This week I decided to explore some uncharted territory- the graphic novel.  My suspicion is that a lot of people make the leap from comics to graphic novels.  I’ve never been much into comic books, so it’s probably not that shocking that I never got around to graphic novels either.  That said, for a long time I’ve had the idea that I should read the Scott Pilgrim series.

I’d read reviews of his work at the AV Club and other places, and it seemed like a fun place to start.  Unfortunately, I had it in my head that if I were going to read these books, I wanted to buy them from an actual book store.  This proved to be rather difficult, and I hadn’t been able to find them at any book stores until Sunday at the Borders on, I think, Grand and Michigan.  After I’d somewhat surreptitiously picked up volume 1 of Scott Pilgrim, the friend I was with noticed I had a graphic novel and suggested I also pick up The Watchmen, which I’d heard over and over again to be not just an Important Graphic Novel, but an Important Novel.   What with all the hype I’d read about the upcoming Watchmen movie, I figured I’d give it a shot as well.

Scott Pilgrim’s Precious Little Life, Volume 1 is what I started with.  It was strange for me to read a graphic novel.  Each page has only 30 or so words on it, so there was a tendency to just rush through it.  I had to consciously stop every page to make sure I was actually looking at the graphic part of the novel.  The drawing has a very anime style.  Actually, I don’t know anything about anime, so that might not even really be accurate.  Basically, all the characters have gigantic eyes.  As far as I’m concerned, that means anime. The title character is an awesome archetype hipster dude: 23, no job, in a band.  The story is about his…  well, precious little life, shockingly enough.  He’s got a17-year old girlfriend, a crush on an age-appropriate girls, and his band has a show.  That’s basically the entire plot of the book.  All the info I read about it said that the main plot concerned his fighting the crush’s evil ex-boyfriends, but nearly the entire book is just him having a weird, young girlfriend, then his having a weird crush, and then his band having a show.  Seriously, that was it.  Then, all of a sudden this evil ex shows up at the band’s show, there’s a fight, Scott wins.  It was weird.  Apparently the next few volumes all concern fighting various figures, but I’m not sure if he ever dumps his young girlfriend or ever officially dates the crush, or if the plot ever becomes more coherent.  There’s supposed to be 5 more volumes, I think only three have been published so far.  Since there’s been so much hype, I figure it gets more interesting as it goes along, cause this one was really pretty boring.  I mean, it was fun, but just kinda..  blah.  It probably took up about an hour and a half of my time when I read it.

Speaking of hype, the day after I read it, I found out that there was going to be a movie made about it.  Michael Cera will play Scott, which is appropriate, since MC’s been steadily solidifying his hold on the cliche sweet, wimpy hipster dude. I don’t know if the remaining volumes will be published before the movies comes out.  I can’t decide if I care, frankly.  The books are a little pricey ($12), especially considering how quickly they go by.  It’s funny how i enjoyed it enough as I read it, thinking back I can’t decide if it was worth the time, even though it was hardly any time.   We’ll see.  The girl who checked me out at Borders was cute though, so maybe that’s reason enough to go back there and buy the remaining volumes this weekend.  Of course, I’ll have to go at the exact same time and carefully plan when I get into the checkout line, so who knows.

So my first graphic novel more or less confirmed my previous thoughts on the genre- cute and fine and whatever, but not really a big deal and probably not worth my time/money.  the second, however, was so much bigger, better, prettier, deeper, etc. that I have to go back to the drawing board re: my opinions on the genre.  That shouldn’t be much of a surprise, given the huge reputation of The Watchmen.

The most striking thing about The Watchmen is that it’s beautiful.  Seriously.  The illustration and the colors are all, throughout the book, amazing.  You could almost read it without the text, just slowly going from page to page, soaking up the images.  Where with SP I had to force myself to actually look at the drawings, I’d easily get distracted, just staring at the illustrations and not turning the page.   The images alone would be enough to make it great, but the story at least equaled it.  The basic plot: super heroes are getting killed, some other super heroes try to figure out why, they figure out why (a plot to control/destroy the world, sorta), and they try to stop it.  That’s a super duper high level overview of the main narrative, however there’s so much more going on.  This is a world where comic books exist, but then, drawing inspiration from coming books, normal people dress up to become “masked adventurers”- superheroes that aren’t really super.  Then an actual, real-life super hero comes into being due to a nuclear-type accident, and he sorta teams up with the faux-super heroes.  Throughout all of this, a side-plot involves a guy reading another comic book, whose plot is interwoven with the main narrative,  serves to emphasize the theme of the whole novel.

There’s a lot going on, but the main questions that stuck with me was how much we are willing to sacrifice for what we believe in/why we believe in it/do ends justify means/what are heroes/do we need heroes?  The newspaper vendor I think represents the everyday joe sorta character- mostly good, a little bit bad, a little bit smart, mostly dumb.  His beliefs “inna final analysis”, as he says, switch daily from an every man for himself mentality to a we’re all in this together mentality, depending on how his day’s going.  The heroes are more absolute: one believes that real, intellectually supermen have the right/responsibility to protect the world from itself through whatever means necessary.  Another believes that though the world is basically a bad place, people should be allowed to make their own mistakes.  Another doesn’t seem to care one way or the other, another doesn’t think about it.  Within this, there’s the political struggle between communism and liberal elitism and good ol’ American capitalism, though each viewpoint is ultimately unsatisfying/wrong.  There’s no character to really get behind- all the heroes prove to be extremely disagreeable in one way or another, and all the non-heroes are stupid, selfish, disagreeable, impotent.

I’ve enjoyed finding parallels between the different books I’ve been reading, I can’t help but point out an interesting parallel between one of Dr. Manhattan’s speeches and what I read last week in Bill Bryson’s book.  (Dr. Manhattan is the legit superhero.  As they say in the novel “There is a god, and he’s American.”)  Bryson’s discusses what a miracle life is, depending on so many chance events.  The existence of a single person depends on the success of thousands of single people before them, the success of earth depends on being close to the sun but not too close, etc.  This against-the-odds miracle is the beauty that Dr. Manhattan finds in the world, finding, ultimately, the existence of life on earth to be such a rare, fragile thing that it gives him a reason to believe that life is worth saving.

So that was my take on it.  I’m told its a book that benefits greatly from rereading, which I’m probably going to do.  I really do recommend it, and I understand why so many people are so into it.  That said, I’m not realy to osure what my take on the graphic novel genre is.  Though SP was a fun, breezy read, and The Watchmen actually got me thinking, I definetely enjoy the process of reading a regular novel to be a lot more satisfying.  I’m not sure that there are any other graphic novels that I’m interested in reading, but I wouldn’t dismiss the thought.