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

虽然平面小说已经成为当代学术研究的一个重要领域，但学者们对其发展的开创性时期--20世纪70年代和80年代初的关注却很少。利用英国和北美未开发的档案，并最终于2016年在伦敦卡通博物馆举办了为期三个月的展览，《重组漫画小说》将重建漫画以书籍形式出版给成年读者的创作实践和商业决策。漫画历史上经常出现一些文字，特别是威尔·艾斯纳的《与上帝的契约》(1978)，但从20世纪70年代初到80年代初，每年都有新的漫画小说问世。这个项目将揭开那些被遗忘的作品，并勾勒出产生它们的制度背景，从超级英雄主导的漫画行业，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。《重组漫画小说》中讲述的故事证明，没有一个国家垄断了漫画小说的发展；英国、加拿大和美国的创作者同时致力于这一形式，所有人都受到了法国漫画业出版的48页专辑的影响。这些以书籍出版的漫画的物质形式对其创作者试图获得的文学地位至关重要，修辞上的援引也是如此。《重塑漫画小说》将表明，漫画小说的特点(以书的形式出版，自称文学性，叙事冗长，用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年代至80年代初出版的各种漫画中找到。通过在卡通博物馆展示这个时代的开创性文本，公众可以看到早期漫画小说的物质形式是如何努力将漫画作为经久不衰的艺术品出售，值得与文学经典并驾齐驱。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，以讲述英国漫画小说的历史-这是以前从未尝试过的。20世纪80年代中期，围绕着所谓的三巨头(阿特·斯皮格曼的毛斯[1986]的第一卷，弗兰克·米勒的《蝙蝠侠：黑暗骑士归来》[1986]，以及艾伦·摩尔和戴夫·吉本斯的《守望者》[1987])的媒体骚动将漫画小说变成了公众讨论的对象。2011年出版的MetaMaus以及《守望者》(2009)和《黑暗骑士崛起》(2012)等电影让读者和观众意识到了这些20世纪80年代中期的主要文本。但在《三巨头》之前有一个漫画小说的世界，这个项目将把这个世界公之于众，展示20世纪70年代漫画小说家的艺术野心和漫画行业的潮流，为了创造出创新的、复杂的、和书籍一样长的漫画，他们不得不谈判。

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.