Nicki Greenberg, the part-time lawyer who reimagined F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby as a graphic novel, is far from the cliché of comic-book fanboy. She finds comic bookshops more confusing than inspiring: ‘The books are all wrapped in plastic so you can’t look at any of them—what sort of bookshop wraps its books up? I couldn’t buy anything because I couldn’t look in it. And they’re full of figurines of demonic creatures and superheros or whatever.’

Greenberg’s book originally came out in a grand hardcover format that defied the term ‘comic book’. Her version of Jay Gatsby is a dilettante seahorse while his paramour Daisy is a fluffy, fussy bird. Rather than a dumbing-down of American literature or a children’s version, Greenberg’s work is a nuanced graphic novel aimed squarely at an adult audience. It’s reverential of the original—‘The last page of the book I used every word, because that’s just uncuttable’—but adeptly adds its own texture to the story. Her images of African-American servants provide a good example as she ‘features all of those nameless characters with hands growing out of the tops of their heads, because they were just seen as a pair of hands to serve the glamorous privileged creatures at the centre of the story’. The class distinction is even more poignant when Daisy retreats into her wealth shielded by hired hands.

Greenberg works in the law part-time, while working on a new adaptation of Hamlet. She’d like to be illustrating full-time but ‘it’s pretty tough in Australia. I’d love it to be a career path, I hope it will be for lots of people.’ Erica Wagner, Greenberg’s publisher at Allen & Unwin, views this as the emergence of a new form in Australia. She calls them ‘literary graphic novels … and they start with an obsessive creator … It’s essentially these individuals working away quietly in their rooms, passionately exploring this world and creating a book.’ If any Australian publisher could lay claim to having an imprint of graphic novels then it is Allen & Unwin, with Wagner among the industry’s most passionate advocates. She reads a lot, scouting DIY zines and underground publishing for new talent. In a good graphic novel, she believes: ‘Even the gaps between the panels resonate. When you’re looking at the whole page your eye dances across the page.’ The traditional comic book, by contrast, is shorter (often serialised), more linear and usually aimed at the existing market of pre-adults. Wagner says The Great Gatsby was ‘very deliberately published in the adults list’ rather than the burgeoning young adult (YA) market, despite the fact that it would have been a safer bet for sales.

The term ‘graphic novel’ was in part created to prevent the books being dismissed as comics. Many comic-book creators reserve the graphic novel for work that has adult themes and is produced exclusively for the longer book format. The superhero comic books hijacked the term as a way to repackage serialised stories and attempt to nab an adult audience who wanted a shame-free way to peruse their men in tights. Some creators have abandoned the term ‘graphic novel’ in favour of ‘sequential art’, ‘graphic narratives’ or the downright clumsy ‘paraliteracy’. Aside from being a marketing buzzword, the term ‘graphic novel’ was really an attempt to promote a new form that could step away from the restrictions on the comic book. Comic books were subjected to an old-fashioned witch-hunt in the 1950s, with an active movement led by US educationalist Frederic Wertheim to burn them. Much of the fear was about so-called ‘horror’ comics as publishers chased an older readership after the explosion among teens of superhero titles before the Second World War. Wertheim and his moral majority staged parent protests across the United States against comics that held too much blood or sex. Fearing the destruction of their business, the US industry introduced a code that was emblazoned on every comic and forbade vampirism, sex perversion or other adult themes. Its wholesome view of marriage meant that ‘Divorce shall not be treated humorously nor represented as desirable.’ The code remained largely unchallenged until the 1980s. Australia wasn’t immune from similar campaigns, with debate getting muddied with fears of an invading American culture. Even illustrators in the Australian Journalists’ Association called for a ban on imported horror comics, which threatened to outsell Australian comics such as Ginger Meggs, Clancy of the Overflow and other homegrown titles that were aimed at younger readers. State law-makers intending to prevent comics tackling adult themes failed to realise that comics had an adult readership as well as a teen one. There were few prosecutions under Australia’s state-based comic laws, although they were used in Queensland to prosecute Playboy in the 1980s.

Internationally, comics were pegged into the adolescent market and comics’ golden age faded to bronze as concerned parents filtered content for their children. Comics were no longer for kids, but for parents and moralists who had protested against comics’ maturing themes. There were exceptions. In Japan comics were smuggled in by occupying US GIs. The audience these comics found led to a flourishing industry, one that peaked with Osamu Tezuka, otherwise known as ‘God of manga’. Tezuka created Tetsuwan Atomu (Mighty Atom) in the 1960s, which became better known to Australians under the title Astroboy. As Australian manga creator Queenie Chan explains: ‘Manga is basically Japan’s version of Hollywood. There’s manga dealing with everything from red wine to surgery, fire-fighting to sushi-making.’ She also points to the flourishing comic-book industries of Spain, France, Italy and Brazil, where there is no form of regulation.

