Reframing the Graphic Novel: Long-Form Adult Comic Narratives in North America and the UK c.1973-82

虽然图画小说已经成为当代学术研究的一个重要领域，但学者们很少关注20世纪70年代和80年代初，这是它发展的一个开创性时期。利用英国和北美未经探索的档案，并在2016年伦敦卡通博物馆为期三个月的展览中达到高潮，“重新构建图形小说”将重建以成人读者的书籍形式出版的漫画的创作实践和商业决策。少数文本经常出现在漫画史上，特别是威尔·纳的《与上帝的契约》（1978年），但从20世纪70年代初到80年代初，每年都有新的漫画小说创作。这个项目将揭示那些被遗忘的作品，并概述产生它们的制度背景，从超级英雄主导的漫画产业，到图书贸易，再到与20世纪60年代反主流文化相关的地下漫画场景。《重构图画小说》中的故事证明，没有一个国家垄断了图画小说的发展;英国、加拿大和美国的创作者同时在制作这种形式，都受到了法国漫画界出版的48页画册的影响，这些漫画的素材格式--书籍对于其创作者寻求获得的文学地位至关重要，就像“图画小说”（或有时被称为“图画相册”或“视觉小说”）的修辞调用一样。“重新构建图形小说”将展示图形小说的特征（作为一本书出版，具有文学性，具有长篇叙事，并以正式的实验和有争议的内容挑战成年读者）可以在20世纪70年代和80年代初印刷的各种漫画中找到。通过在卡通博物馆展示这个时代的开创性文本，公众可以看到早期图画小说的物质形式是如何将漫画作为值得与文学经典放在一起的持久艺术品出售的。这个项目的展览不仅是关于20世纪70年代的文本，它将展示从19世纪到现在的原创艺术，以讲述英国图画小说的历史-这是以前没有展览尝试过的。在20世纪80年代中期，媒体围绕所谓的“三巨头”的骚动（Art Spiegelman的《Maus》（1986年）第一卷，Frank米勒的《蝙蝠侠：黑暗骑士归来》（1986年），以及Alan摩尔和Dave Gibbons的《守望者》（1987年））将图画小说变成了公众讨论的对象。2011年《MetaMaus》的出版以及《守望者》（2009）和《黑暗骑士崛起》（2012）等电影使这些20世纪80年代中期的主要文本保持在阅读和观众的意识中。但是在“三巨头”之前有一个图形小说的世界，这个项目将把这个世界带到光中，展示20世纪70年代图形小说家的艺术野心和漫画行业的潮流，他们必须谈判，以创造他们的创新，复杂，书长的漫画。

While the graphic novel has become an important area of contemporary academic research, scholars have paid little attention to the 1970s and early 1980s, a seminal period in its development. Using unexplored archives in Britain and North America, and culminating in a three-month exhibition at London's Cartoon Museum in 2016, 'Reframing the Graphic Novel' will reconstruct the creative practices and business decisions that saw comics being published in book form for adult readers. A handful of texts frequently recur in histories of comics, notably Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978), but new graphic novels were created every year from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. This project will uncover those forgotten works and outline the institutional contexts that produced them, from the superhero-dominated comic book industry, to the book trade, to the underground comix scene associated with the 1960s counterculture. The story told in 'Reframing the Graphic Novel' proves that no single country had a monopoly on the graphic novel's development; creators in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States were working concurrently on the form, and all were influenced by the 48-page albums published by the French comics industry.The material format of these comics-published-as-books was crucial to the literary status that their creators sought to attain, as was the rhetorical invocation of the 'graphic novel' (or 'graphic album' or 'visual novel', as they were sometimes called). 'Reframing the Graphic Novel' will demonstrate that the characteristics ascribed to graphic novels (being published as a book, having pretensions to literariness, having long narratives, and challenging adult readers with formal experimentation and controversial content) could be found in a variety of comics printed during the 1970s and early 1980s. By displaying seminal texts from this era at the Cartoon Museum, members of the public can see how the material form of early graphic novels was a bid to sell comics as long-lasting art objects deserving to be shelved next to literary classics. The exhibition attached to this project is not only about 1970s texts, and it will feature original art from the nineteenth century to the present in order to tell the story of Britain's history of graphic novels - something no exhibition has attempted before.In the mid-1980s the media commotion surrounding the so-called 'Big Three' (volume one of Art Spiegelman's Maus [1986], Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns [1986], and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen [1987]) turned graphic novels into objects of public discussion. The publication of MetaMaus in 2011 and films such as Watchmen (2009) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) have kept these major mid-1980s texts in the consciousness of the reading and viewing public. But there is a world of graphic novels preceding the 'Big Three', and this project will bring that world to light, showing the artistic ambitions of the 1970s graphic novelists and the currents of the comic industry that they had to negotiate in order to create their innovative, complex, book-length comics.