Skim

I know many of you have limited or no experience with comics or graphic novels. We spend some time with them in our Culture Industries classs because of their current cultural influence. I'd like you to read what's posted below, in that it raises a very important issue as to how those outside the medium often fail to really understand the form. Give it some thought.

There's a graphic novel that's getting lots of attention. It's called Skim and it's by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki. The NY Times Book Review is here. Here's a taste of the review, but you should read it all for our purposes: "... the story of 16-year-old Kimberly Keiko Cameron, known as “Skim” to her classmates. A Wiccan-practicing goth who goes to a private girls’ school, Skim is the quintessential outsider, a dark-haired, Asian-American in a sea of Caucasian blondes, not skim (slim) like the girls in the popular clique, thus her nickname ...

The black and white pictures by Jillian Tamaki, Mariko’s cousin, create a nuanced, three-dimensional portrait of Skim, conveying a great deal of information often without the help of the text. The book’s most striking use of purely visual communication occurs in a lush and lovely double-page tableau of Skim and Ms. Archer exchanging a kiss in the woods that leaves the reader (and maybe even the participants) wondering who kissed whom. ...

Graphic novels, by the nature of their form, often use as little text as possible; the dialogue is sometimes hardly more than a serviceable vehicle to drive the action. In “Skim,” however, the spare dialogue is just right, capturing the cynical and biting way that Skim and her classmates tend to talk to one another.

“Skim” — a winner of a 2008 New York Times Best Illustrated Children’s Books Award — is a convincing chronicle of a teenage outsider who has enough sense to want to stay outside. ...

All in all, “Skim” offers a startlingly clear and painful view into adolescence for those of us who possess it only as a distant memory. It’s a story that deepens with successive rereadings. But what will teenagers think? Maybe that they’ve found a bracingly honest story by a writer who seems to remember exactly what it was like to be 16 and in love for the first time."


Okay, that's not why I'm posting this. I haven't read it yet, so I normally wouldn't be mentioning it until I did. But I am talking about "Skim" because it just made the short-list for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards. That recognition for Mariko Tamaki prompted the following letter posted on the Drawn and Quarterly site and now copied elsewhere. I am posting it in full as well because of issues involving the graphic novel medium that we should be aware of for class purposes:

AN OPEN LETTER TO THE GOVERNOR GENERAL’S LITERARY AWARDS

November 12, 2008

As individuals involved in the art form of comics and graphic novels, we are glad to see that a graphic novel has made the short-list for this year’s Governor General’s Literary Awards. SKIM (by Mariko and Jillian Tamaki) is a wonderful book and deserves the attention. But we’re troubled by the fact that only one of its co-creators is receiving credit for the creation of the book’s text. We understand that an award-category exists for illustration, but to have nominated Jillian in that category would not have rectified the problem. Indeed, that would have highlighted how our medium is misunderstood.

We’re guessing that the jury who read SKIM saw it as an illustrated novel. It’s not; it’s a graphic novel. In illustrated novels, the words carry the burden of telling the story, and the illustrations serve as a form of visual reinforcement. But in graphic novels, the words and pictures BOTH tell the story, and there are often sequences (sometimes whole graphic novels) where the images alone convey the narrative. The text of a graphic novel cannot be separated from its illustrations because the words and the pictures together ARE the text. Try to imagine evaluating SKIM if you couldn’t see the drawings. Jillian’s contribution to the book goes beyond mere illustration: she was as responsible for telling the story as Mariko was.

In an October 21st article for the CBC website, one of your jurors, Teresa Toten, was interviewed: “Toten praised SKIM for using the graphic novel format to tell a sophisticated story about what life is like for teenaged girls. The work is remarkable in part because of how the words and pictures both contribute to the literary quality, she said.” And that is the point of this letter. “[T]he words and pictures both contribute to [SKIM’s] literary quality”.

A new category does not need to be created to properly address the graphic novel. In fact, it is best to see graphic novels appear in literary awards only when they deserve to compete equally against prose on their literary merit alone.

In writing this letter, we don’t mean to slight Mariko. One of the reasons this collaboration works so well is because she understood how to write for this medium. But we feel that as things now stand, Jillian is being slighted. We want both of the enormously talented creators of this book to be honoured together for their achievement.

Yours,

Chester Brown (Author of Louis Riel)
Seth (Author of It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken)

NAMES IN SUPPORT OF THIS LETTER
Lynda Barry (Author of What It Is)
Peter Birkemoe (Owner of The Beguiling)
Dan Clowes (Author of Ghost World)
David Collier (Author of The Frank Ritza Papers)
Julie Doucet (Author of 365 Days)
Chris Oliveros (Publisher of Drawn and Quarterly)
Joe Ollmann (Author of This Will All End in Tears)
Bryan Lee O’Malley (author of Scott Pilgrim)
Michel Rabagliati (Author of Paul Moves Out)
Art Spiegelman (Pulitzer Prize winning author of Maus)
Adrian Tomine (Author of Shortcomings)
Chris Ware (Author of Jimmy Corrigan, Smartest Kid on Earth)