Help me to love graphic novels!

I wish I could get excited about graphic novels. I looked at Maus many years ago and tried to get into it.  I couldn’t.  I didn’t like having prefab images put my own imagination on hold.  I didn’t like the lack of complexity that I enjoy so much in a literary novel (no graphics). It was like watching tv in print. Everything is oversimplified. Reduced to its  lowest common denominator.

Oddly, I loved comics as a child.  I inhaled them, swallowed them whole.  Stacks and stacks of regular and classic comics.  I couldn’t get enough of them.  I can remember walking blocks, my piles cradled in my arms in front of me, to keep an appointment with another kid who was willing to trade.  It was serious stuff, these exchanges.  I would go home with my new supply and bury myself until I’d read them all.  They may not have been artful, but they had my attention.  I was only interested then in their plots.

But why was I able to embrace them then?  I think it’s because as a child, I didn’t have the same need for depth and complication.  I was perfectly happy to have someone else give me the images and simple text.  I saw something similar happen with my husband’s grandchildren when they were eleven, twins who attended private schools in England. They not only spoke and read Latin, French, and German, but also were reading literary classics.  Still, when they visited us, they were mesmerized by tv.  It didn’t require them to give something of themselves to the viewing other than just being receptacles.

I feel comic books and graphic novels work in a similar way.

In literary fiction, things may happen on the surface, as a graphic novel can convey, but what is really important are the thoughts, desires, and motivations of the characters as well as the underlying social and cultural threads that act upon them.

Even when the prose is straightforward, literary fiction is more challenging to read because it requires the reader to infer a great deal of the plot rather than simply sitting back and watching the plot unfold. It requires empathy to relate to characters as humans and to deduce the hidden motivations and desires that lurk beneath their actions. The reader has to recognize the small turning points and the low points and the high points based on what they know of the character and about human nature. They also need to read between the lines in terms of denotative versus connotative meanings of words.

While it’s true that images can have a lot of power and capsulate a good deal, they also can oversimplify characters and situations. Words tend to be more suggestive. Rather than overtly presenting what’s driving the narrative, they can convey multiple meanings, making a work much more interesting and complex, just as life is complex.

My apologies to readers who love graphic novels. Please help me by offering your perspective!