I have long despised the term "graphic novel", but this is a weird take.

oh my god

i can't believe this person didn't delete this article

they got blasted when they posted it

yes because it makes no sense

not even a little

pastels are the shades of the gentrifier

hawha

oh I remember this

we had a fun time on twitter

"The rise of so-called quality television has occasioned sufficient commentary and need not be reiterated here." no please reiterate because I have no idea what the fuck you're talking about

anyway I wonder what's a thing you are allowed to like

if "comics" are sexist/racist etc, if truly proletarian, but "graphic novels" are pastel and gentrified, what is the the responsible working class entertainment

movies are gentrified tv

quality tv is gentrified cbs

anyway, the problem is that educated upper middle class people have certain aesthetic tastes, and the only way to prevent that is to have other upper middle class people with even more education criticize that taste

what is truly gruesome about this is making a graphic novel rarely nets you as much per hour as a monthly gig

also buying monthly comics in trade is cheaper than buying them monthly?

and the monthlies he’s talking about are all owned by massive media companies

While the biggest outlets publishing graphic novels are like scholastic and random house

Tho I can’t tell who his beef is with exactly??

this beef appears to be like

he really hates Fun Home I guess

conceptual

he doesn’t know enough about the industry to critique it

Alison bechdel that titan of industry

I hear she has, a house

I think the argument is that 1) aesthetic gentrification is a thing

2) calling things "graphic novels" is an example of that thing

3) don't appreciate any comic

It’s annoying when memoirs get called novels I agree

it's annoying when TPBs are called "graphic novels" imo

however bc of the way comics are published it is necessary to have a term for a large book published all at once

robospider9000 I'm sorry this probably made your headache worse

I agree tho I think that ship has sailed with watchmen

watchmen is the perfect example of why that's bad tho, like the serialization/countdown aspect played off each other

but it is definitely a nerd complaint against a cultural tide

yeah like he fucking opens with "they don't have to be fictional, like maus" and "persepolis got made into a movie" and those were half his examples before GENTRIFICATION it's like

buddy................??

haha yeah but the people who were able to experience it that way are now in the minority of people who read watchmen

Also marjane satrapi made that movie???

Also if we’re talking about movies???

it's fine I'm Actually Laughing

this article is like the definition of I don’t have time to tell you how wrong you are

squints

my ex has actually published a graphic novel traditionally, hired on as the artist for the script a well known indie company wanted to produce

he made less than $1/hr for the art and worked 16 hour days to make the deadline

anyway, another thought I had while reading this is that he's missing out on a big part of the move to "graphic novels" and it makes me think he doesn't know anyone who produces them or is into them

it's not really about gentrification (duh, I think there's a lot of agreement here that it isn't)

Lmao was it boom.

comics were seen as Kid Stuff for so long

a lot of it is more about people who grew up loving comics and cartoons wanting them to be seen as more respectable art forms.

and I'd say the issue is more Kid Stuff vs working class-ness.

nah, it was Oni

Yeah that tracks

it was right as they were first having their Scott Pilgrim boom, so they were nominally starting to do well but they still couldn't really pay more than like $1000 as an advance, and he had to pay for all his own materials

there is a loooooot of industry stuff he’s failing to grasp here

he did get a job on the strength of his work on that book where he was paid about $10-12K to do some CCG card art

and he got an admiring review from Lev Grossman

but that was about it.

including how bad a deal wfh is actually??

it's a horrible deal!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

but the comics he’s namedropping specifically were generally made for the same reasons prose novels and books get made which is that they had a story to tell

the writer here also doesn't seem to grasp that a lot of people now wait for floppies to come out in a collected format because buying them individually is a luxury

but I get that he's not really talking about that kind of graphic novel (the comics collection) -- he's talking about things like Persepolis and Maus

and they are drawn the way they are drawn bc that’s how the cartoonists want them to look,

it does interest me, though, that collections are a preferred format for a lot of people specifically because of the associated economic concerns.

and that, more than "highbrow" gns (i don't disagree with the stuff you just said, btw!) is part of the reason floppy comics don't sell as well

as well as they used to. so is the disappearance from convenience stores, grocery stores, and so on.

yeah he has absolutely no idea how the industry works lmao

sit down and read a book about the industry, my dude

talk to some people

many creators will be happy to talk your ear off about how hard it is out there for them.

