PeterThelonious

This is a well-researched and informative overview. I’ve been following news about the Switch, but this is one of the most comprehensive run-downs I’ve seen and I learned a lot. Great work.

This was a fantastic introduction to Thomas Aquinas’ thought, and very informative to me! I would love some sort of follow-up to this article, but I doubt you could find many other animated films that connected so effortlessly to Thomism, ahahhah.

I was considering Boogie Nights too, but I think at the end of the day, despite the circuitous nature of most of PTA’s works, the film primarily follows the exploits of Dirk Diggler and those who are tied to him. What I’m gathering from this (hella excellent) piece is that ‘hyperlink cinemas’ generally don’t have such a clear-cut protagonist, forcing you to connect three or more narratives.

I have to agree with Lusk22. Though scole certainly had (his? her?) heart in the right place, I wish that the piece had taken a few more editing runs before making it to print. The argument was pretty wobbly in places.

For one thing, being collected in a trade paperback does not make something a graphic novel. If it was serialized through floppy comics, and published as a book… Then its not a graphic novel. A graphic novel is a long-form comic, intended to be published in book-form from the get-go. Contract With God, Maus, Persepolis, and Fun Home all were originally published as books with intended literary merit. Those are all graphic novels. Watchmen, which was originally serialized in 12 issues, is often called a graphic novel due to ITS literary themes, but still is not. Watchmen’s writer, Alan Moore, even declared,

“I’ve no objection to the term ‘graphic novel,’ as long as what it is talking about is actually some sort of graphic work that could conceivably be described as a novel. My main objection to the term is that usually it means a collection of six issues of Spider-Man, or something that does not have the structure or any of the qualities of a novel, but is perhaps roughly the same size.”

I recognize that this might come off as pedantic, but if we are to have this discussion we need to separate the two often-contradictory definitions that often get thrown together, that a graphic novel is just a published series of comics, and that a graphic novel is a ‘mature’ comic.

Now, what is maturity? Scole points out that many comics and graphic novels have come to include sex and violence, and that is evidence of them not being for kids. While that is certainly true, there is a difference between these themes being used in comics for literary merit versus for shock value. While they are fun to read, many comics featuring, say, the Joker have him doing horrible things to people that… don’t really make you think. They are just to prove how evil he is, not to make you re-evaluate your positions. On the other hand, a comic series like Alias used Marvel’s universe to tell a story of how racism, depression and the trauma of sexual abuse can cause just as much alienation and strife in a world with superpowers (which led the comic transitioning well into the powerful Netflix series Jessica Jones, I should add.) Comics and graphic novels can tell really powerful stories with dark aspects of the human experience, but its important to not confuse portrayal of those dark aspects as maturity in and of itself.

Finally, I have to say its pretty clear the scole loves comics, and keeps up-to-date on the latest and greatest that contemporary Marvel has to offer (Moon Girl and Devil Dinosaur, Ms. Marvel, etc.) However, I cannot abide with (his? her?) insistence that graphics novels are unpopular and less prevalent than they’ve been previously. We are currently in a golden age for graphic novels, with North American publishers like Fantagraphics and Drawn-and-Quartered publishing dozens, if not hundreds, of stellar graphics novels each and every year. Just because the author (who mostly seems to read superhero comics, and I can’t blame ’em, they’re great fun) isn’t familiar with the current graphic novel scene, doesn’t mean that it doesn’t exist.