Thesis
Spiegelman’s memoir Maus: A Survivor’s Tale uses text and pictures to tell the story of his father’s survival of the Holocaust, but it is not a picture book.  Numeroff likewise uses text and pictures in her picture book If You Give a Mouse a Cookie about a young boy stuck in a cycle of filling a mouse’s needs after giving him a cookie, but it is not a comic.  The fine line separating these types of works comes from how the pictures relate to the text, the use of visual text features, and the use of paneled layouts with gutters.

Topic Sentence
Illustrations or images?  The distinction between the seemingly interchangeable words lies at the heart of discerning comics from picture books.

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Where an illustration clarifies and defines, an image is an idea or representation. 

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Instead of always speaking for their characters, the authors of comics often employ visual text features to give their characters the power of speech.

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In a typical picture book, what the character says can be found in the text set apart from the illustration. 

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The most defining feature of comics is the use of paneled layouts with gutters.

The caged bird motif, a widely used trope in literature, alludes to the fact that someone feels imprisoned by his or her circumstances.

After the brutal murder of her lover, the protagonist attempts suicide by flinging herself into a river. 

The ubiquitous “hunch-back” character, first appearing in his namesake chapter 7, turns up at a time when the protagonist displays the most vulnerability (Nückel).

Predestined to return into her life the “hunch-back” looks on ominously in image 2 of chapter 13 (Nückel).

The religious imagery in Nückel’s novel shows most prevalently in the repeated use of the image of the cross. 

One of the most striking images of the cross in image 8 of chapter 13 hangs above the bed where the woman has committed adultery against her husband, the “taylor” (Nückel).

Thesis: In Ghost World, Clowes depicts emerging adulthood, particularly the summer after graduation, as a liminal state in the life of its heroines. He does this by depicting Enid as contrary and unsure of who she really is, through her nostalgia for her childhood and her avoidance of the imminent future, and by following the sudden deterioration of Rebecca and Enid's relationship following their high school years.

The strongest indication of the liminal state of adolescence in Ghost World, though, is the sudden deterioration of Enid and Rebecca’s relationship toward the end of the novel. When we encounter the girls at the beginning of the novel, both of them are deep into the liminal phase of adolescence. They have both just graduated high school, and spend most of the novel together wandering aimlessly throughout its suburban setting, searching for something to do without much care for whether or not they accomplish anything meaningful. Arnold Van Gennep says “that all rites of passage or ‘transition’ are marked by three phases: separation, margin (or limen, signifying ‘threshold’ in Latin), and aggregation.” He states that in the phase of “separation,” the subject becomes detached from their former societal role. For Enid and Rebecca, this takes place when they graduate high school. During the actual liminal state, or margin, the subject “passes through a cultural realm that has few or none of the attributes of the past or coming state,” which is the phase the girls are in throughout most of the novel. During the final phase of aggregation, the subject finds a new niche in their society, thus exiting the liminal state (Turner 359).

Why, then, do Enid and Rebecca seem to grow apart as the novel progresses? First, it seems that Enid and Rebecca are struggling to aggregate and take their rightful place in adult society, and they seem content to avoid this at all costs. Enid, due to pressure from her father, ends up applying to a college and taking an entrance exam. This angers Rebecca, and she even debates whether or not she should go away with Enid so that they can stay together. The novel reaches a sort of climax when Enid finds out that she has failed the exam, and thus will not be able to go away to college. After Enid received this crushing news, some time seems to have passed, and we find that Rebecca has started working at a bagel shop in town. Enid sees her there one day, and it is clear that they have not spoken in a while. Rebecca, upon seeing Enid says that she “didn’t even see [her]” and rubs her eyes, saying “I think there’s something wrong with my eyes… You’re all blurry…” (Fig. 2).

Figure 2, (Clowes 76)

This seems to suggest that Enid has taken on a sort of ghostly presence, while Rebecca is now grounded in the reality of adulthood. By taking on a real job and abandoning Enid in her aimless lifestyle, Rebecca has successfully completed the third phase of aggregation, crossing the threshold into the adult world .

