From Autonomy to Polygraphy in the Extended Mediascape
In The Origins of Comics (Reference Smolderen2014), Thierry Smolderen proposes a reading of the history of the medium that is different from most current histories in two regards. He elaborates a position that occupies a middle ground between on the one hand the broad vision of those who see comics just as a mass-media instantiation of age-old practices of visual storytelling with fixed images and, on the other hand, the more focused vision of those who opt for a specific point of departure, for instance Rodolphe Töpffer and his “engraved literature” (littérature en estampes) for the European tradition or R. F. Outcault’s The Yellow Kid in the case of the American newspaper comic tradition. Criticizing the historical definition of comics as (only) sequential art for being too heavily rooted in today’s comics practices, Smolderen locates the birth of comics in the work of all those who in the eighteenth century were used to a visual culture in which images were read as signs or texts, that is as complex encryptions of rewritings of other messages. Thus, he makes a plea for an approach that broadens existing lines of influence. The many fascinating relationships he discloses, for example with the emerging film technology as well as the experiments with sync’ sound that revive the worn-out discussions about speech bubbles, help build the medium network the comics belong to and stress the idea that it is not possible to study comics as a self-enclosed medium. Smolderen’s idea of comics as polygraphy, that is a critical rewriting of the many visual and ideological discourses of its time, is therefore a vital tool in any close reading of the medium’s specificity.
As far as the graphic novel is concerned, similar questions emerge that challenge the definition of the medium as self-enclosed and autonomous, even when one admits that the graphic novel cannot be considered outside of its relationships with literature. Yet how to circumscribe the position of the graphic novel in the broader mediascape remains a huge problem. There exists a consensus on the fact that a graphic novel is not – or not exclusively – the adaptation or, more generally, the imitation of a novel in comics format. Not all comics adapting novels are graphic novels. And not all graphic novels rework a novelistic subtext. The infamous example of the Classics Illustrated series (first run in 1941–1971), the continuing efforts to market comparable series catering to an audience that is expected to receive them as comics rather than as graphic novels, and the persistent refusal of numerous adapters to label their often very ambitious and original work as graphic novels – a refusal that can still be observed in as important a market as France – all these elements explain why the place and role of adaptations in the graphic novel field remains somewhat understudied. What is more problematic, however, is the fact that adaptation is mainly reduced to literary adaptations, whereas other forms of adaptations could more convincingly be associated with comics (see Gardner Reference Gardner, Ryan and Thön2014 for an analysis of the filmic intertext of the medium).
The drawn novel, a short-lived and almost completely forgotten type of proto-graphic novel, offers a good opportunity to reconsider the importance of adaptation in the history of the medium, while unearthing a fascinating example of visual storytelling in the immediate post-World War II years, when the very notion of the graphic novel was nearly absent from all critical discourses about the field. The drawn novel is, to put it very briefly and crudely, a form of mimicking film stories in serialized cartoon form that suddenly appeared in 1946 in many large-format European female magazines (Fig. 5.1). A merger of comics and film novel, and therefore much closer to the world of the graphic novel than to that of either comics of film novels, the drawn novel illustrates the power of adaptation in the general approach of the graphic novel as polygraphy. As this chapter will demonstrate, it does so in a positive as well as a negative way. The drawn novel – a literal translation of the French term roman dessiné, more precise than the extremely polysemic and too all-embracing Italian concept of fumetti – is born from a complex set of adaptation processes, and it is also a subsequent type of adaptation that has produced its rapid death. One year later, in 1947, a new medium will appear, the photo novel (often wrongly presented as comics made with photographs, see Baetens 2017b), that is both a remediation of the drawn novel and so radical an innovation that it will rapidly sever all ties with its competitor and, given its commercial triumph, condemn it to almost complete oblivion.
