Veteran comics editor Paul Gravett enthralled the audience at Edinburgh’s International Book Festival on Friday with his passionate presentation on the history of comic books. Gravett, who recently edited the mammoth 1001 Comics You Must Read Before You Die compilation, appeared as part of the festival’s ‘Stripped‘ theme, and spoke of the amazing leaps and bounds that comics have made recently in becoming accepted as a legitimate art-form. Starting, he claimed, with Chris Ware winning the Guardian First Book Award in 2001 for Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, comics have slowly started to gain a measure of respect amongst the literary establishment, a respect further cemented last year when Mary & Bryan Talbot’s Dotter of Her Father’s Eyes won the Costa Award for Biography.
Such respect has been a long time coming; Wordsworth was an early detractor of graphic storytelling, and his haughty dismissal of the medium set the literary establishment’s tone for much of the following two centuries. Goethe was reputedly a fan, though, and in 1967 Salvador Dali said that, “comics will be the culture of the year 3794.” Actually, argued Gravett, it’s happened a little earlier than that, but it’s still only in the last 30 years or so that the medium has really “woken up” to the storytelling possibilities of the comic book format. This has been seen in the postmodern superhero stories of Alan Moore, Frank Miller and Grant Morrison, but also in the innovative work of writers and artists like Chris Ware, Charles Burns, Daniel Clowes and Alison Bechdel.
While everyone, Gravett said, has their own personal history of comic books, he has put together a list of undeniable “geniuses” whose work has shaped and transformed the art-form over the last two centuries. It ranges from familiar luminaries like Hergé, Charles M. Schulz, Will Eisner, Jack Kirby, Osamu Tezuka and Alan Moore to more obscure (but no less influential) auteurs like Winsor McCay, George Herriman, Leo Baxendale, Milton Caniff and Hector Oesterheld. Gravett also briefly mentioned rising star Jason Shiga, whose work in the digital realm, he suggests, represents “the future of comics.” Many of these writers and artists will be featured in the first ever exhibition on the history of comic books at the British Museum next year, an event in which Gravett is personally involved and about which he is clearly hugely excited. With comics making such cultural inroads, he said, they are getting closer and closer to being recognised as a legitimate art-form in their own right.
[suffusion-the-author]
[suffusion-the-author display='description']