Elsewhere, self-censorship forced comics underground, with creators such as Robert Crumb or publications such as The Fabulous Furry Freak Brothers. In 1978 adult issues appeared in comics again when American Will Eisner created A Contract with God. This book allowed him to play with a longer form than serialised comic books, featuring ‘wandering’ short stories that explored New York tenements. It was among the first publications to be marketed as a graphic novel. Throughout the 1970s British children’s book illustrator Raymond Briggs was creating books that were stretching his audience. In 1978 he produced an entirely wordless comic, The Snowmen, which was a pioneer of the form and appealed to all ages. In 1982 When the Wind Blows grimly followed a British working-class couple through a nuclear attack in a graphic novel that raised debate in the House of Commons. In case the Thatcher government hadn’t gotten the message he followed up with the anti–Falklands War polemic The Tin-Pot Foreign General and the Old Iron Woman.

By the 1980s the superheroes were being released in book format and dabbling with difficult issues. The term ‘graphic novel’ was now used more freely. Watchmen (due for film release in March this year) was among the first comic books in which superheroes developed self-doubt, had relationship issues or faced their own mortality. ‘Sock!’ and ‘Biff!’ were replaced with ‘Hmm …’ and ‘I may have erectile dysfunction.’ Confused by the adult nature of comic books, critics began talking about graphic novels as a new genre. In 1992, Art Speigelman was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for Maus, an anthropomorphic biography of his Polish Jewish family’s survival of the Holocaust and the impact of the experience on successive generations. In 2001, Chris Ware turned critical heads with his graphic novel Jimmy Corrigan, The Smartest Kid on Earth, which won the 2001 Guardian First Book Award. These awards are often cited as a wider recognition of the graphic novel as a serious literary form.

In Australia things were slower to develop. In the 1990s zines and self-published comics kept adult comics alive. One survivor of the DIY scene is Bruce Mutard, who published Street Smell No. 0 in 1994 with a loan from his dad. These days he’s working on a trilogy of very adult comics, the first of which, The Sacrifice, was published in 2007. Mutard’s trilogy follows a pacificist’s entanglement with the Second World War as he questions his ideals and develops a relationship with a Jewish German refugee girl. ‘I always pitched it at an adult market,’ Mutard says. Initially influenced by Watchmen and Frank Miller’s Batman—The Dark Knight Returns, Mutard was really liberated by ‘the underground comics of Robert Crumb and the Hernandez brothers and the so-called alternative comics’, all of which dealt freely with adult issues. In conversation Mutard has a professorial air. He carefully thinks about what words to use, sometimes rewinding to re-edit what he’s just said. It’s the caution of a historian reflecting on his own time. ‘There was a wave of Australian self-published comics in those days—Platinum Grit, Greener Pastures, Bug & Stump—they were all being distributed in the newsagents. I wasn’t prepared to go that far, because of the numbers that you have to print.’ So Mutard published several issues of Street Smell and distributed them himself through traditional comic outlets.

He was eventually noticed by US Image Press who took on his comic The Bunker, ‘a graphic novel about art in general’. While the book didn’t sell well in the US, Mutard kept working and was eventually picked up by Allen & Unwin. In the last couple of years his work has attracted more interest, with Arts Victoria and Australia Council grants:

Interestingly, mainstream publishers are getting to the medium as well as grant bodies and other official arts bodies—academia and elsewhere. That, for me, has always been where the graphic story medium has had to go to become a fully fledged member of the arts community.

Other comic creators have leapfrogged the Australian industry entirely. Born in Hong Kong, Queenie Chan is one of a handful of Australian manga artists who has found success overseas. Her gothic trilogy The Dreaming was based in an Australian school in the nineteenth century, but was published through Los Angeles–based Tokyopop. In 2008 she illustrated a graphic novel by thriller writer Dean Koontz, with a follow-up planned. Chan is ‘optimistic’ about the future of Australian comics creators, though ‘most Australian comic artists I know already work overseas … It’s just a matter of building a market and a readership in mainstream channels, and for publishers to get into the act.’

Manga is primarily a Japanese and Korean comic form, but English-language versions became popular in Australia and elsewhere in the 1990s via content-sharing on the internet. Scanlation (or scanslation) communities appeared as Japanese readers scanned their favourite comics and uploaded them with their own English translations. It’s no more legal than music sharing, but Japanese publishers have been slow to prosecute, possibly because they have no plans to offer translations. In Australia, according to Chan, ‘the market grew without any input from mainstream publishers, because it all came off the internet’. Publisher Erica Wagner agrees: ‘I’m very interested in manga, but I think that has its own momentum and does its own thing.’ But like other forms of graphic novels, Chan believes manga ‘fills a void left by people who think comics are just superheroes or Sunday funnies. And considering the possibilities of sequential art as a story-telling medium, that’s a very large void.’

