Graphic Novels (Rippl)

Question 1

In literary studies, the term ‘contamination’ can take on positive as well as negative connotations; it refers to

Answer 1

• blending techniques in manuscript tradition (the blending of different sources or traditions)
• the blending of stories and plots
• the ‘endangered’ purity of literary genres and styles

Question 2

What are Graphic Novels?

Answer 2

• combine media: they integrate images and words in order to tell a story
• popular intermedial art forms involving two media, text and picture, the majority of critics agree that they are first and foremost based on pictures: there are comics and graphic novels without text, but none without images
• are a sequential form of narrative organization
• practice intermedial referencing, evoking (and provoking) literary styles, imitating (and influencing) cinematic techniques, or suggesting sound
• have a historical affiliation with mass media
• do not communicate through separate verbal and visual channels but rather combine these channels inextricably
• words are often hand-lettered, i.e., handwriting remediated through print, and presented in speech balloons, and participate in the overall look of a panel, page, or story
• framed panels and the negative space between them – the gutter – are further major features of intermedial graphic narration which generally unfolds through a series of still images that capture individual moments distilled from a fluid – yet never fully rendered – narrative: a series of “pregnant moments” (Lessing 1984, 23) chosen by the creator(s) and translated into an ongoing succession of events through a reading process that entails establishing “causal connections” (Carrier 2000, 14) through a process of “closure” (McCloud 1993, 63-73) that each reader must perform in order to translate individual images into a story (Gardner 2012); the readers’ ability and constant activity to bridge the gutters that divide the single static pictures helps to create narrativity.
• this spatio-temporal construction – the representation of time through the techniques of panel design and sequencing – incite readers to invest the gutters with meaning: to provide the links between panels by way of imagining what must have happened between one scene and the next; to participate actively in the meaning making process and to turn static images into moving o nes
• different panel designs, from regular waffle-grid structures to more flexible shapes and sizes, further impact the process of readerly imaginary projection.

Question 3

When was the term Graphic Novels coined and by who?

Answer 3

The term ‘graphic novel’ was coined by Richard Kyle in 1964, and popularized by Will Eisner, who used it to promote his 1979 book-length work A Contract with God and Other Tenement Stories: A Graphic Novel.

Question 4

What is petrofiction?

Answer 4

is a genre of fiction focused on the role of petroleum in society –> example: Steve Duin and Shannon Wheeler “Oil and Water”

Question 5

What do Petro-texts do?

Answer 5

“Puzzle out the implications of our dependency, as much metaphysical as material, on a slippery substance that connects technological futures with prehistorical pasts in ways that cannot but be difficult to conceptualize” (Imre Szeman 2012).

Question 6

Joe Harris and Martín Morazzo: Great Pacific – Trashed! Portland: Image Comics, 2013

Answer 6

• Martín Morazzo’s inventive art in brown unhealthy hues and subdued colors that symbolize the environmental catastrophe.
• The pictures Morazzo has created remind one of Marvel or DC’s superhero comics
• Martín Morazzo manages to present the floating trash heap in a truly convincing manner. Striking depictions of Chas’s face
• perspective often involves the reader directly

Question 7

What is sustainability?

Answer 7

Sustainability is the balance between the environment, equity, and economy

Question 8

Characteristics of GNs?

Answer 8

–Reader has a job that turns pictures from a static state into a temporal sequence
–Has a worldwide significance and images promoted before words
–GNs promote a ‘contaminated’ language and environment; “depictions of facial expressions call upon readers neural systems for recognition of basic emotion” (Keen)
* The text, typical handwritten, hold “effective documentary power”
–Reader engages differently with content as the gutter provides literal room to imagine situations (Polak 2017)