The Drawn Novel and the Adaptation Industry
A necessary dimension of any cultural industry, adaptation is not a one-way business (today, there are, for instance, as many films that are novelized as there are films that are literary adaptations), and it is above all a real business (Murray Reference Murray2011). The commercial viability of many cultural products depends on their capacity for being reused, reworked, remixed, in short reappropriated in more than one medium or format. It would be a mistake to think that this is a recent phenomenon, directly linked with digital culture and the easiness of the cross- and multiplatform migration of bits and bytes. In nineteenth-century Britain, for example, merchandising and remastering of comics figures and scenes was already a daily reality (Sabin Reference Sabin2003). In general, the stronger a business grows, the stronger will also be the impulse to pursue an adaptation policy. The drawn novel can be seen as a rather isolated and apparently marginal phenomenon in the larger history of the graphic novel, but it will not be easy to find another example that was so closely knit to the wider visual culture of the period, mainly the second half of the 1940s. If there has been no lasting place for the drawn novel of either the graphic novel in particular or of comics in general, one should immediately specify that its place in the mediascape of the years 1946–1950 can hardly be overstated, to the point that it is not absurd to qualify the drawn novel, together with the photo novel that would replace it, as the most decisive new mass medium of the pre-television era.
As already stated, the concept of graphic novel was virtually nonexistent in these years in Europe. Rodolphe Töpffer was to be rediscovered, Frans Masereel was seen as an illustrator and a painter rather than as a visual storyteller, Hergé’s Tintin was just for kids, illustrated books for children or adults were not yet conceptualized as picture books. The sudden appearance in 1946 of a totally new format, the drawn novel, was therefore something that was difficult to situate in the larger framework of graphic storytelling. The drawn novel had everything to be defined as a graphic novel, or at least as a precursor of the graphic novel, if the term had been available. But this was not the case, and when the term became more readily available the drawn novel had disappeared for quite some time already – long enough in all cases to no longer reappear on any terminological or historical radar unless to be confused with a medium that is actually very different, the photo novel. Even today, the drawn novel is often defined as a precursor of the photo novel, not of the graphic novel. Even for contemporary observers, who had witnessed in real time the arrival of first the drawn novel and, one year later, the photo novel, it seemed pretty complicated to sharply distinguish between both media, in spite of their huge formal and aesthetic differences. Michelangelo Antonioni’s short documentary on the tremendous social impact of the photo novel, L’amorosa menzogna (1949), a first-hand and well-informed report of the massive and sudden shift from drawn novel to photo novel, is clearly indifferent to the difference between the two media, an attitude quite typical of most later observers and scholars and one that has played a crucial role in the continuing lack of interest in the drawn novel as a graphic novel. The drawn novel is archetypally the victim of a mismatch between words (the label of graphic novel, missing at that time) and things (the practice of the drawn novel, as a culturally hegemonic form).
Before analyzing what the drawn novel actually was, it is necessary to sketch the larger history of the relationships between novels and images before and after the mutual embrace of literature and cinema, of which the drawn novel is an interesting epiphenomenon. Literary texts have always been illustrated, but during the nineteenth century, that is, in the years of literature’s growing autonomy and the accompanying divide between popular and elite literary culture (Marx Reference Marx2005), the resistance toward illustration was steadily growing. Illustrations, which were rejected by several serious novelists such as Gustave Flaubert and questioned by no less ambitious poets such as Stéphane Mallarmé, were considered a concession to crass commercialism, only to be accepted in deluxe bibliophilic editions for the happy few (the niche market for lavishly illustrated book-art albums of poetry and prose is supposed to have taken off in the 1870s) as well as an invitation to practice bad reading habits. As powerfully argued by Matthieu Letourneux (Reference Letourneux2010), illustrations tend to make the reader skip the descriptions, that is, the passages where authors show off their literary know-how. Corollarily, images are also accused of drawing attention to the least literary parts of the works: characters, actions, settings – all elements that literature shares with other media.
