The term non-fiction graphic novel is not a misnomer because a misnomer is an inaccurate use of a term or phrase. In my opinion the term non-fiction graphic novel is a perfect term to fit books like Maus and Contract With God because you can have a real life story and portray it in a medium that does not rely solely on text. Paintings are much like this because they are not a picture capturing the image nor a non-fiction piece of writing about the topic, but instead portray what happened using paint, a canvas, and the artist's imagination. It is pretty easy for something to be non-fiction and a novel because all you have to do is take the non-fiction story and add a creative twist to the way you tell the audience. Assigning simplistic images to a non-fiction story does not all of the sudden make it fiction, but it instead creates a way for the audience to relate to the protagonist or even antagonist in a way that they might not have been able to before. For example, in Understanding Comics, McCloud says that we as humans have the need to assign an emotion to everything we come in contact with, but it has to be a simple enough object in order to do that, otherwise it becomes "other". We do not see the details in our own faces so in order to put ourselves in the other's place, we need a medium with less detail like a comic. The way Spiegelman uses comics to portray his story is revolutionary because he decides to use animals as the main persona instead of people because it is easier to digest the seriousness of the novel. In other forms such as a written novel, yes he could have still used animals as the characters, but we as people would transform them in our minds into too-similar-to-human characters and the story would not be as easily well disposed.
As discussed in Chapter 2 of Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics , the Japanese style of comic book art holds several notable quirks. While early manga artists tended to favor simplistic, yet distinct styles that paved the way for a number of internationally renowned characters, contemporary manga artists have since favored a hybrid style that juxtaposes the cutesy, rounded characters of yesteryear with the realistic and richly shaded settings that have since become popular. Building on this, McCloud describes a phenomenon in which Japanese comic artists have used realism to objectify--that is, to emphasize the "otherness" of certain characters, objects, or places--elements of their work and further separate these elements from the reader. I have chosen the work of one of my favorite comic artists, Japanese horror icon Junji Ito, to further illustrate McCloud's point. Though McCloud describes this phenomenon in the context of Japanese comic book art, he is usi...
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