Diary of an author, waiting. part 8
While waiting for my new collection of wise words and pictures to appear in the stores, my Fate of the Artist, my old ones hurry back to haunt me. Actually, upon reading this, it’s not so bad. I managed to spice it with enough humor to keep it alive in the bottle. Nearly two years ago, just after the NY Times magazine did their big piece on the graphic novel (Jun ’04) , I observed a tendency in our artistic community to waste precious print space arguing about things of no importance (such as what is a graphic novel and why don’t we go back to saying comic book?). I attempted to galvanize the practitioners of the form into a state of solidarity by writing a manifesto. It got reprinted widely and I think it may even be quoted in full on the Wikipedia site.
This chappie (I think he’s in the Phillipines) just decide to present it afresh for all our readers who missed it the first time around.
A nice bit of commentary.
I think people forget that a “novel” was simply something new. Assumptions about length grew from the format, but all the word meant was that the story had been made and was not necessarily meant to be objectively true. So the only questions about graphic novels should be about their use of graphics and their success in creating something new.