Fantasy Genre in Graphic Novels

Definition

Supernatural non-horror fiction—the broadly defined “fantasy” genre—is among the oldest literary divisions, encompassing fairy tale, legend, myth, fable, folklore, magical realism, and spirituality. Sequential fiction offers a new voice to this venerable storytelling tradition, uniting evocative graphic art with magical stories new and old.

Introduction

The fantasy genre in comics encompasses stories set in worlds in which magic works and the supernatural exists. These elements are not inherently inimical or malevolent, as in supernatural horror stories, and fantasy comics are generally distinguished from superhero comics in which magical elements appear. The fantasy genre does not necessarily exclude science-fiction concepts, but fanciful hybrids such as steampunk or space fantasy are not widely considered a part of the genre and are typically set aside into their own categories. The crucial element in the genre is magic in all its forms: wizardry, magical creatures and races, plants and substances with magical properties, and direct and indirect appearances of gods, spirits, and demons.

The fortunes of fantasy in comics and graphic novels have generally followed the genre’s success or failure in other media. Graphic novels are a relatively recent expression of comics art, and their commercial success seems to have been limited mainly to superhero stories, manga, and the occasional breakout independent work. Among the earliest and most successful of these independent projects was Wendy and Richard Pini’s creator-owned and self-published ElfQuest, which was published in multiple graphic novels over the course of twenty-five years.

Underground and International Works

While the mainstream comics industry was relatively slow to embrace the fantasy genre as more than a sidenote to superhero or horror comics, various creators working in the field of underground comics or publishing outside of the United States explored the genre to a considerable extent. Vaughn Bodé’s stories featuring Cheech Wizard were among the underground creations that examined mainstream fantasy ideas—in the case of the Cheech Wizard stories, a magical forest and its denizens—in a hipper, more cutting-edge context. French comics creator Philippe Druillet’s Lone Sloane stories as well as his Yragaël crossed the boundaries of the fantasy genre frequently in the 1970’s, helping inspire American and British artists to new heights of invention. Less technologically oriented or science fiction-based than works by contemporaries such as Moebius (Jean Giraud), Druillet’s often-mystical works strongly influenced the development of the fantasy genre in graphic novels.

For all his decades of work in mainstream superhero comics, artist and art instructor Jack Katz would receive his greatest recognition for his groundbreaking early graphic novel, The First Kingdom. Although the setting is science fictional in many of its trappings and overtones, particularly in later volumes, the presence of identifiable Greco-Roman deities and metaphysical implications shows that Katz, like fellow superhero comics creator Jack Kirby, felt that the fantasy genre’s conventions were as adaptable in modern times as they had been in centuries past. This freedom to experiment with genre expectations was further explored in the supernatural elements of stories by creators such as Jim Starlin (Dreadstar). As a genre, fantasy has tended to offer the writers and authors of graphic novels a means of escaping conventional methods of reaching their audience.

Alien Worlds

Most fantasy graphic novels and comics are set in preindustrial, pre-gunpowder societies of one sort or another. The exceptions to this rule, such as Matt Wagner’s Mage and Mike Barr and Brian Boland’s Camelot 3000, are usually very clearly set in places that are different enough from the real world that there is little risk of confusion. More clear-cut fantasy graphic novels may be set in a supernaturally augmented version of a documented historical period, as in the twelfth century Europeof Chris Claremont and John Bolton’s TheBlack Dragon, or in an ancient or feudal setting reminiscent of J. R. R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings or Robert E. Howard’s Conan the Barbarian stories.

Even when fantasy graphic novels offer visions of preindustrial cultures, the worlds in which they are set are not always recognizably parallel to Earth. The Bone books by Jeff Smith paradoxically insert simple, humorous comic strip-style characters into realistically drawn settings and pit them against foes that range from normal human beings to the nightmarish “rat creatures” that infest Smith’s detailed, complex fantasy world. Larry Marder’s Tales of theBeanworld expresses real-world ideas of ecology and social interaction in a fanciful world that borders on the surreal. The World of Two Moons, the setting of ElfQuest, is a fully thought-out, workable fictional world, but its diminutive, savage, wolf-riding tribal elves are absolutely not of Earth. Like its cousin the fantasy novel, the fantasy graphic novel attempts to displace the reader’s point of view to a strange and different world—not necessarily a utopian one, but always one that emphasizes qualities strangely changed from the world the reader knows.

