Some of us don't watch television, and that's fine. Some never go to the theater; different strokes. Some never listen to music; the gustibus, etc. Me? I avoid West End musicals. But to to boast that you never do X or Y, wear it like a badge of honor, or bring attention to the entire art form is the pride of the worst kind of dick. And yet: that's still a view you hear about graphic novels.
The problem could be that the form is still so young. Until recently, it wasn't unfair to assume that most comics revolved around superheroes and detectives, kiddie jokes and talking animals. When did things change? When did people start calling them "graphic novels" and taking them seriously?
Thirty years ago, I think, with Daniel Clowes' Ghost World, perhaps the first naturalistic 'literary' graphic novel to go mainstream. Some had challenged convention before: Alan Moore turned superhero stories on their head in his dark satire Watchmen; Art Spiegelman forced us to take talking animals seriously in the moving Holocaust story Maus. But Ghost World didn't try undermine existing tropes - it preferred to blithely ignore them. A novel (and later an Oscar-nominated film) about two cynical girls meandering toward adulthood in an unnamed American town didn't fall into any of the obvious genre silos-and when a novel does, critics have no other choice than calling it 'literary'.
Clowes has now broken seven years of silence Monica (Jonathan Cape, £20), and shook things up again. On the last page you may still be trying to figure out what kind of book it is is. It is part nuanced cradle-to-grave story of a woman, Monica, who longs to learn more about her parents, part critique of hollow American ideals from Vietnam to the present, through the creepy side of the flower power cult. the sixties and the cults of the seventies. . (Monica's hippie mother - who soon disappears - raises her among an "avalanche, an endless cascade of hirsute suitors and crazy roommates.") And it's partly a love letter to the schlock genre comics Clowes grew up on, because of the art style and pacing of it. telling stories to the bright, off-white tones of the paper it is printed on, changing the hue from one chapter to the next. (There is a subtle narrative reason for the color coding; not a single detail in this book is an accident.)
The story continues
We get a ghost story, supernatural historical fiction, a detective story, a conspiracy thriller: some may be "real," some may be stories-within-stories, written or created by Monica, whose memories are unreliable. The first chapter, in the style of 1960s war comics, ends abruptly with a GI's description of a terrible dream: "The world is opening up. Like a wound in the ground." It plants a seed of Lovecraftian dread that builds up everywhere.
We cannot resist stories, Clowes suggests; even a nightmarish story can be more appealing than the idea that life has no meaningful storyline at all - an idea also espoused in Emily Carroll's gothic psychological thriller. A guest in the house (Faber, £18.99), which may or may not be a ghost story. Abby, a housewife in Canada, does her best to love her distant stepdaughter and her dentist husband, but begins to question how his first wife died. Abby's waking life is dull black and white, but her psychedelic, fairytale nightmares throb with blood and neon; she longs to escape into it.
Erik Svetoft, on the other hand, is creepy Spa (Fantagraphics, £34.99) is completely black and white and all nightmarish from the creepy first line. An empty-looking man and woman stand in an apartment that we later find out is littered with corpses. "Do we live here?" he asks blankly. "I think so," she answers. They chat aimlessly about booking "one of those lovely relaxing weekends", before moving to a "nice" spa hotel. There are luxurious steam rooms and fluffy bathrobes - just ignore the black tendrils leaking from the walls. Really funny and really scary, it's Spirited Away meets Eraserhead, with a festering dollop of body horror.
People who claim that reading comics as an adult is a sign of arrested development - maybe they have a point. Many of this year's most memorable graphic novels were about children estranged from their parents. The Mom and Dad at Paul B Rainey's Why don't you love me? (Drawn & Quarterly, £18.99) - drawn like an old newspaper strip in Family Circus style - cannot remember the names of their two toddlers and barely bothers to clothe or feed them. Why would anyone be so terrible? We'll find out. What starts as a black absurdist comedy becomes an allegory for depression and mental illness, and then, heartwarmingly (if less compellingly), a love story across the Sliding Doors timeline.
Not every story has to be so formally difficult. Architect and illustrator Owen D Pomery's daring The hard switch (Avery Hill, £15.99), in which three explorers earn a living by salvaging a rare mineral from wrecked spaceships, is simple sci-fi, halfway between classic Star Wars and the rusty, rickety world of Firefly. Pomery's delightful art style is close to Tintin's line, but with everything very vaguely rumpled. I loved it, but it's over way too quickly, leaving a dozen threads dangling. Give us a follow!
Comics have rarely been less comic than the unusually dark crop of 2023. Half the books I've read end with an apocalypse, which makes it a bitter understatement Big ugly (Avery Hill, £14.99) all the more admirable. It is a sweet and sour slice of life of Ellice Weaver, best known for her beautiful illustrations for newspapers and magazines (including The Telegraph). With a Clowesian balance of vulnerability and snark, it follows a brother and sister in their thirties who move in together after a falling out with their father, and slip back into their feuding childhood dynamic, as siblings often do. They are catty and friendly, hopeless and hopeful, passive-aggressive and occasionally just plain aggressive. Weaver wonders whether people can ever truly change, and cleverly leaves the answer up for debate.
There is a similar gentle restraint to Camille Jourdy Juliette (Signed and quarterly, £23). Worried Juliette travels from Paris to visit her feuding but loving family in a small French town. We meet a large group of locals, watch them making love and pies, and spend the evenings in a messy bar. A lonely bachelor adopts a duck and names it Norbert. It's so pleasantly unhurried; Jourdy gives entire pages to empty streets in spring, or still lifes where you can almost feel the sunlight hanging in the air. And then Juliette leaves. Life goes on. If you think comics aren't your bag, this one might change your mind.
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