Graphic Novels in Theory and Educational Practice

• Björn N. O. Sundmark
  When discussing the nature of the graphic novel in relation picturebooks and/or comic books, critics tend to focus on the visual content. Picturebook scholars refer to picturebook codes and make use of the concept of the iconotext (Hallberg; Nikolajeva & Scott), in which the relationship between verbal and visual text on single pages or spreads is explored. In practice, if not in theory, such iconotext analyses often overlook the dynamic interplay between pictures. Research into comics (or the bande dessinée, to use the more solidly critical French term), on the other hand, is more concerned with the idea of seriality, that is, the spatial organization of panels and strips, as well as the arrangement and repetition of visual motifs over and across pages. What is regularly missed in research into comic books, however, is the verbal aspect of the narrative, and how it relates to the visual representation. Through association with the picturebook and the comic book formats, the “graphic novel” is regularly caught up in a discourse of the visual, whether “iconic” or “serial.” Now, obviously, “graphic” refers to the visual domain, but as I see it, and just as importantly, it is also, and maybe primarily, a novel. The reason why this matters is that it takes somewhat different skills to read a graphic novel than a picturebook, or a comic book. It is in this context that it becomes interesting to consider Jakob Wegelius’ Legenden om Sally Jones (2008). While The Legend of Sally Jones has not yet been translated into English, the Swedish novel won the most prestigious children’s book prize in Sweden that year, the August Prize. The sequel, Mördarens apa—The Murderer’s Ape, not yet available in English—was also awarded the August Prize (2014), and additionally received the Nordic Council Prize in the same year. In this presentation I focus on the qualities and properties that make The Legend of Sally Jones and, by extension, its sequel graphic novels. Methodologically I seek inspiration in Ian Watt’s historical and critical account of the genre in his seminal The Rise of the Novel (1957). The underlying educational assumption I make is that by engaging with the graphic novel, young readers are not only given the tools to handle complex visual-verbal narratives, but are likewise introduced to the rich tradition of novel writing in prose.
• Jeanette Hoffmann
  Stories told through images, like those in graphic novels, awaken great fascination particularly in young readers. Boys and girls, readers and nonreaders alike are invited to dive in a story told through various combinations of pictures and text. Reading, seeing, and imagining are fundamental actions during this reception-process. Contrary to perspectives of a pragmatically oriented approach of ‘reading literacy’, which emanates from the competent reader, this paper will examine the reception-processes and social practices from the perspective of an ‘emergent literacy’. It is based on our current study “Narrating in Images und Texts – Graphic Novels in German Lessons” in the course of which second grade students in an elementary school read Jean Regnaud and Émile Bravo’s My Mommy Is in America and She Met Buffalo Bill (2009). We use video records, transcripts of discussions, and text-picture activities the students completed as well as the Key incidents (Kroon/Sturm 2007) methodology to collect, analyze, and compare data. Out of our observations of interactions during lessons, of the students’ conversations, written assignments, and responses to pictures we reconstruct the linguistic, literary and aesthetic experiences of children reading graphic novels. In this paper I discuss the children’s individual appropriations of graphically related stories during the reading process in an open, educational context and reconstruct the intermodal, typographical, symbolical and pictoral challenges of the Graphic Novel for the emergent readers. The processes of (appreciative, intensive, and sociable) reading, seeing, and imagining thereby shift into focus.
  
  References
  Kroon, S.; Sturm, J. (2007): International comparative case study research in education: Key incident analysis and international triangulation. In: Herrlitz, W.; Ongstad, S.;/van de Ven, P.-H. (2007): Research on mother tongue education in a comparative international perspective. Theoretical and methodological issues. Amsterdam/New York: Rodopi, pp. 99-118.
  Regnaud, J. & Bravo, É (2009): My Mommy is in America and she met Buffalo Bill. Doddington/UK: Fanfare - Ponent Mon.
  
  Key Words
  Graphic Novels, Interplay between Text and Picture, Emergent Literacy, Reading Process, Recosntructive Research, Classroom Interaction
• Marek Oziewicz
  Despite its supposedly widespread use in literary critical and literacy scholarship, “graphic novel” remains a highly contested term. A number of mainstream comics studies scholars have repeatedly dismissed it as a euphemistic and distinctly apologetic term that seeks cultural legitimacy for comics or a purely marketing phenomenon. Other scholars have recognized graphic novels as a separate category of “long-form comics” that accommodate genres of the self-contained story, the novel, or the memoir. Yet, build on the notion that graphic novels are comics, derive from comics, and should be discussed as comics, is a normative assumption that the graphic novel must necessarily be written in the comic or cartoon style—that is, featuring multiple panels per page, gutters, speech and thought bubbles, motion lines, and other structural conventions characteristic of the comic page layout. This definition of graphic novels overlooks a large body of literature that heavily relies on the pictorial narrative to support and complement the textual one. In these works, graphic narration is an essential part of their appeal, but they are not, by any account, comics, picturebooks, or illustrated books. The works of Brian Selznick would be one obvious example. Their novelistic scope and length radically challenges the statistically normative conventions of a comic or a picturebook. But even if Selznick is taken to be an exception, one is still faced with a large group of works predicated on the skillful integration of the pictorial and the textual, many among them belonging in the category that teachers, librarians, and booksellers commonly refer to as chapter books. This presentation suggests that the definition of the graphic novel could be expanded to include these works. The implications of this broadened formulation are then explored by looking at examples of three recent chapter books: Dasha Tolstikova’s A Year Without Mom (2015), Gary Northfield’s Julius Zebra: Rumble with the Romans (2015), and Obert Skye’s The Lord of the Hat: The Creature from My Closet (2015). I argue that to appreciate these works fully, young readers engage their multimodal literacy skills, effectively decoding them as graphic novels.