Why Graphic Novels Rule! (Guest Post by Rex Ogle)

By the time I’d hit middle school, I had read hundreds of books. My journey started with Dr. Seuss and then moved on to classics like The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, Peter Pan, and Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Later, it detoured toward mystery series like Encyclopedia Brown and Hardy Boys, and then it leaped headfirst into horror, skipping past Goosebumps and diving straight into Fear Street and Stephen King. I loved reading, but it was all prose. It wasn’t until sixth grade when a new friend introduced me to X-Men comics, and I discovered that I was in love with sequential storytelling.

The magic of comic books and graphic novels manifests itself in few ways: a collaborative effort between an author and artist, the history of humanity through visual storytelling, and—perhaps most importantly—a reader truly seeing (not imagining) themselves in the work.   

Collaborating with an artist makes an author accountable, not only to craft a good (or great!) story to make it worth an artist’s time, but also to make it worth a reader’s time. While it takes an author months to conceive and write a script, it takes the artist longer to draw, color, and letter. On a good day, I can write twenty to thirty pages. A cartoonist might need at least one full day to draw a single page. It’s a lot of work. So, both author and artist know they’ll need to pour themselves into the work and commit to giving it their all to craft something special. And I believe this partnership makes the book twice as loveable because twice as much love went into making it. When an author and artist vibe well, it’s palpable. A reader can sense the passion and hard work that went into the book they’re holding in their hands. The text is crisper; the art is tighter. As the adage says, a picture is worth a thousand words, but a single page in a graphic novel page is worth much, much more than that. 

Sequential storytelling isn’t new, though. In fact, I would argue that comics are humanity’s first written language. The oldest cave drawings discovered to date are around 67,800 years old. Without an established alphabet or common communication device, our ancestors had no other way to share their stories, except with images. After all, humans are visual learners and the best way for us to learn something is to witness it with our eyes. This is why we watch films and TV and sports, because our eyes “read” the story presented before us. Evolutionarily speaking, humans seem to crave visual stimuli to grow. No wonder the Egyptians developed hieroglyphs to share their experiences. 

However, what I love most about visual storytelling is that young readers can truly see themselves in the panels. Growing up mixed race (half white, half Mexican), there were few protagonists or heroes who were similar to me. And those who were—in prose—were only made so by one or two words in a description. After that, it was up to me to maintain the character’s skin color in my head. But with graphic novels, when a Mexican character is present, I can see their skin, their ethnicity, how they appear in real life. I see the food they eat, the way they dress, the way they dance, and what their neighborhoods look like. Something deep within me stirs because the visual resonates. Seeing characters who look like me allows me to fully see myself in a book. And there’s nothing quite as important as finding characters who empower us and make us feel seen. 

So, yeah, graphic novels rule, and I can’t wait to write more.

Check out more of Rex Ogle here or head to Bookshop.org for a copy of Fruitcake