"Rough day at the book mines."

"... an important part of the secret history of comics."
— art spiegelman on Frans Masereel

Taking a cue from art spiegelman's quote above, this issue of Indy Magazine samples the "secret history" of the graphic novel. More accurately, the bulk of this issue is given over to a series of essays showcasing original, book-length graphic narratives that might be seen as historical antecedents to the contemporary "graphic novel." Beginning with Rodolphe Töpffer and ending before Maus, one can outline a relatively full and certainly eclectic pre-history of the graphic novel. In fact, I began compiling a version of such a list (limited to works available in the U.S.) but gave it up for several reasons. Primarily, I wasn't confident that my list would be complete.

The history of original, book-length graphic narratives is generally a list of isolated incidents. There are occasional trends, such as Töpffer's imitators or the followers of Masereel and Ward, but more often these books tend to be idiosyncracies (or idiosyncratic bodies of work, like Edward Gorey's). The book length graphic narrative is re-conceived each time according to a particular artist's concerns. As such, the books become difficult to classify, especially vis-a-vis any definition of "comics." (Milt Gross is the only profiled artist who self-identified as a cartoonist.)

These books all emerged from a period after the birth of mass-market book publishing but before the "comic book" as we know it fully adapted to the book format — a period before the book-length graphic narrative collided with the comic-book-straining-beyond-its-bounds. In that light, Harvey Kurtzman's 1959 Jungle Book stands out as a wholly original "comics-book" fully utilizing the stacked, vertical page structure and other graphic-narrative devices codified within the context of the comic book industry proper (with Jules Feiffer's semi-comic-bookish Passionella and Other Stories appearing in that same year).

The less conventional (or pre-conventional) graphic narratives featured here, often lacking those codified "comics" elements with which we have become familiar, challenge us to determine what it is that we value about comics. Certainly it becomes clear that the comics page as it has developed is a particular and complex structure for graphic storytelling. It is equally clear that if these proto-graphic novels don't do everything that "comics" do, they certainly do some of those things — narrative drawing, sequential images, word/image juxtaposition, etc. — and they do them well enough to tell satisfying, challenging graphic narratives, effectively using the devices each artist has chosen and developed.

The books selected for this issue are all good, highly idiosyncratic graphic narratives drawn for an adult — or general — audience, long before comics weren't for kids anymore. I avoided the pioneering Rodolphe Töpffer because I hope to cover his work more fully in a future issue. The line of artists he immediately influenced is represented here by Gustave Doré, who first imitated Töpffer and then developed his own style of long-form graphic narrative. I also avoided the frequently cited novels-in-woodcuts (Masereel, Ward, etc.), as that line of work was well-surveyed in an excellent series of features published by the Comics Journal (#208). I'm pleased instead to represent that group of books with the least representative book of the lot: Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong. Spiegelman has called Gross "one of the few unsung Golden Age greats," and this book is an over-looked gem. I came across Mine Okubo's Citizen 13660 by chance in a used bookstore, and found an accomplished graphic narrative that also happens to be a major historical document. I learned of R. O. Blechman's The Juggler of Our Lady when Drawn & Quarterly announced a now-shelved reprint project. I'm grateful, at least, that D+Q's solicitation brought the book to my attention. Thanks to a few vocal posters on the Comics Journal's message board, Matin Vaughn-James's The Cage has gained something of a reputation as a truly challenging avant-garde graphic narrative that deserves notice from readers of comics. The CNBDI's acquisition and exhibition of Vaughn-James's original artwork and preparatory sketches encouraged me to seek out the book, and I invited one of those vocal message board posters — Domingos Isabelinho — to explicate the book's techniques and themes.

To the extent that this issue covers overlooked books, it seemed relevant to survey some more recent major works that remain largely hidden by linguistic and international barriers: untranslated European comics. Translation projects to date hint at the large quantity of comics currently inaccessible to English-only readers. Books such as David B.'s Epileptic leave me wondering how incomplete my own concept of "the best in comics" might be. I asked Mark Nevins to develop a survey piece that would list key untranslated European graphic novels. Mark enlisted Bart Beaty and Paul Gravett — two other emminently qualified individuals — and the group collaboratively produced the final, selective overview presented here. May curious publishers take note.

I'm grateful to Paul Karasik, Megan Kelso, Domingos, Mark, Bart, Paul Gravett, Isaac Cates, Charles Hatfield and Adam White for contributing to this issue. Special thanks to Mark for energetically spearheading the European project and for his consistent dedication in the face of unforseen personal and professional emergencies. Special thanks as well to Charles for coming through on short notice, and to Isaac for helping out with some last minute scans. I'm indebted to Thierry Groensteen for permitting an excerpt of Caran d'Ache's Maestro, a compelling "might-have-been" in the "secret history of the graphic novel." Many thanks as well to Tom Devlin for arranging a preview of Brian Chippendale's Maggots, upcoming from Highwater Books.

As always, I welcome comments via e-mail: billyk@alum.dartmouth.org. Indy Magazine will return in the autumn.