Comic-Con International :: The Many Faces of the Graphic Novel

Featuring (left to right, top to bottom): Mark Siegel, Jeffrey Brown, Becky Cloonan,
Renée French, Jim Ottaviani, Andy Runton, and Doug TenNapel

No matter how many comic books are turned into feature films and television shows, it is the graphic novel that has truly promoted comic storytelling as a legitimate literary art form. These books come in numerous shapes, sizes, and formats, and the topics journey well beyond collected series or standard superhero fare. To honor these works, Comic-Con brought together six creators who represented various aspects of the medium.

Moderated by Mark Siegel from First Second Books, the panel included Jeffrey Brown (Clumsy, Incredible Change-Bots), Becky Cloonan (East Coast Rising, American Virgin), Renée French (The Ticking, The Ninth Gland), Jim Ottaviani (Cowboys, Bone Sharps, and Thunder Lizards, Two-Fisted Science), Andy Runton (Owly), and Doug TenNapel (Creature Tech, Gear). Here are some highlights from that event.

Mark: Each one of these creators holds at least one genre of the graphic novel. Andy has the children's comics category, Jim has non-fiction and scientific comics, Doug for wild speculative fiction, Jeffrey for his autobiography, among other things, Renée for strange and beautiful tales, and Becky for these ethnic, manga-influenced fictions. Right there at this table is a great case to be made for the fact that graphic novels [are] an almost unlimited, endless, and unexplored format. So I think [we] start with, what is the graphic novel?

Jim: I've been using the graphic novel for about ten years to tell true stories about scientists, and for me that's quite natural. If you've ever had the misfortune of being exposed to scientific publications, you notice they're full of pictures. Seriously, you can't crack open a journal of differential equations without running across figure after figure and graph after graph-using images to communicate scientific ideas and concepts. What I try to do is also communicate about the lives of the scientists who actually make these discoveries. It's a really wonderful and enjoyable fit between subject matter and form.

Renée: I'm not as articulate as Jim and that's kind of why I do what I do, because I mostly make pictures. I like to tell stories but I'm not really that good with words, so by putting pictures together in a book you can make a world and tell the story you want.

Jeffrey: I try not to think too much about what defines a graphic novel. A lot of my work so far has been autobiographical and I think using the form of comics for personal stories just makes sense [because] you can pack in a lot of emotion in a very small space.

Andy: I didn't really set out to do graphic novels. I'd always read comics as a kid, I loved animation but I didn't really have the patience [to do it], and when it came time for me to tell my own stories, all that stuff that I loved got combined into this. What drew me to these thicker books was that I knew it wasn't going to be "to be continued." It's a fully contained story, [and] I still consider graphic novels to be longer format comics.

Becky: Graphic novels are a little [intimidating to create]. At about 170-pages each they're really hard to get through. I feel like we work and work and when it comes out it's like a drop in this giant ocean. So I'm leaning towards the shorter graphic novel, something that's like 60 pages.

Andy: It's a hard mix because it takes like 6 months to make a graphic novel but less than 10 minutes for somebody to read it.

Becky: It's really painful to think about it. I've been working on a [comic series] and I really like having something out every month. But then bookstores don't pick it up and you have to rely solely on the direct market. It's this weird thing.

Doug: For me, the graphic novel represents freedom for the creator. I come from a lot of different disciplines of mass media. I make video games, movies, TV shows. Of all the mediums, the graphic novel is by far the freest, and part of it is because printing books is a lot cheaper than producing a television show. There's less power struggle over getting it out to the audience because if any publisher wasn't willing to publish one of my graphic novels, I can self publish it or put it out on the Internet. Whereas, I can never reach ABC's audience, I can put out a video on the Internet, but it would look very different than one of ABC's shows. But for each of us, the basic work that we do is professional enough to compete with other forms of media. Those of you who have read my graphic novels know that the subject matter is very different then the subject matter in the TV shows and videogames I've made, and it's because [with] the graphic novel, no one ever said no.

Mark: What are the constraints of the graphic novel from a creator's standpoint?

Doug: Financial is the biggest constraint. I can spend 6 months on a graphic novel and some of us will make $3000. But I'm a sole provider for a family of 4, I have a house payment, so I can't do that all the time. You do own the intellectual property, or at least a chunk of it, so if something gets made [into a movie, TV show or game] then you're doing good.

Andy: I can talk about the constraints in terms of my publisher, Top Shelf. It doesn't do a lot of floppies, which are single-issue [books] with no spine that aren't considered graphic novels. Floppies don't have a shelf life. They are up for a certain amount of time and then disappear, whereas graphic novels have a spine and they're on a shelf. So you have to have enough pages to [make] a spine. Financially speaking, the more pages you have, the thicker the book, the more money you'll make because you can [print] a $30 book versus a $10 book. The cost to print a $30 book is not proportional. I don't know how much how it would cost, but [say it costs] $3 to print a $30 book and $2 to print a $10 book, so you make more on those bigger books. In the end it pays off, but a 300-page book may take 3 years to make, and all that time you're not getting any money. So that's a big investment if it doesn't work.

Mark: Something I'm interested in, personally, is the role of the editor. There's a history in the early days of the super-hero comics [where] the editors and publishers owned all the work and controlled every facet [of it] in a very ruthless way. Then with indy comics there was a whole backlash against that. Editors were basically burned at the stake.