Illustrations in these years are therefore to be found in the first place in other, less high-status forms of writing: pornography or cheap melodrama, for example, or in the financially rewarding but from a literary point of view slightly suspect prepublications and serializations in a wide range of magazine formats. When the young film industry started looking for (popular) literature in its insatiable quest for new content – for once the cinema industry adopted fictional narrative cinema as its hegemonic format, the delivery of content became a vital issue – the visualization of the text entered not only a new era, it also dramatically changed the medium hierarchy. Film became the dominant cultural form whereas literature was more and more obliged to put itself in its service, willingly or not. A telling example of this influence is the practice of novelization, that is, the transformation of an original screenplay of film into an independent novel (Baetens Reference Baetens2005). Probably the most independent form of film novel (a very broad genre label that nobody has ever succeeded in satisfyingly defining and that comprises works as different as “the making of books,” illustrated or nonillustrated digests and all kinds of more or less rewritten scenarios in various stages of realization, see Virmaux [Reference Virmaux and Virmaux1983]), novelization is not intrinsically linked to film. In the nineteenth century, when drama was still the dominant cultural medium, both artistically and financially, it was the successful plays that were novelized (often without previous authorization, which made them a companion to the many illegal reprints of the first half of that century). Yet what makes film novelizations so interesting in this context is the fact they have rapidly been illustrated, either by film stills or, more frequently, by set picture (the same pictures that were used also for other publicity purposes: celebrity culture, reviews, direct publicity in theater lobbies, etc.).
In a certain sense, one may say that the relationship between text and image thus comes full circle. Popular novels are illustrated, then adapted to the wide screen; later, these films are readapted as novelizations, which happen to include illustrations more or less the same way the original novels did. The practice of the drawn novel shows, however, that many possibilities of creative adaptation remained untapped and that the circle in question, although full, is far from complete. First of all, the illustrations of a film novelization are not comparable with those of an illustrated novel. They are photographic, that is machine-made pictures, whereas the pictures one normally finds in an illustrated novel are, until very recently, drawings, etchings, sketches, collages, in short handmade and therefore allegedly more artistic images. There have been few exceptions to this rule (except in poetry, as a niche market for bibliophilic editions): for example, the symbolist novel Bruges-la-Morte by Georges Rodenbach (Reference Rodenbach2007), supposedly the first “serious” novel to contain photographic illustrations, or André Breton’s Surrealist memoir, Nadja (Reference Breton1928), in which the images aimed to replace the allegedly boring descriptions of the realistic novel. In addition, illustrations in novels are in principle purely fictional images (that may be another reason why so many authors refrain from using photographs, which seem to contradict the fictional status of the novel), whereas photographs in film novelizations have by definition a material, indexical source, namely the film, either the fictional part of it (reproduced in the form of photo stills or set pictures) or the nonfictional part of it (in novelizations one also finds celebrity pictures or pictures of the making of the film).
As a specific subgenre of the film novel, more specifically of the novelization, the drawn novel is part of the immense adaptation traffic that goes on between words and images in the film business, more specifically in the two fields of story illustration and celebrity culture. A drawn novel is indeed a very particular form of novelization, which radically changes all the ways in which one had been practicing illustrated verbal adaptations of filmic material.
A Graphic Novel Like No Other
Contrary to what happens in the field of the graphic novel, where there is little agreement on what kind of novel this actually is or should be, the definition of the drawn novel is a piece of cake. Form and content can be described in flawless terms, and there is no danger whatsoever of mistaking the drawn novel for another genre, format or medium. Paradoxically, however, this confusion is what actually did happen, when the drawn novel was superseded by the photo novel and suddenly became nothing more than a precursor of the latter. We will have to come back to this issue, which cannot be overlooked as a detail or a mere caprice of history.
