Week 11: Comics as Contemporary Literature

This week we looked into comics as contemporary literature.  I wish when I was in elementary and high school we could’ve gotten more comics as assigned literature.  Illustrated school books were my initiation into what I now pursue as a career.  So as an alternate reading selection for this week I chose to look over Craig Thompson’s Habibi.

I want to buy a personal copy of this graphic novel someday.  The amount of work Thompson puts into detail with his pen and ink is inspiring.  You find yourself staring at the patterns derived from Islamic art techniques.  The story is very entertaining also.  The way Craig Thompson gives us multiple storylines is very seamless and surprisingly not that confusing considering how the juxtaposing of multiple stories could easily get tedious and hard to understand.  But it flows nicely.  It really caught me off guard at first with the content.  Not for kids… that’s for sure.  It is definitely geared toward the young adult and older crowd.  But I love the middle eastern influence.  The Biblical mythological story, derived from aspects both present in Islamic and Christian traditions, of the great flood, and of God’s creation of letters was just really fun to read.  I really enjoy his style of work.

Contemporary literature is an extremely diverse field.  The new generations of children are raised, more and more, on visual stimulation.  So it is my hope that the influence and prestige of the graphic novel continue to grow.  It is groundbreaking works like this that just excel in literary and illustrative quality that are the future for the graphic novel industry.  Just like Japan pioneered in the future of what is robotics, among other things, I think they also have set an example for the impact of the graphic novel in society.  The significance of visual storytelling to us is huge.  We are imaginative creatures, that is what drives us back to childhood when most of the time our imagination could entertain ourselves.  Graphic novels are visual escapes that take us away from the daily worries and entertain us.  But also looking back at history it is not surprising to me when the original printings of classics such as Don Quixote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes, had beautiful illustrations by Gustave Doré.  Versions that were very popular, and were a prelude to the masterpieces of graphic novel work out there today and the ones to come.