Diversity in the Stacks: Exploring International Perspectives with Comics and Graphic Novels in Romance Languages

Diversity in the Stacks

Explore the history of comics and graphic novels and learn about some of the titles in Romance languages that you can find in the Penn Libraries collections.

The addition of graphic novels has been as significant a feature of our collections in Romance languages literature as it has for English and other literatures. What many now call the “graphic novel” dates back to the post-World War II period, but its acceptance as an important form of art and literature took some time to arrive, and even more time before it occupied space in large research libraries such as Penn. It is, in fact, still in process, as the form is evolving and the extent to which libraries collect it remains limited.

One might find it hard to believe that at one time great research libraries did not collect comic books or any publications that relied as much on the visual as on the textual to tell a story. In the United States in the mid-20th century, there were even many people who viewed comic books, whose primary audience was young people, as morally pernicious. Senate hearings on the "Comic Book Menace" in 1954 threatened the survival of the comics industry and led to the industry’s creation of the Comics Code Authority.

The prejudice was a bit odd, since illustrations have been important to fiction for centuries. For a celebrated example, see the 92 drawings Sandro Botticelli made in the 15th century for Dante’s Commedia. They have been reproduced in a facsimile nearly identical to the original. Illustrations sometimes had an influential place in the consumption of classical literature and could be factors in finding places in the collections of research libraries. The drawings of the prolific (Gustave Doré were very much valued and were certainly significant in how texts were imagined, including those he made for the French edition of Cervantes’ Don Quixote and Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Through the second half of the 20th century, the academy’s view of what was worthy of study widened greatly. It became, in fact, more democratic. It evolved geographically and chronologically. For example, students of Spanish began to study literature written after the 17th century or in the Americas. I was present at a notable moment in 2003 when a faculty member asked that we acquire a run of a popular Argentine comic book Patoruzito. The point of the request, it seems, was not that the comic book series represented a towering achievement in Spanish-language literature or of Argentine culture, but that it provided a way to understand popular culture and how it represented the values of a society and its history. It was not relevant whether the comics were great art, but you might read them to make sense of a culture, or even to share in the pleasure experienced by their primary audience.

Libraries generally missed out on the opportunity to acquire comic books and strips at the time they were published, with the occasional exception of those that appeared in newspapers that were archived. The Penn Libraries' collection of comics and graphic novels was built through gifts and retrospective purchases years after publication. They now have a value that was not recognized a few decades ago and are now more expensive and more difficult to acquire.

There is not a clear distinction between “comics” and “graphic novels.” While they both use sequential art to tell a story, the latter typically tells a complete story arc in one volume; the former more likely appear on cheaper paper and are published serially, often with no end point and sometimes with no sequence of events. A graphic novel is more a format than a genre, since it is not a completely logical term. It can include work that is clearly non-fictional, including autobiographies and histories. This makes the form more interesting and, in some cases, a vehicle for more effective personal expression or description of historical or contemporary events. The same sort of delineation between comics and graphic novels also exists in other languages and cultures. For example, in French they are called “bandes dessinées” or “roman graphique," and in Italian they are called “fumetti” or “romanzo grafico.”

The graphic novel is a format that grew after World War II and is viewed as more serious and more literary or artistic than comics in a less substantial format. It is also popular: one of every four books purchased In France is a graphic novel. Some early popular examples are the Asterix series, the Franco-Belgian Tintin, and Corto Maltese.

The early successful graphic novels – and this still persists in both Romance and Anglophone worlds – were typically humorous, fantastical, or superhero-themed. Dystopian themes have also been popular, and harrowing works of historical testimony have received critical acclaim. What has been most notable and, perhaps, useful to those teaching and studying languages and cultures is the increasingly wide variety of subject matter.

Despite the interesting contemporary material, the extent to which publications are acquired by libraries outside the countries of publication remains limited. This interest is also rather recent outside of a few very influential works. At the Penn Libraries, collecting efforts in this area extend beyond works of fiction to include personal and historical stories of immigration, refugees, war, and cultural clash.

Below are some examples of themes and titles that populate our Romance graphic novel collections. If one wants to browse the catalog, choose the “Advanced search” and enter “comic strips” in the Subject field. The result of over 15,00 can be filtered by language, with over 900 each for Spanish and French, more than 200 for Italian, and more than 100 for Portuguese. One can also search on the subject “graphic novels,” which produces a much smaller result, often in addition to “comic strips,” and with a less accurate result in languages (e.g., “French” may indicate a novel translated from French).

Diversity in the Stacks: Exploring International Perspectives with Comics and Graphic Novels in Romance Languages

Biographies and stories about famous people

War and revolution

Jewish themes

LGBT themes

Feminism

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