What are now the basic features of a drawn novel? Let us start with its formal and material aspects and the way they help describe the primary elements of the medium, that is the drawings or panels. If one accepts the hypothesis that the drawn novel continues the well-established tradition of the illustrated film novelization and several other forms of the film novel, the first characteristic that springs to mind is the radical inversion of the hierarchy between text and image. This inversion is not quantitative: drawn novels are often extremely talkative, and the number of words per page can be amazing. The shift in question is qualitative. Even if in many forms of the film novel – the case of the novelization, where illustrations are elective only, is somewhat different – the role of the image is far from being secondary, most of these novels continue to give a large weight to the text. Even in those cases where, from a quantitative point of view, the images occupy more space than the text, there is still the unchallenged acceptance that the story is basically told with the help of words and that the main purpose of the images is to illustrate, indeed as richly as possible, the text. In the drawn novel, this system is broken. The story is clearly told with visual means, and the role of the text is to elucidate, support, complete or nuance the image, never to take its place. Using Roland Barthes’s provocative rephrasing of this idea, one could say that it is now the text that illustrates the image (Barthes Reference Barthes1977a). This shift is, however, just one small aspect of what is actually a complete revolution. For the drawn novel is no longer reusing or reediting cinematographic pictures: the photographs have become drawings. To a certain extent, this remediation is not an absolute surprise: the transformation of photographs into drawings was a well-known and much appreciated technique in the film business. All audiences were familiar with the drawings of film posters and other marketing materials such as the immense publicity drawings adorning the fronts of the larger theaters. What is completely new, however, is the multiplication of these drawings, each of them aspiring to be the equivalent of a film still, and their subsequent sequential rearrangement in image strips that adopted the basic grid format that could only be interpreted as that of the comics. The vertical or horizontal strips used in certain film novels were very different since they did respect the material unity and uniformity of the film still, mechanically repeated in all images: unlike these film novel sequences, the drawn novel fully explores the possibilities of the page (and one should remember here that the pages of all magazines publishing drawn novels were large sized pages).
The adoption of the grid is, however, anything but passive. Just as the drawn novel succeeds in keeping the film novel and novelization model at arm’s length, it manages as well to produce a sui generis form of the typical comics page drawing style and page layout. Let us specify these differences in more detail. Strictly speaking, the pictures of a drawn novel are not made according to the conventional drawing techniques of the comics business. In comics drawings, the crucial issue is that of the division of labor, even if not all functions are necessarily attributed to different (and often strictly gendered) agents. Yet there is a Taylorized production line, which brings us from sketching to drawing to inking to lettering to colorizing. Here, in the drawn novel, the general approach is much closer to the “all in one” technique in painting, a technique that will only come en vogue in the 1990s, under the influence of the upcoming digitization of drawing (Groensteen Reference Groensteen1993). In a drawn novel, the images are made with the help of (in this case single-color) wash drawings, that is a kind of watercolor technique resulting in a semi-transparent layer of color, generally in combination with drawing ink. This old technique, brilliantly applied by Old Masters such as Rembrandt, is unequaled for the production of a subtle range of nuances (in the case of the novel: gray or sepia nuances) which help the drawing compete with the chromatic density of the black-and-white photographs of movies. In fact, seen from a certain distance, or just looked at in a distracted or hasty manner, one can easily mistake these drawings for badly printed pictures or even for heavily retouched photographs, and this is of course exactly the effect these lavish drawings aimed to produce.
Yet the drawn novel’s independence and specificity do not rely on its drawing techniques alone. Compared to the usual comic style, the drawn novel goes far beyond the foregrounding of new form of drawing, hitherto unseen in comics, it also dramatically reshapes the structure of the page by introducing certain elements of film language. The newly introduced filmic influences do of course refer to editing techniques as well as narrative and focalization techniques such as the voice-over borrowed from the movie aesthetics of these years. But much more important was the systematic disruption of the comics grid due to the spectacular use of oblique and curved lines, which became a staple technique of the drawn novel. On each page, the rectangular squares of the traditional comics panels morphed into triangles and circles. True, comics had already been experimenting with nonrectangular panels for many decades – it suffices to think of Herriman’s Krazy Kat (McDonnell and O’Connell Reference McDonnell and O’Connell1991) – but what is new in the drawn novel is the strongly cinematographic reference of the new panel frame technique. Here, the appearance of oblique and circular lines and irregular angles is a blatant allusion to the wipe, a shot-transition technique Hollywood was fond of in the 1930s and 1940s. As Wikipedia defines it: “A wipe involves one shot replacing another, traveling from one side of the frame to another. Think of a vertical line passing from the right side of the frame to the left. On the left side of this line, we have shot A, and on the right side of this line is shot B. When this line reaches the left edge of the frame, shot B will completely fill the scene, and the transition is complete. This example describes a vertical line wipe, though this is but one type of wipe.” Yet wipes, which recently made a spectacular comeback thanks to the FX industry in digital cinema, can use all kind of lines: not just vertical or horizontal but also curved and jagged. In the drawn novel, the link to the ubiquitous wipe transitions in Hollywood cinema of these years is clear. It is therefore not sufficient to state that the drawn novel is a remediation of the comics language. Yes, the comics aesthetics have been vital in the drawn novel’s reappropriation of the film novel, but no less important is the return of film and photography, each of them with a vengeance. The panels of a drawn novel are made to look like photographs and the panel-to-panel transitions are made to resemble the smooth transitions from one shot to another the reader had seen so many times in the film theaters.