I assumed the "kid stuff" argument is basically what he's referencing with "marketing ploy"

[clicks] [clicks out again]

idk if he knows how big the ya gn market is rn tho I cannot read past the intro without my eyes glazing over

the condescension!!!!!

i'm not even sure what this guy likes

i don't think he likes "regular" comics OR graphic novels OR manga OR the kid and teen stuff

i think maybe he likes writing essays for publication

well it sure isn't tenure track jobs opening up in university programs

for other people

heaven forfend

one very bourgeois thing to do is criticize others for being too bourgeois

though I'm not sure being a Jacobin submitter pays much differently than freelance comic artist

If you break it down by hour it probably does

plus art spiegelman at least was a big self-publisher back in the day so

being a jacobin submitter doesn't but being a university professor does!

i too hate when tpbs are called graphic novels but this article is a weird take

I'm currently writing a second book, tentatively titled "Gentrifying Comics: The Rise of the Graphic Novel and the Evolution of Cultural Value", which brings together computational methods and literary sociology to write a quantitative history of long-form comics since the 1970s.

anyway yeah seems he does have an actual paying professorship job, and the pastel thing is actually a huge part of his book

That’s Bad

how can one human, be so little fun

is he still writing that book after the roasting he received on twitter tho

a friend had his display name ‘gentrified comic book’ for a solid month

Is German his native language

One thing that struck me while I was reading the essay is that he misunderstood the way “graphic” is used in the phrase “graphic novel”

He seemed to think it meant “potentially shocking” instead of the art connotation

Either that OR

He was trying to do wordplay based on his assumption that his audience would think that, and it fell flat. I’m guessing most people who would read his work do understand the way “graphic” is used in that phrase.

Because it’s not a work of broad general interest. It already has intellectual pretensions.

his POV is extremely American tho

it is a mystery

I’d say “maybe his editor will do him a favor and eventually convince him not to use that joke” but if an editor were doing him any favors they’d be dissuading him from the entire line of argument

my hope is he doesn’t have a publisher lined up or that his deal fell thru

And it’s true, this is not a European POV

French people in particular would get a laugh out of it

it’s astonishing that he would bring up Persepolis without touching on French comics at all--yes

many things about this article are astonishing

He also brings up Blue is the Warmest Colour because that fits his autobiographical thesis but that’s ALSO part of the French comics tradition

I realize that if you don’t have a grounding in comics it probably has some surface/stylistic similarities to Fun Home but

(But.)

like he seems WHOLLY UNAWARE of tintin

the absence of tintin is NOTABLE

Looming

YEAH

Adults read Tintin

Literally, my ex still has all my Tintin books

I am unhappy about this, it took me a long time to collect those!

like moomin also, but he seems to be mad at ligne Claire without knowing he’s mad about it

And it’s a cultural institution in France

I think bechdel’s style just got streamlined as she got older and started using more photo reference, compared to dykes to watch out for

The entire tradition of “serious” French graphic artists in the last 5-6 decades at least that came out of that

trying to pick apart any one single aspect of this is extremely,, gestures,,,

It's strange b/c he's not American and his work is funded by the German government

But his field is American studies

Nothing... but can’t wait for Donny Cates to take over writing Amazing Spider-Man, hopefully this year! Cheers!

Coming back to this it's not so much the questionable understanding of the comic industry that gets me but the idea that gentrification is an aesthetic.

Gentrification can have aesthetic consequences and signifiers, but the reason it is bad is not because it's pastel.

There's no essential link between pastel and late stage capitalism, and I think that a lot of our current political discourse focuses too much on aesthetic signifiers rather than philosophy, thinking, consequences.

Looking into his actual comic scholarship more he focuses on "quantitative analysis" which is basically scanning a thousand comic books and then running them through computer programs to see which ones have brighter colors.

