I can’t read graphic novels. I am used to reading linearly and I gulp words and lines very quickly. (I do not speed read and I don’t miss a word, but I’m fast.) I can’t seem to swallow the balloons or clusters of copy scattered around a page of illustrations.
A graphic novel is not a comic strip. I know that. I used to love comic strips. I remember when newspapers had Funny Pages. I used to lie on the floor and read them first, or only. I remember wondering why grownups bothered with the print sections with all the boring news, that’s how trivial I am.
But i loved to read. I started school when I was five and a half years old and I remember carrying the book I was reading under my arm. . It was light green, about two inches thick, with no illustration: Grimm’s fairy tales, familiar to me already because my father used to tell me a story every morning in bed. He particularly remembered one morning when he told me the whole story of the dancing princesses and how they wore out their shoes. It was a long tale and he was almost hoarse when he finished it.
“That was a lovely story,” I said. (I don’t remember this.) “Tell it to me again.”
I guess that’s why I was so picky about the Books of Knowledge. They were given to my older brother (of course) but I was allowed to read them. I read all the fairy tales, legends and myths I could find, marking my place in each volume with strips of toilet paper so I could move on quickly from one book to the next. I vaguely remember the speeding train (did it illustrate the theory of relativity?) and the parallel lines thrusting forward into a future where they might (never?) meet. My brother told me about Zeno’s Arrow and about the search for a universal solvent and why nothing better than water could ever be found because where could it be stored if it was a universal solvent?
But I always loved stories best.
Arrested development.