The definition of a drawn novel does not depend on material features alone. The specificity of the medium appears no less clearly when one takes a closer look at the content of the works, and here as well one notices a creative distance toward the models that are reappropriated (Baetens Reference Baetens2017a and 2017b). At the level of the medium’s material aspects we have seen that there remains a gap between the format that is used as a model (the comics grid and the traditional comics drawings) and the form that is eventually deduced from it (with photographically oriented panels and a page layout that is much indebted to film editing). It is also possible to repeat this analysis at content level, where a comparable distance is created between the medium that is being used (cinema, more specifically Hollywood cinema) and the unashamedly exploitative and plagiarizing way in which the filmic universe is being modified in the drawn novel.
What are the main analogies and differences in this regard? All drawn novels clearly want to be read as movie tie-ins. Their protagonists look like film stars, not just in general but to the extent that the reader is directly invited to identify the stars whose celeb pictures are copied in the drawings (Minuit, Faber and Takodjerad Reference Minuit, Faber and Takodjerad2012). Their settings are not those of the neorealist, low-budget or B-series films, at least not at the beginning, but those of the overwhelmingly spectacular Hollywood studios the average European moviegoer recognized as typical of the dream factory. Finally, the stories told were easily acknowledged as those of the weepies, the melodramatic women’s movies or from-rags-to-riches adventures that perfectly matched the social needs of escapism and day-dreaming in the hard years of postwar reconstruction. Drawn novels did not ignore these difficult circumstances as Jane Austen put between brackets the Napoleonic Wars in Pride and Prejudice, but they used these themes of hardship and hunger as a counterweight against the irrepressible desire for a better life.
At the same time, all this was perfectly fake. Just as the main characters in a drawn novel resemble the big stars of these days without ever being “real” drawings of “real” pictures of “real” people – among other reasons for copyright reasons: the actual producers of drawn novels did of course not have the money to negotiate a licensing deal with the large American corporations – the stories told were anything but based on existing movies, they were customized versions of the melodramatic imaginary that for good reasons can be called universal (Brooks Reference Brooks1984). With an almost perverse pleasure, the authors of the very first drawn novel, Souls in Chains (“Anime Incatenate,” Dukey and Symes 1946, 1, Fig. 5.2), tease their readers with the mythical, that is both prestigious and inaccessible, origins of their story, while being perfectly aware of the stereotypical character of their claim, which obeys all the clichés of the found manuscript. They attribute their story to totally invented American writers, M. Dukey and J. W. Symes, whose specific contribution to the work is not specified (scriptwriter and draftsman?Footnote 1), while adding the name of F. M. Macciò, a well-known writer working for the juvenile press, as that of the “adapter” of the story (“Italian version by F. M. Macciò”). For strategic, that is, political, reasons, the name of the actual maker of this first drawn novel, Walter Molino, an already very famous illustrator and comics artist since the 1930s, is, however, missing. All this clearly makes no sense, while at the same time it makes perfect sense: everybody knew that American pseudonyms and fake attributions were not only fashionable in the postwar period but in many cases were the only possible way to copy with all kind of legal constraints and restrictions in a time when various local artists and writers had been condemned either for direct collaboration or for having continued to publish in pro-Axis-controlled companies. The story itself is the ultimate combination of the typical melodramatic scenarios that dominate popular literature since the nineteenth century: impossible love affairs, mistaken identities, masks and liars, complicated family affairs including lost and found babies, the clash between individual destinies and history writ large, social differences and rags-to-riches stories, false marriages, all culminating with the perfect happy ending but reframed here in a very contemporary context, with a sharp eye for modern fashion, travel, technology and politics.
