Graphic Novels?

[notdan]

Fancy picture-books!

I'm curious about how the community here feels about graphic novels. I'm not talking about comic books, necessarily, but more along the lines of works like Watchmen by Alan Moore and Sandman by Neil Gaiman. (I'm guessing most of you are more familiar with the film adaptation of Watchmen than the comic, if you are I heavily recommend that you check out the hard copy.)

Personally, I believe that Sandman is one of the best stories (or, more a collection of stories) ever told. The writing, despite done on top of essentially comic-panels, is superb--Gaiman at his best. (Also, if you're not familiar with Gaiman's work, I heavily recommend him, too!(Stardust, American Gods, Good Omens))

Anyone else have a favorite graphic novel? Believe they are fine literature or just children's things?

[enkindledpulsar]

I think graphic novels are an entirely different thing. The kind of remove the difficulty an author has with creating visuals in his/her work, but add to the difficulty of dialogue and shorter presentation of a large idea. I think both are difficult to create, and pretty much anything quality is good to read.
Of course, I have no experience whatsoever with graphic novels or comics at all. Haha.

[notmike]

I've never read Sandman, but a friend of mine was reading it over the summer and heavily recommended the series, so I plan on picking it up sometime. Watchmen, on the other hand, I have read. And like most of Alan Moore's other works its amazing. V for Vendetta, in the book form is better than the movie (which was amazing in its own right). And League of Extraordinary Gentleman is supposed to be fantastic as well.

[notdan]

I highly recommend Sandman, as well. It's one of the greatest groups of stories ever told, and part of it is due to the medium. If you're going to read any graphic novel, make it that one.

However, hard copies are incredibly expensive (part of the reason why graphic novels don't have quite the general appeal as novels, printing them is a bitch). I have a *cough*totally legitimate*cough* digital copy of it on my computer. It requires a special program to read which is free and easily found online. Reading it on a screen doesn't really do justice to the piece's aesthetic appeal, but it gets the story across. (The art style is incredible, imo.)

Maybe I'll bring back a hardcopy from home to show people who are interested. They're like massive tome, it's pretty amazing.

[quinlaninland]

I've read Watchmen and V for Vendetta and love them both. More so than the movies even though they were good in their rights.
I haven't heard of Sandman, but will definitely check it out once the semester is finally over.
As for recommendations, i read a 2 part graphic novel called Maus for a requirement for summer reading back in the day when i was in high school. Although it was a requirement i enjoyed reading it and that's what made me read the other part of it and that opened me to other graphic novels like the Watchmen.
So check out Maus if you haven't already, its about the life of a Jewish man during WWII and the Holocaust. But, interesting thing is the Jewish people in the "book" are mice, the Germans cats, the Americans dogs and i think either the Poles or Russians are pigs lol

[The Mariner]

While I have not read Sandman per se, I am a huge fan of Neil Gaiman and all of his work, so I imagine I should look into it at some point. Overall, though, the graphic novels I read aren't so much novels as they are web comics. And no, I don't mean a webcomic like xkcd.com/ (an example I hope will be sufficiently explanatory). More like what people like Evan Dahm (www.rice-boy.com/) or Aaron Diaz (dresdencodak.com/2007/02/08/pom/) do; digital graphic novels if you will.
I find that the whole art of graphic novels allows an author to forgo what might be unnecessary description, in order to focus more on dialog, plot, and characterization. But more than that, the artistry gives the author the ability to show their readers things in a way that words on a page might never be able to do. For example, in Evan Dahm's Rice Boy, there exists a myriad of different races and languages, not all of which use a conventional alphabet. There are several scene throughout the story with no English spoken whatsoever, and the importance of these scenes would be significantly diminished which proper illustration.

Case and point, the trill-folk:

[notdan]

I've never seen either of those two sites before, but I'm very happy that I know of them now. (Thanks, Mariner!) The Dresden Codak page is especially appealing, though I've only begun to look at the material on the site. I think he does a good job balancing the visual element with the text element.

The primary difference between comics like XKCD and Dresden Codak, or other (again) webcomics like QuestionableContent (www.questionablecontent.net) is that the latter tells a story. They work with a running narrative and consistent characters and have what I would call a plot, most of the time.

Putting pictures to paper in place of words is always an interesting choice. Lots of writing is imagery, trying to capture how a place looked--but getting a photograph of a location and a written description can often develop two very different feelings about the location. For example, I was thinking about Conrad's "To Build A Fire." If instead of the brilliant way Conrad describes the scenery we just had a photograph of the tundra and a superimposed thermometer, a lot of the story would be lost to the read.