Paul Gravett Spreads the Word
This story originally appeared in PW Comics Week on February 7, 2006 Sign up now!
by Douglas Wolk, PW Comics Week -- Publishers Weekly, 2/7/2006
Paul Gravett's Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know (Collins Design) is a sharply designed coffee-table book. But the book is also meant as a guide for the perplexed. It's a survey of English-language graphic novels, reproducing full pages from hundreds of volumes across the spectrum of time and genre, grouping them together thematically, and explaining the all their story hooks. Gravett, the author of Manga: Sixty Years of Japanese Comics and former co-publisher of the British magazine Escape, has been proselytizing for comics for decades, and he's got plans beyond the new book, too.
For more information on Gravett visit his Web site at www.paulgravett.com.
Comics Week: How did the form of Graphic Novels evolve?
Paul Gravett: Over many years of talking to the public, I've encountered all kinds of misgivings and prejudices people have about reading graphic novels at all. One of the problems is that the term "graphic novel" itself, which was meant to elevate comics and avoid the stigma of their name, has now in fact acquired its own stigma—it can be used by movie critics to describe, say, a bad, trashy science fiction film. Which is discouraging.
The British version of the book has a different subtitle from the American one: "Stories to Change Your Life," as opposed to "Everything You Need to Know"—and the stories were very much what we wanted to start from. You can convince anybody to read a graphic novel if the story's good. We found 30 books that were kind of landmarks, and from those key books we branched off in different directions, to enable people to explore the field. We also made a deliberate point of trying to stretch the choices so they weren't just Anglo, looking at material from Europe and Japan and beyond. Hopefully, it'll open doors for people to step into the next phase of reading graphic novels, not just saying, "Well, I've read Maus and Jimmy Corrigan."
PWCW: You seem pretty enthusiastic about just about every book you mention. Are these books you really love, or are there some that you thought you should include for the sake of including them?
PG: I'm enthusiastic about all of them—there are another 10 books listed in each chapter that are further follow-ups, because we couldn't get everything in there. Peter Stanbury, the book's designer, helped me to think it through for the layman who doesn't know much about comics. That's where the "story" angle comes in—trying to describe in a sentence or two why it's worth spending the time and making the effort to read something. We forget that for a lot of people it's not natural to read a comic—a lot of people find them very alarming objects.
PWCW: Was there anything you really wanted to include but couldn't?
PG: The main issue was availability. There were a couple of cases of things we left out—Alan Moore's Marvelman/Miracleman, which is languishing in some kind of copyright hell, and Zenith, a very original superhero book by Grant Morrison and Steve Yeowell which is also in dispute. Both of those have become exceptionally collectible and rare, which is why we left them out. And one of the big issues was to try to select works with some end in sight, even if it wasn't actually already created.
PWCW: You managed to include some pages from Moore and Melinda Gebbie's yet-to-be-published Lost Girls, though.
PG: Yes—it's rather odd to be reviewing a book before it's even in print! It was meant to be out last summer, but I've read the whole thing. I'm very excited about that work, although I think it's going to cause some eruptions.
PWCW: What are you working on now?
PG: There will be, touch wood, a book every year from us every year or so, to build into a library about the whole field of comics. The next one is a book on British comics, which is really overdue. It'll focus mostly on books published in Britain, as opposed to books by British artists and writers published elsewhere, although we'll talk about the way that British material has had a global impact. There's a great history to be told, and so much forgotten material—it's been fascinating to research this. And we'll be showing original art by the masters of British comics, where possible, which will be really amazing. It's a good time to be doing this.