The drawn novel is one of the institutional results of these multilayered strategies and tactics. It is one of the many attempts to benefit from the new US culture that enters Europe in previously unseen proportions via Hollywood and also through music and literature. A very successful attempt, however, not only commercially, as we will see in the next paragraph, but also artistically. A remediation of the film novel as well as the comics format, the drawn novel succeeds in inventing a new medium, which seems at first sight purely derivative but which reveals on closer inspection an astonishingly original reworking, not just a simple remix, of elements borrowed from very different sources. At its origin, the drawn novel may have been the dream of the total fake. At its end, however, it proves to be a new creation without any known equivalent.
No Medium without Host Medium
Like any other medium, the drawn novel is not only a particular combination of signs. It is also a specific cultural practice, a set of socially established norms, conventions and instructions, which are often in direct relationship with a specific host medium and its social and cultural embedding. The drawn novel is no exception to this rule, and the material form and type of circulation of this host medium in the public space have proven as crucial as the pulp brochure to the creation of the comic book. Its origin in 1946, when the genre appeared literally overnight in the pages of a new Italian magazine, Grand Hôtel, cannot be separated from a certain number of innovations in the market of the female magazine press. Under complete reconstruction after the war, the female press was in tremendous demand but had to cater to the needs of large numbers of modestly literate women who had little disposable income but who were exceptionally eager to participate in the new consumer culture, albeit only vicariously through the purchase of a women’s magazine. Hence the quest for a new killer application capable of making rapid money by selling many copies at a dramatically low price. The drawn novel was the magical answer to that question and the massive and immediate public response was the proof that this was what the female press audience was actually waiting for, as a cheap and efficient way to complete if not replace a cinematographic culture that was definitely ubiquitous yet less immediately available. Even if the number of theaters was high and the speed of circulation of movies impressive, the thresholds that remained were considerable (the ticket price was low, but not extremely low, while the physical access to theaters, certainly first run theaters, was definitely a problem). An alluring and cheap ersatz of the cinematographic experience, easy to share, open to endless reuse, and freed from temporal and spatial constraints, the drawn novel opened the doors of a dream world that not all readers could afford or access by going to the movies (and for those who could do so, the drawn novel was an easy way to expand the cinematographic experience outside the limits of the theater).
Women’s magazines, and certainly those magazines that started featuring drawn novels, were confronted with many practical difficulties: shortage of paper, lack of professionals trained in the quick production of time-consuming wash drawings, ferocious competition in the market, technical flaws of the printing equipment, logistical problems, etc. Yet the major danger of the new medium was the ideological resistance in France, where the drawn novel was soon to be adopted and developed into homegrown formulas, and, to a lesser extent, in Italy. The overt hostility of the authorities, common to the (far) left as well as the (far) right was a direct consequence of the refusal of America and US culture after World War II. National Communist parties as well as various religiously oriented parties joined forces to tackle what they saw as an unacceptable cultural and economic destruction of “the nation” or “the family” (the former term typical of left-wing discourses, the latter the cornerstone of Catholic political ideology, even if in practice the frontiers between both discourses became often blurred in the common refusal of capitalism as the destructive force of both popular and family values). The profound distrust of America, which is, of course, nothing new, certainly not in the French context, explains the aggressively active obstruction of the female magazines, that is, the drawn novels that were rapidly monopolizing all the available space in many of these magazines, by (mainly but not exclusively) French authorities. The new tone and style of the female press in the postwar years, strongly influenced by US formats such as the “true confessions” magazines of the 1930s, was discarded as “American” and “immoral.” It was the success of the drawn novel and its glorification of antipatriotic and antifamily values such as personal happiness, wealth, and individual self-promotion and success that pushed many governments to oppose the female press that made the choice of the supposedly escapist and anti-social drawn novel. Publishers were not allowed to buy paper, still a resource put on ration, or they had to mask their editorial line by announcing themselves as working in a slightly different market (that of the professional film magazines, for instance). It is true that the battle of the female press, as symbolized by the smashing success of the drawn