Graphic Novel Galaxy

by Pauline Uchmanowicz, April 30, 2007

The Golden Age of Comics arose in the 1930s with the creation of Superman, Batman, and DC Comics. Wonder Woman appeared in 1940, the year legendary graphic artist Will Eisner undertook a weekly newspaper comic series known as The Spirit, featuring a masked crime fighter. Experimenting with the medium beyond the superhero formula, by 1978 Eisner had drawn A Contract with God, four related stories about a single tenement in the Bronx. Hoping to entice a mainstream publisher for the book-length work, he called it a “graphic novel.” And thus a genre was born.
Three decades later, the term graphic novel continues to mean a longish comic book that follows a single storyline, including superhero and cosmic adventure tales. It also refers to serious “literary” picture stories aimed at intelligent readership. Often produced by a lone author who draws, writes, inks, and letters the complete work, the standard bearer is Art Spiegelman’s 1986 Maus, a Pulitzer Prize-winning account of the Holocaust. According to Mark Siegel, editorial director at New York City’s avant-garde comic book press First Second, “More and more styles and possibilities are now available for graphic illustrators and writers whose works blur categories and span readership. In addition to fiction of all kinds, graphic novels have expanded into nonfiction categories, such as personal memoirs, biographies, history, comics journalism, and visual essays.”
The field has increasingly opened to women as well, with notable nonfiction titles including Marjane Satrapi’s Iranian-girlhood portrait Persepolis; Marisa Acocella Marchetto’s recovery memoir Cancer Vixen; and Alison Bechdel’s familial tragicomedy Fun Home. Helping pave the way for today’s gender inclusion, High Falls actor, playwright, and comic book writer Elaine Lee can remember “a time when a comic book convention was the only place in America where there was no line in the ladies room.” Co-creator of the Marvel space opera Starstruck, which introduced Brucilla the Muscle in skin-tight outfit, Lee’s work ushered in a new era of cartoon Amazons and femme fatales. She continued to cast strong and sexy females in edgy series she scripted for DC during the 1990s.
Another pioneering comic book artist, Woodstock resident Jim Starlin, witnessed the graphic-novel big bang, having worked for DC, Marvel Comics, and others since the early 1970s. Creator of the cosmic villain Thanos, his titles include Amazing Spider-Man, Batman, and Incredible Hulk. Growing up in Detroit during the 1950s, Starlin discovered his vocation as a child. “It was not a cultural nirvana, but a bit of a wasteland,” he recalled, reached by phone in his home studio. “So I got into comics at age eight. My father was a draftsman for Chrysler and would bring home tracing paper. I started tracing comics and was self-taught.” Influenced by Golden and Silver Age (1950s and `60s) artists Stan Lee, Jack Kirby, and Steve Ditko, he first turned out imitative amateur fanzines, selling a few pages to DC editor Joe Orlando in 1972. “Around that time, the industry started to boom and Marvel went from 16 to 60 titles a month,” Starlin explained. “They hired anyone who could draw straight and hold a pencil.” Though the single anatomy class he took at the Art Students League in New York City would prove helpful, he noted, “In my generation, no one went to art school. Back then, comics was the poor people’s art, largely done by poor Jewish and Italian kids coming out of Brooklyn.”