Graphic Novels

Everyone was comparing The Orange Eats Creeps to Charles Burns' Black Hole, so I finally upped and read it. I thought it was fantastic. So in the future we're going to start considering graphic novel submissions for publication.

Also, along those lines, The Philoctetes Center for the Multidisciplinary Study of Imagination at the New York Psychoanalytic Institute is hosting a panel discussion on Sunday, December 5 at 2:30 on the subject of 'The Art of the Graphic Novel.' Panel participants include Lynda Barry, Hillary Chute, N.C. Christopher Couch, Ben Katchor, and Francoise Mouly.

Here's how they introduce the panel:

"The underground comics movement in the 1960s and '70s and the avant-garde RAW magazine in the '80s and '90s established comics as an important medium for storytelling and self-expression. Since then the field has opened in many new directions. Today there are cartoonists such as Joe Sacco publishing four-hundred-page works of comics journalism about Gaza, and Alison Bechdel publishing comics-form book reviews in The New York Times Book Review. An unprecedented critical and popular interest in “graphic novels,” book-length fiction in comics, has emerged in recent years. Why is there such enthusiasm about comics in our current moment, and where is the form headed? What can this intricate, double-tracked narrative form, composed of words and images, bring to journalism, or to memoir, or to the art of fiction? How are politics and aesthetics intertwined in comics, and how are popular and so-called high cultures melded in the form? This roundtable will bring together some of the foremost cartoonists, publishers, and critics in the field to explore current and future avenues for the comics form—its strengths and capacities, and where it is headed."