Through the audience’s acceptance of their role as the “implied reader,” the awareness of semiotics as a mode of communication, and the interplay of images and text, graphic novels are elevated to contend with and surpass the gross misconception that the medium is subordinate to traditional forms of art and literature.

Wolfgang Iser, in The Act of Reading, uses the term “implied reader” (34) to refer to a theoretical figure that possesses the background knowledge necessary to interact with a text and the “literary repertoire” on which it draws upon. In Sean Connors’ essay, “Altering Perspectives: How the Implied Reader Invites Us to Rethink the Difficulty of Graphic Texts,” he explains that the extent of one’s repertoire— “a collection of social norms, values, and conventions that exist in the world outside of text, and that readers and writers ideally share”—determines the ability in which one can readily adopt the role of the “implied reader.” Iser’s concept of the implied reader is crucial in the realm of graphic novels-- a medium where reader participation is a dynamic task. Connors details how students who possess knowledge of literary, artistic, and cinematic conventions and those who are willing to adopt the role of the reader—approaching the graphic novel with an open mind and a willingness to apply outside knowledge to the framework of the medium— “are able to engage with graphic novels in ways that students who lack familiarity with the diverse range of conventions they employ are not.” (34). Confronting Otto Nuckel’s Destiny—a novel absent of text, a story in roughly etched and scored woodcut panels—is no easy task if one is to approach it with the notions and experiences of the 21st century. While the emotions evoked in Destiny are universal to man, the conventions Nuckel employed in the work are specifically hinged to the time period, political and economic climate, and the natural constraints of the medium. A responsible read of the work includes background knowledge of the Depression in Germany during the 1920s and ‘30s, the evolution of German Expressionism with the aim to “‘render visible’… the raw effects of emotion, sexuality and spirituality […] which explore the hidden world of the unconscious […]to shed light on the complex impulses underpinning daily life” (Buchanan). The acknowledgment of the restrictions of woodcuts as a medium to showcase a story in pictures, is crucial in recognizing the significance of each element within a panel. The nature of broad, staggered, and often ambiguous line work within woodcuts, as opposed to crisp lines of pen and ink, force the reader to engage with the panel using a close eye so as to derive a clearer meaning. This task of participation on the reader’s part grows from within the panels, to between them, since our participation in the act of closure is the only bridge between the images (McCloud). The fluidity of Destiny relies on the reader since the panels “…fracture both time and space, offering a jagged, staccato rhythm of unconnected moments. But closure allows us to connect these moments and mentally construct a continuous, unified reality” (McCloud). Our understanding and meaning of the novel as centered on a female protagonist whose journey through life is one marked by sorrow, is the closure that we provide page by page and the meaning we extract while we participate in the closure necessary to make comics “work.” 

The three panels above appear on a single page each, in sequential order, in the chapter Nuckel titled “The Child.” Without any dialogue or narration, the reader is left to rely on the knowledge of the chapter title, the elements within the composed panel, and the panels’ contextual relation to come to a general conclusion that: before daybreak our protagonist left her room in a rush, delivered her baby riverside, and in an overwhelming grief, actively or passively saw to the drowning of the child, which was fetched out of the water, limp and lifeless, by sailors. One can see how the chapter titles help to catalog the events, although this wordless novel does not give the reader a passive reading experience by any means. Destiny invites its readers to shed their preconceived ideas about books comprised of seemingly rudimentary renderings absent of words, by drawing on the rich cultural, artistic, and literary conventions Nuckel employs. When one is able to draw on those conventions, and bring their knowledge to the analysis of the work, the message gleaned is luminous. While the adoption of the role of the “implied reader” is instrumental to one maximizing their interpretation of a work, so is the awareness of semiotics as a mode in which the creator is communicating to the reader through our knowledge of universalities.

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The Graphic Novel: An Adult Case of “Green Eggs and Ham?”