About the graphic novel
Wordless storytelling.
When we started making marks on walls of caves, we didn't use symbols for ideas and nouns. We used representations for what was around us. We linked the representations in graphic ways that conveyed temporal or linear progressions — small and powerful stories.
As families gathered to communities and evolved into cultures, storytelling in its endless forms also evolved reflecting their nascent worlds. The medieval church developed virtual comic books, the Biblia Papaurum, a way of conveying to an illiterate world the complex story of the New Testament and its roots in the Old Testament. The Mayan Culture demonstrated that the painting surface could be a rectangle, a circle — any shape — and could be divided up in non-linear and dynamic design and still convey narrative.
In the early twentieth century, Winsor McCay, a newspaper cartoonist — unaware of convention indeed before convention — designed panel comic strips for brilliant stories in which the bizarre humor would have done any surrealist proud. Pulp novels were invented: small graphic works named for the poor quality paper and known in part for semi-pornographic images and stories. The comic book developed, the value of which was quite controversial in my childhood of the 1950s.
In the 60s the underground comic surfaced, much to my disapproval. I considered it too easy. I thought it would be better to work within the confines of the convention and push the boundaries rather than to trash all the rules. Thinking outside the box must include the box in order to be outside of it. However this genre certainly did open up many possibilities.
The graphic novel today has developed in its own right. Most of the themes are trite, adolescent, superhero, social commentary. However there are those who have taken graphic novels to a very high place. Frans Masereel, like Thomas Hogarth before him, drew novels whose themes include love, longing and generally the world’s various pitfalls. Asalto y Paranoia represents an initial toe wetting for me in this format. Check back. Let’s see where this goes.