Graphic Nonfiction Novels, Did You Know They're The Closest to Truth We'll Ever Get?

Once upon a time, it was easy to distinguish fiction from reality. I knew what a story was, what a novel was. I understood it all; then I started grad school and everything I thought I knew went out the window. So here I am, contemplating if something can be both a novel AND nonfiction.

When it comes to your regular old words-on-the-page books, it's easy to determine what's true and what's not. Theoretically.  I mean, if we're just talking semantics and not diving into the fact that some times memorists lie, it's a quick and easy line. But graphic novels are where things become dicey. Even in the name of the genre, we're labeling things as a novel. Can you even think of another way to describe it? Graphic memoir. Nonfiction comicbook. I've got nothing; nothing that sounds good at least. 

The thing is that words-on-the-page traditional novels are easy to define because words are words. We know what they are, that they're capable of telling the truth. Graphic novels, though, are all art, and art puts a lot of filters over things. 

Yep. So many lines and so many feels. 

Take for instance, how different kinds of lines convey different kinds of emotion. They can make us feel things according to comic critic McCloud. Jagged lines are scary. Smoother lines are happier. If you go to a modern art museum and just let yourself feel the lines, you'll be surprised. 

Words can also make you feel things. If we want to get really into it, words are lines on a page that make us feel things too. They're just symbols after all. Is a traditional novel really all that different than a graphic novel when you consider the fact they're both just a bunch of symbols on a page? 

Graphic interpretations and written interpretations of a story are different though. They convey information differently. Take, for instance, Maus, the Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic novel in which a man tells his father's stories of surviving the Holocaust. However, he draws everything as cats or mice; Nazis are the felines and Jewish folx are the mice. I bring it up cause the stories in the book are true but those involved are drawn as animals. Does that mean this is a novel or a memoir? 

Spiegelman, the author, makes everyone into animals to make the story and atrocities involved palpable. There's this one scene where they're talking about how the Nazis 'made an example' out of some folx by hanging them for a week. All you see are these mouse bodies just hanging. The main panel features their full bodies, but the next two are just their feet, swaying. 

His use of heavy black for their clothes and just lines for the background is heartwrenching. In particular, the black lines meant to represent the nooses carry the most emotion for me. They're not quite straight and formulaic, but a little jagged, much like the cries of those watching their family members hanging in the street would've been. I had to put the book down because it just made me feel a little ill once I sat back and thought about the fact that these were real people, not just mice in a story. 

Spiegelman makes it so easy at first to distance yourself from the story cause it feels almost fantasy-like with all these critters doing human things. Next thing you know, you've read a hundred pages and are forced suddenly to acknowledge what you've read like I did. Then you realize, Spiegelman's just using these animals as symbols. They're different symbols than the words on the page, but they're still symbols. The Nazis are the predators. The Jewish community, the prey. 

Then you realize, the symbols that are missing. You don't see the lines denoting motion around the bodies, which means they aren't swaying like your brain first thought they would be, but just hanging limply. The stars that denoted Jewish folx in the Holocaust are just blank spaces on the jackets. Devoid of color, but still at the same time, they are an almost stain that immediately draws your eye. Staring into those blank stars, you feel a little sick. 

That's why graphic novels are different than traditional ones. A single panel can make you ill and terrified. Sure, a well-written description can do the same, but you have to imagine it in your mind to create that image. Here, it's laid out right in front of you. You can't help but see it just as the author intended. It makes me almost think that perhaps graphic "novels" are truer than any traditionally written memoir could ever be. Sure, it's drawn and that adds a lot of filters, but it gets us closer to the author's truth than some words ever could.