novel and, later, the photo novel, did not have the same economic stakes as similar struggles in the field of film production and distribution, where there was an actual competition with US imports. In the case of the drawn novel, there was no rivalry between local production and import production. When the American romance comics, which were launched in 1947, reached the European market, the drawn novel hype was long gone, and, moreover, these comics were much closer to comics than the drawn novel, which was never received as a form of comics but as a form of film novel. Yet it would be an error to underestimate the stakes and the economic importance of this debate. Print media were the hegemonic media in the immediate post-World War II years, and the fear of a US cultural invasion was widespread, perhaps even more in the Allied nations than in the former Axis countries. At the same time, the general public, regardless of its political convictions, unreservedly embraced the drawn novel and the female press. Some figures gathered by sociological surveys in the 1950s and 1960s have revealed that one adult out of three was a weekly consumer of drawn novels (and later photo novels). More surprisingly, the same surveys disclosed as well that this type of graphic literature, which exclusively targeted the female audience, was commonly consumed by male readers as well (Antonutti Reference Antonutti2013). The most iconic appearance of the drawn novel in cinema highlights these tensions very well. In the neorealist hit movie Bitter Rice (dir. Giuseppe De Santis, 1948), the female protagonist of the story, Silvana Mangano, playing the part of a peasant rice worker, is seen reading a copy of Grand Hôtel, an occupation that is unmistakably meant to give an instant definition of her (shallow and greedy) character while also enabling the spectator to better judge her later evolution toward a certain form of moral and political consciousness (since neorealism is also deeply rooted in melodramatic imaginary, her sense of guilt will make her commit suicide).
The Sense of a Sudden Ending
The success of the drawn novel was a success despite many obstacles: great material poverty of the magazines, small number of pages (initially eight to twelve), poor print quality, highly repetitive content, and the sometimes weak aesthetic qualities of the art work. The black-and-white wash drawings did survive very well the impoverishment of the printing process as well as the dubious quality of the pulp paper. However, the novelty and originality of the drawn novel have to be nuanced if one takes into account the larger context of the medium. It is undoubtedly true that in the history of the graphic novel the drawn novel is something completely unique, a kind of cultural UFO. However, it is not in this environment that the drawn novel was read and circulated: it hardly reached the readers of comics and (pre)graphic novels and those who passionately loved it, and it did not do so because of its contribution to the field of comics and graphic novels but to its remediation of a different medium, that of the film novel and the film novelization. Even today, the drawn novel remains something of an alien in the general history of the graphic novel. It could have been the missing link between romance comics and the emerging graphic novels, but there is little evidence that the world of romance comics and of the drawn novel ever really met. (When romance comics will be published in European magazines, the drawn novel is no longer a culturally thriving force, and the presence of the drawn novel on American soil is close to nonexistent.)
In hindsight, the contributions of the drawn novel to the graphic novel as a medium could have been fabulous. For the first time, there was a possible precursor of the graphic novel capable of reaching a real mass audience (the wordless woodcut graphic novels of the 1920s and 1930s were certainly no elite or niche productions, but their audience was inevitably modest in comparison to that of the drawn novel). For the first time as well, there was a form of graphic novel that simultaneously addressed the languages of photography and cinema and produced very original solutions to the challenges raised by the rapid move from handmade to mechanical images in mass-media communication. And, finally, there was also an attempt to invent new forms of stories, even if these stories soon turned out to be pale copies of age-old melodramas and last week’s Hollywood blockbusters. None of these innovations, however, was strong enough to have a lasting impact on the slowly emerging graphic novel, which ignored the drawn novel for reasons that one can regret but that are perfectly understandable. First, the mismatch between product and audience, the graphic-novel reader being (or feeling) excluded from the feminized universe of the women’s magazines that were the only outlet for drawn novels. Second, the rapid and definitive decline of the drawn novel once the female press discovered the newer and hotter medium of the photo novel, which was more cost-efficient to produce, easier to read, apparently more modern and seductive, and probably closer to the world of cinema than the drawn novel, whose success is attacked as soon as the first photo novels appear and whose role is virtually finished around 1950, when Grand Hôtel, as the last of a large row of women’s magazines, starts replacing its drawn novels with photo novels.