Into this void came graphic novels. Like Raymond Briggs before him, Shaun Tan moved from children’s books into the graphic novel with his wordless The Arrival, which won the NSW Premier’s Literary Award in 2007. ‘I say it’s a silent book about immigration or migrant experience. It’s meant to look like a photo album a little bit if you imagine a photo album from another universe or that someone’s kept from a long dream they’ve had,’ Tan explains in his dry Western Australian tone. His voice is strained after his session at the National Young Writers Festival, where he ran half an hour over time taking drawing requests from a standing-room-only crowd that packed Newcastle town hall chamber. In Australia The Arrival is still classified as a children’s book, but Tan chuckles at this:

It says something more about the limits of Australian categorisation. You take a book to France, no-one’s going to say it’s a kid’s book, because they’re more familiar with that form … You look at manga in Japan and that’s really different—that’s much more accepted, all ages read it, people sitting on the trains, businessmen are reading manga.

His latest book, Tales from Suburbia, is more novel than graphic, with a series of short stories that switch between words and illustrations. Critics were bemused—the Sydney Morning Herald review of 16 June 2008 called it ‘not Tan’s best’ and compared it to text-based short-story collections and children’s literature—rather than other graphic novels. There are few Australian comparisons because the form is so unexplored here. Tan notes that: There’s also this big gap in the sort of books that are available. They’re kind of between children’s books and adult illustrated books, something between picture books and comics. A few people do occasionally cross into that, like Raymond Briggs—his books are like ‘Where do they belong?’

It’s a question puzzling not just reviewers but also bookshops. Illustrator Chewie Chan works as a comics consultant for the Sydney branch of the international bookselling chain Kinokuniya to build on their dedicated graphic novel section. Chewie is upbeat and believes that publishers will ‘welcome a brand-new category to market, just because people haven’t seen too much of it in the past and they’re up for something different’. As an artist and a bookseller, he welcomes Tan’s NSW Premier’s award as proof that ‘a story can be told in many ways and, told well, would be enjoyed by everyone. And sometimes that best way is in a graphic novel. It’s made everyone aware of that “new” choice.’

It’s a sentiment echoed by publisher Wagner when she talks of graphic novels as ‘a new unique art form’. In the crowded and competitive worlds of publishing and bookselling, graphic novels can easily fall between the shelves. ‘I think for a lot of booksellers that graphic-novel section is dominated by manga and these literary graphic novels are hard to find and hard to see.’ Any new art form struggles to find an audience, but in mainstream publishing the graphic novel has to overcome superhero associations and avoid being branded children’s literature. Ironically, early literary novels were initially dismissed as trivial Romances, tales of bold knights on quests to prove themselves. Novels seemed to be full of little more than tales of derring-do and critics sneered at them: novels were not considered real literature. If you traded armour for capes, you’d have the graphic novel problem. Just as Watchmen showed human superheroes, the seventeenth-century Don Quixote’s antihero knight bent the novel into farce and allowed progress from its chivalric origins.

By the eighteenth century, novels such as Daniel Defoe’s Robinson Crusoe controversially borrowed from the popular genre of historical journeys with an introduction labelling it a ‘true private history, risking to be read as romantic invention’. It astounded critics and readers alike, who thought they knew what a novel was, but it ultimately led to greater experimentation. Tales of Outer Suburbia’s blending of short stories into images or Tan’s ‘silent graphic novel’ similarly befuddle. Tan looks to historical antecedents of pictures and text intermingling, saying, ‘It used to be very common in Dickens’ time to have illustrated novels.’ But it is experimentation with this new form and its growing audience that will lead to a Jane Austen of the graphic novel.

For Sydney-born illustrator Mandy Ord (whose work appears in Meanjin), there are signs of hope:

People need choice and comic material has the potential to be so diverse. As readers mature they might start to get interested in philosophy, or travel or religion. Who’s to say comics can’t deal with these topics any less than novels or short stories or travel guides or history books? I like it when I go into some book stores that Maus is in the history section as opposed to the humour section.

Like Tan, Ord comes at the graphic novel from a fine-arts background with a scratchy black and white style that’s often more black. She spent ‘spent six months locked in my studio at night and in the early morning working my arse off’ to produce Rooftops, a non-standard-sized book that skips between Melbourne’s skyline, Ord’s depiction of Bill Murray movies and an autobiographical yarn. It breaks the book mould with its odd size. It also doesn’t follow traditional comic-book rules—four image panels are printed over a double-page spread that blends into a black background rather than a clear frame. The reader’s eye dances (to take Wagner’s phrase) from left to right then up and down. It’s a graphic novel that teaches us how to read differently. ‘I actually freaked out a bit at the idea of putting it into the world,’ Ord says with characteristic shyness. ‘It felt like a sort of experiment to me and I knew it had flaws and all that but I did the best I could at the time so I thought, bugger it.’ If Australian graphic novels are to thrive it will be because creators, publishers, booksellers and readers say ‘bugger it’ and explore the new form.

— George Dunford