easy to forgive McCloud a bit of coldblooded glee at the rising status of his art form. All you have to do is think back to how utterly unappreciated it was -- in this country, at least -- when he was launching his career a quarter-century back.

"We have to remind ourselves once in a while just how incredibly fast this has all happened," he says. It hasn't been that long since trying to interest American publishers in graphic novels was "beating what looked like a dead horse." Suddenly, seven years ago, "the horse opened its eyes. And then, like 7,000 horses came over the hill."