In
the year of my birth, issues of Sandman, a graphic novel written by
Neil Gaiman, were serialized by Vertigo books in what would become
the penultimate volume of the Sandman
series.
The Kindly Ones, as this 9th
collection would be named, consisted of issues 57-69, and was
published in whole in 1996. I was two years old at the time, and
only clever enough to tie my own shoes. Although I did not realize it
then, Neil Gaiman’s series represented a landmark in the history of
the graphic novel; Sandman became one of the most popular graphic
novels of the 1990s and changed many of the preconceived notions
about the graphic novel as a literary genre. The evolution of the
graphic novel has been an ongoing process since its inception, and I
have been fortunate enough to be able to witness many of the defining
moments in its chronology in my own lifetime.
Sandman
was written by Neil Gaiman and illustrated by a constantly rotating
group of artists. The series tells the story of the seven Endless,
most closely narrating the life of the titular character Dream.
Gaiman describes the Endless in a variety of ways, perhaps best
through the words of Destruction in volume eight, Brief Lives:
The Endless are merely
patterns. The Endless are ideas. The Endless are wave functions. The
Endless are repeating motifs. The Endless are echoes of darkness, and
nothing more... And even our existences are brief and bounded. None
of us will last longer than this version of the Universe.
The
Endless exist as the manifestations of universal experiences. Each of
the seven Endless (Dream, Death, Desire, Destruction, Destiny,
Despair, and Delirium, formerly Delight) personifies an aspect of the
human condition. Gaiman’s ability to create such beautifully
tangible manifestations of these experiences resulted in its
popularity and transformative effects on the graphic novel.
The
entirety of the graphic novel genre has the same wave function as the
Endless; throughout history varying forms of sequential art have been
used to convey narratives. Although only dubbed with the term graphic
novel in recent history, examples of illustration portraying stories
and legends exist throughout every culture and every time period. The
Bayeux tapestry- portraying the Norman conquest of England, and the
Egyptian papyrus scrolls- depicting the entry into the afterlife, are
two examples of marriages between narratives and art. In the absence
of written language, or in the absence of literate audience,
pictorial cues have always aided the description of the greatest
epics of our time. Building on this time honored tradition, the
modern graphic novel has evolved and specialized around the world.
From the bande
dessinée of France, to the manga of Japan, graphic novels are a
celebrated cultural phenomenon.
Today,
graphic novels are capable of relaying entire stories in less time
and often with less ambiguity than their non-illustrated
counterparts. While both written language and literate audiences
exist today, the driving force of instant gratification has caused a
former measure of necessity to become a measure of convenience.
However, a successful graphic novel does not sacrifice its story for
its art; both aspects are strongly linked and benefit the other, and
neither can exist alone. The power of the graphic novel lies in its
ability to show and tell the reader what its characters are thinking
and feeling. When we see sadness, we react to sadness. Likewise, when
we read about happiness, we react to happiness. The duality of the
graphic novel doubly increases our understanding of the material that
we are reading.
Today,
in our own little ways, I think that we are each living graphic
novels. We want our moments to be captured and captioned. Evolving
forms of communication have undoubtedly aided us in our attempts to
be read. We create chronologies of our lives across facebook,
twitter, and blogs, making a complex lexicon of who we are at any
given point in time. These digitalized versions of ourselves are
preserved like chapters in a book, each with a convoluted story line
and unlikable main character. Our desire to be read and remarked upon
(or perhaps, rather, our desires to be remarkable) is truly an
example of life imitating art. So we write another blog post, tweet
another status, and upload another profile picture. Maybe it will
gain us the literary criticisms of “lol!” or “babby gurl u look
fine”, and maybe they won’t. But we’ll write another page
regardless, sometimes because we love ourselves more than dynamic
lettering and dramatic inking could ever hope to convey. And
sometimes we write another page simply because (as Neil Gaiman wrote
in Sandman, Volume 5: A Game of You) “everyone has a secret world
inside of them. All of the people in the world, I mean everybody—no
matter how dull and boring they are on the outside, inside them
they’ve all got unimaginable, magnificent,
wonderful, stupid, amazing worlds. Not just one world… hundreds of
them. Thousands, maybe.”