Which might tell us some things. But it fails here because the article namechecks a lot of "graphic novels" and then talks about the signifiers of their prestige without engaging with their content at all.

it's a very tedious sort of stance I saw in brooklyn a lot

of swinging hard at the nearest target and not going after the landlords and real estate people at all

But as I am sure everyone is aware, Maus is about the holocaust. Persepolis deals with the Iranian revolution. These books are about something and it's not being self-involved Brooklyn hipsters, or whatever. They have their own things to say about forces of oppresson and evil.

he could have more easily gone after dan clowes, chris ware, and their generally worse imitators, but instead he had to be a clown

however the whole premise is shaky?? even the most self-involved sad boy comics don't have much to do with economic displacement,

not everything is that one thing you read about

The author is critical of the idea of the "auteur", and refers to the "assembly line" production of mainstream superhero comics as more working-class, as though you can't be a poor cartoonist, or

I'm not sure

there's an argument that memoir, again, is the most bourgeois of all genres, but while it might be true that most published memoirs speak to middle class experience (and I don't know if this is true, this seems like a question "quanititative analysis" might be useful for answering)

but you can't make the argument that memoir is inherently middle class without denying working-class people have the ability to self-reflect

likewise, you can look at the auteur as an inherently problematic archetype, and be skeptical of the elevation of this single component of genius, but it seems to me that working class people are quite capable of producing individual art about their own experiences

pastels are not a problem of "late-stage capitalism"

I don’t have any arguments with any of this

it's been bothering me for days!!

I guess you could make a tortured argument that design trends in general are tied to capitalism, mass production, and bourgeois priorities, but if you were doing that, why not focus on homewares... also, it’s so basic and obvious an argument that it’s not going to be widely published

yeah like, aesthetics can certainly be class signifiers

There definitely IS a 30-year trend of hipster intelligentsia taking swings at creators for imperfections and not at the parasitic wealthy class (source: I used to have a subscription to Bitch Magazine and read a lot of other similar content)

that doesn't mean the aesthetics are meaningful positions in and of themselves

(But less facetiously: it really is in the air if you hang around a lot of people and read a lot of cultural criticism)

(*a lot of people like that, I mean to say)

that's so and to a degree I understand it

for similar reasons fandom spends a lot of time critiquing fans and not just the media they consume

We all consume culture to one degree or another and the messages it sends are important

They do have real world influence

and it makes sense, because fans exist within fandom!!

But at the same time... a change in popular palette trends in what is inherently a working artisan class thing isn’t a class betrayal or etc

yes

And we keep coming back to “jfc this guy knows, like, NO actual comics creators” because outside of a handful of people like Clowes who have done okay, most of them live completely hand to mouth

My experience is that the comfortable money is in licensed corporate properties, but the comics versions of those (and storybooks and coloring books) are such a tiny drop in the bucket of what they bring in that they’re not really worth going after as a cultural critic.

again it doesn't surprise me because his whole comics research is literally scanning a bunch of comics and running them through an algorithm

If you’re going to go after a comic book based on Frozen why not just go after Disney

I mean, I will admit this is still probably better than CBR

the money is in licensing your own film/tv rights tbh

marvel/dc etc. have higher payrates for like, writers, when you break it down into hourly wages

Yeah tmk that’s one of the places where Jeff Smith has done really well? I don’t actually KNOW know him (have met him a few times) but there is decent money in being an indie creator whose comics get optioned for a possible animated series.

the Mark Millar model

But in terms of getting paid for monthly work

yes, the more commercial outlets break down to more money per hour, which is part of this articles Crimes

The money is definitely in Elsa’s Adventures In Ice Town and Spidey Slings Another Web, more so than, idk, Snotgirl or Shutter.

(Until someone wants to adapt one of those for film or TV.)

bryan lee o'malley does all right

He just doesn’t seem to understand what the business is like at all

but even the most obnoxious sad boy white privilege comic is not actually, displacing anything

except that they make more marginalized creators feel less welcome etc etc

Yep

which is why twitter dunked so hard on the use of 'gentrification' here

Sad white boy comics creators who didn’t write Blankets (or etc) don’t typically feel privileged because most of them are still pretty broke and struggling, but “white boys failing to recognize their own privilege” is a whole other subject, of course

like graphic novels (actual, not tpbs) tend to cost more per book than books that are not, as big

you are essentially getting the same amount of Comics for your money. one is just more comics

it's like saying bc an entree costs more than an appetizer, the entree is a gentrified version of appetizer

For many years, working class people were pleased to just go to a restaurant and order appetizers

and none of this, has anything to do, with real estate!!!!!!

I almost made a joke about humble peasant meal fare becoming appetizers on upscale restaurant menus and then realized that actually does happen and was like SIGH

But ultimately comics aren’t food, they’re entertainment and storytelling vehicles. That’s fine, but they’re not even the only way we have to tell a story: they’re just one mode of storytelling.