Electrified Words and Images, A Golden Notion

What's the power of comics form? It seems to be looked down upon by the literary world as a popular form--the old high/low aesthetic split--and one stereotype seems to be that it doesn't, that it can't, carry the gravitas that more "literary" work does.

I don't know, maybe Maus dispelled this notion to some degree. I recall sitting in the audience at AWP listening to Art Spiegelman give the keynote in NYC a decade ago. Now he was electrifying. He got the nod, then it was back to the regularly scheduled prose programming.

Just for fun, let's apply the low-art label to comics art for a second. What, then, are graphic adaptations of literary works--dumbed-down versions of the real thing? This has been a point of internal resistance in my mind as I consider the current project. 

Not that I care about the tenuous membrane between low and high art or the perceived need to puncture it, just that I wonder, fundamentally, why reach for a different form? 

I guess I'm suspicious of my own intentions. Is it a commercial impulse, a desire for more readers and respect, a result of my stuckness with producing new work, something else? All these fears suggest I come at the project out of some shameful necessity. 

And yet.

Last night, while reading Nnedi Okorafor's introduction to the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler's Kindred, I came across this sentence: "The very medium of the graphic novel already electrifies words and images."

My brain ignited. What if the comics form is actually a higher, more immediate, more powerful, more electric form of art than prose? Ai yi yi. Maybe we don't need to posit "higher." Higher is problematical. More emotional, more visceral are terms that are perhaps more useful.

In the heady days of grad school I liked to declaim film as "the highest art" because, I would argue on my fourth or fifth glass of cheap merlot at a symposium, it combines not one but multiple various arts--written, visual, acting, editing, and musical--to play on the viewer's emotions. And beyond that, the "visual" is a dynamic one of cinematography...zzzzzzzzzzz....you get the picture.

So now I consider a return to the golden notion that recombinant art electrifies, intensifies, amplifies. Perhaps here, there's a little bit more.