Bloodstar

The first fantasy graphic novel known to have identified itself as such was Richard Corben’s Bloodstar, a 1976 adaptation of Howard’s fantasy short story “The Valley of the Worm,” one of several to chronicle the adventurous past lives of protagonist James Allison. As a number of critics and comics historians have noted, Bloodstar was the first self-described “graphic novel” that was neither a collection of previously published comics nor a prose novel with interspersed illustrations; Will Eisner’s A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories, commonly cited as the first graphic novel, was not published until 1978. Despite Corben’s inclusion of some science-fiction elements in the story, Bloodstar’s provenance as fantasy is clear.

Although Corben uses a large portion of Howard’s original text in dialogue and narration, vital portions of the story are conveyed almost completely through the illustrations. Along with Howard’s straightforward story line, violence and sex are given graphic form in Corben’s bravura manner. If Bloodstar lacks any claim to the title of first graphic novel, it may actually be in its reliance on imagery rather than words. The medium of the graphic novel relies on a balance between the word and the image, and there will always be those who advocate the primacy of the word in fiction.

Fantasy and Narrative

The argument is often made that all fictional characters are figures of fantasy, and it has been asserted that the superhero story is a subgenre of fantasy fiction rather than science fiction or adventure fiction. However, these notions make the genre definition too shapeless and far-reaching to mean very much for either marketing or intellectual purposes. Despite this, there is an increasingly popular category of person for writers and artists to include in fantasy graphic novels: ordinary people like the readers, and in some cases, the readers themselves.

Breaking the narrative fourth wall and addressing the readers—drawing them into the story, effectively making them participants as well as the audience—is a narrative technique with a long history. Because fantasy holds within its genre definition the implication that it concerns things that do not and cannot exist, generally only the most fanciful and lighthearted fantasy comics have allowed characters to wink to the reader and imply kinship. (Exceptions can also be made for supernatural horror stories, such as the metanarrative in Corben’s story “The Slipped Mickey Click Flip” in Creepy, and for the supernatural assumptions made in religious comics as part of their message.) It was only in the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries that this narrative leap came to be added to the repertoire of magically oriented titles such as those of Alan Moore and Grant Morrison, both of whom describe themselves as real-world magicians and certain of their works as actual magical “workings.”

Whether taken literally or not, such experiments in enchantment call the reader’s attention to the question of where the fictive act ends in the author’s mind and where it begins in the audience’s. Viewing art as an act with two accomplices—the creator and the consumer—lends weight to the idea that for the duration of a short suspension of disbelief, the reader actually does live in a magical world in his or her mind’s eye. If Joseph Campbell’s and Carl Jung’s notions of a shared body of motifs, stories, and ideas across eras and cultures exists in any sense, it is surely allegorical to the rich body of cultural folklore that rises up through fantasy graphic novels only to pass into other creative minds and be changed and retold in other forms. This primal, intuitive, and polymorphic quality is part of the enduring power of fantasy in graphic novels. In many regards, the fantasy genre may be regarded as the mythmaking genre.

Impact

Graphic novels, like all other printed media, have faced increasing challenges in the marketplace in the early twenty-first century. However, the fantasy genre has been one of the few genres of printed media to experience a surge of interest during the period. In the wake of the success of motion pictures such as Peter Jackson’s adaptation of TheLord of the Rings and fantasy novels such as J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series, the fantasy genre has seen a healthy dose of matching success in the graphic novel medium. The groundswells of support for comic books featuring Howard’s Conan and Red Sonja characters have also contributed to this success, as has the popularity of fantasy-tinged titles in DC’s Vertigo line, notably Bill Willingham’s Fables.

Thematically, the body of folklore and myth that underlies fantasy fiction informs other genres as well. Starlin’s satirical Gilgamesh II pointedly takes off on the Babylonian tale, and the legends of ancient Greece are frequently retold in youth-oriented educational graphic novels such as Charles R. Smith and P. Craig Russell’s The Mighty Twelve: Superheroes of Greek Myth. Magic, the fabric of fantasy and much of its raison d’être, is so frequently utilized in graphic novels that a dollop of fantasy is often a useful ingredient for any sequential story, providing an insight into human nature and a frisson of the esoteric and the unknown.

Bibliography

Benton, Mike. The Comic Book in America: An Illustrated History. Dallas, Tex.: Taylor, 1993. Offers an overview of the trends in graphic storytelling and the movement toward comics that fall within the fantasy genre or incorporate fantasy elements.

Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005. Provides a comprehensive history of the American comic book, including discussion of the development of the fantasy genre.

Petersen, Robert. Comics, Manga, and Graphic Novels: A History of Graphic Narratives. Santa Barbara, Calif.: Praeger, 2011. Discusses the history of the comic book and graphic novel both in the United States and elsewhere, exploring publication trends and major works.