The Graphic Novel

This week I read Blankets by Craig Thompson. This was a dramatic shift from the comics I read last week as I found this story was much more complex and adult when compared to the stories of tin tin and Scrooge McDuck. Comics seemed like short stories and Blankets was definitely deserving of the title novel. It is not a novel particularly due to the length of the book, but rather the story that it told.  We can see in the book overlapping story arches, motifs, and themes that are common to most literary novels, but can be hard to get across in short form comics.

One of my favorite aspects of this book was the complexity and relatability Craig Thompson portrayed in the characters of the novel, not to say comics a good comic writer can not do the same, but many times due to the episodic nature of comics you need to follow the story through a couple of issues to really to get the full grasp of the protagonist’s character. The graphic novel though has the benefit of being able to tell a story in one straight run and I did not have to pause the story for a month to figure out what happens next, in the graphic novel I was able to dive right in.

The quality of the comic felt a lot more cinematic as well, when compared to the comics of previous weeks. Of course the amount of evolution that occurred in comics between Scrooge McDuck and Blankets is gigantic, but the nature of the comic almost make me feel as if I am watching a television show, and the Graphic novel feels like a movie. I am not an expert in story telling, but it seems that when more time is given to tell a story the fundamental principles of telling the stories take a subtle shift, for better and for worse.