Doug: If some guy covered my salary for a year and I was just cranking out hero books, he can say whatever he wants about my work and I'll do it. He's my boss and he'll pay me. Independent comics are different. They're real comic fans, they love getting books out and they love your work.

Renée: At Fantagraphics you had an editor by name. You worked on the book and you'd get a call where he [checked in], then you'd hand him the book and it would be published. It's not like now, [especially] with the kids' books I do. [They say,] "Let's do a dummy book. Can you move that little bit up? Can you make him look a little less psychotic? That bird looks stoned." Once you have the dummy they leave you alone.

Jeffrey: Maybe comics doesn't have such a strong editing presence [because] as a medium it's relatively new and there has been relatively little money in that. I think working with a bigger publisher, where there's more money involved, the editing becomes more hands-on.

Andy: For me, the ideal editor is the guy who reads your story and asks you the kind of question that you had in the back of your mind but you weren't asking yourself. He puts his finger right on it and helps you tell the story you're trying to tell because you can get too wrapped up in it. I show my stories to my mom first. She's my first editor now.

Mark: I think the best editors are people who come alongside you, the creator, and throw challenges at you, drive you to produce your very best. My criticism for a lot of what's out in the graphic novel world today is that there are some things that are good that could have been great with just a little bit of "George Lucas" editing.

Jim: The first thing I ever published was a graphic novel, which was ridiculous. But the reason it happened that way is because the stories told me that it had to happen that way, and I'm guessing that that's going to be true for lots of people. As you get into the process of making them, you know.

Doug: I did graphic novels because I was only interested in telling large stories. It's [also] as much work on the print side, prep side, solicitation, and barcode on the back, to do one 270-page graphic novel as it is to do a 24- page comic book. So I can do either 6 books a year or 1 book a year. I'm going to do 1 book a year that's going to be the equivalent of that 6-book plan, and regular bookstores will carry my work. I think the graphic novel has a better shot with your average American reader because people don't go to comic book stores. It's an old fashioned comic buyer who buys them every month.

Jeffrey: I grew up as a Marvel kid and I really wanted to draw comics. By the time I got into college I'd started reading alternative comics like Eightball, Acme Novelty and Julie Doucet's work. I was at art school and thought I was going to be a painter, grew disenchanted with fine art, so I started drawing graphic novels.

Andy: I was also a big Marvel kid, then right in the early 90s, the X-Men "Inferno" series got so crazy and I got so frustrated that I just gave up. When I got back into comics with Hellboy, I only bought graphic novels.

Becky: I'm a Marvel kid, too, but I started picking up manga when I was in high school. I went to school for animation and after a few really near misses I got sick of trying to look for a job and went into comics. I actually started working with Tokyopop because they approached me [to do] a graphic novel.

Becky: Everyone I know who has an agent is working with big book publishers.

Renée: I didn't have an agent and I was working for Simon & Schuster. I [understood] that you really didn't need one unless you were further along in more complicated things-movies and TV. I have a lawyer [to negotiate book contracts].

Andy: I just do Owly, and my contract [with Top Shelf] is for a limited amount of time, but it is for all of Owly. So if I do [anything] else with Owly, that stuff goes through Top Shelf. But everybody has different deals.

Jim: I now have agents [and] I found it very valuable because work that I wanted came to me, [and it] wouldn't have come otherwise. But you don't have to have one.

Doug: I have a Hollywood agent that I do my TV shows or movies with, but they don't touch my book deals. They don't know comics and there's not the profit there to work with contracts. Now when a publisher starts saying they're going to take your work and option it automatically for 8 years and take whatever percentage of the movie deals, then my agent gets involved because [it's] cutting into an entertainment piece of the pie that is traditionally for my lawyer or agent.

Mark: My answer is a bit similar to the editors. There are good agents and there are bad agents. There are good lawyers and there are bad lawyers. It depends on if you have someone who is genuinely a believer in you as a creator first, and that will make a good partnership.

Andy: The cool thing about Comic-Con is everybody here is a misfit, but misfits are becoming the culture. So I don't know if [the industry] is expanding because of that, but we're getting more readers because what we do is becoming more acceptable.

Jim: I got a call from an editor wanting me to do some work, and it was because of a book I did years ago. This editor was probably 15 [back then], but what has happened is that there has been enough good work done [over the years] and we actually held on to some readers by virtue of the graphic novel form. And now the 15-year-olds who dug Creature Tech or Owly are assistants to editors [and effecting change]. That's the future I'd like to see, and I'm really happy that I'm already seeing it.

Becky: So many [mainstream publishers] are hopping on. So many of my friends have gotten publishing deals, it just seems like it's going to bring comics more into the mainstream and makes them more readily available. If we can get kids reading them now, they'll grow up and they'll remember that they read comics, give comics to their kids and so on.

Mark: The chain bookstores are also starting young graphic novel sections so there's evidence [of change]. And as a publisher we certainly want to contribute to that.

Andy: That's the thing, pictures were for little kids and you wanted more and more words as you got older because that made you an adult. But we don't really age that way anymore. It's like Jeffrey's [autobiography] books. These are issues I'm dealing with but it's in a comic book. We don't mind seeing pictures and it's great because that means [graphic novels] can be serious books.

Special thanks to Gina Gagliano of First Second Books for her help in producing this panel.