The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature: Artists and Writers on Creating Graphic Narratives, Poetry Comics, and Literary Collage

Edited by Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart

Rose Metal Press, 2023. $24.95

Reviewed by Rebecca Fish Ewan

I rarely venture out to explore without a field guide in hand. It’s an old habit borne of a deep appetite for knowing the nature of things. As a kid, a favorite book was Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds. The world felt like a more magical place knowing that Rails are “somewhat Chicken-like marsh-birds of secretive habits, shy rather than wary.” A field guide helps to make me feel akin to what I have not yet met.

So, I was eager to review The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Graphic Literature: Artists and Writers on Creating Graphic Narratives, Poetry Comics, and Literary Collage, edited by Kelcey Ervick and Tom Hart, but uncertain what it might contain. I can’t remember if, when I pored over Peterson’s guide as a child, I asked myself first what a bird is. I doubt it. A bird was a thing with feathers and the burning questions for me would’ve been—what kind of bird might I spy with my little eye? How do I know it when it flies high above me in the sky? Let me consult my silhouette chart.

I did wonder about graphic literature though. I’ve read comics, graphic novels, authored a cartoon/poetry memoir, but I’d never heard of graphic literature before. It made me a little nervous. When words make me anxious, I dose myself with definitions. The Oxford English Dictionary describes graphic as “picturesque,” and “belonging to drawing,” but it’s also a more expansive word that means “to write,” and more specifically “to scratch on clay tablets with a stylus.”

While literature means “book-learning,” it’s also “printed matter generally.”

I find these inclusive definitions comforting, because I fret about the fate of comics art when scrutinized by a scholarly lens. And the word “literature” in a title often signals scholarship. I’ve been an academic for three decades, so I’ve learned to recognize such things, even without a field guide in hand.

To my delight, the main body of the Field Guide to Graphic Literature, escapes the pitfalls of academia (excessive opacity, gate-keepery, and dullness) that can sap the magic out of any subject. It offers, instead, twenty-eight glimpses into the making of hybrid form work, drawing specifically from graphic narratives, poetry comics, and literary collage.

The book is structured by aspects important to making visual hybrid work, beginning with lines and mark-making, then covering panels, page design, story structure, character creation, place, voice and visual language. It ends with a section on transforming archival materials. Each of the seven sections includes excerpts, insightful essays and prompts of three or four authors who work in words and images. This format makes the book a great resource in a classroom where visual hybrid storytelling is being explored.

As with birds, a reader will have favorites, mine is the section on place. My heart rejoiced when I read “Comics are layered objects, like the Earth itself,” in Arwen Donahue’s essay “A Geography of Comics.” Or when Thi Bui, crediting her friend Pat Grant, ended her essay with these words: “if you can capture the light of a place, you’ve found the holy-grail of place-making.” I plan to include this section as reading/inspiration for students in the course I teach on hybrid stories of place.

What struck me in reading through all the sections in the book is the shared desire of these authors to actively engage their readers. It’s not that word-only authors don’t think about this, but it is so clearly essential in comics art. Beneath each page design decision lies the hope that it helps the reader enter into the world the author is creating on the page. Perhaps it’s the physical nature of reading comics that makes this so vital. When I experience visual work, I enter it. When I read words, they build a world in my head. Comics art and other visual hybrid forms, get me both ways. I dive in and imagine simultaneously, a very cross-fit workout.

Another common thread through the book is how visual hybrid work creates a sense of time. “How does time work on this page?” is a question Marnie Galloway asks directly in “The Problem of the Page.” She offers an exercise in creating a comic 5-ways (e.g., Six panel page), prompting the reader to consider how page design affects the story, the pacing, and the emotional sense created for the reader.

Moving through the essays gave my mind a wonderful ramble among the deeper underpinnings of what makes visual hybrid form so engaging and exciting. Like when Alexander Rothman wrote, “It strikes me that juxtaposition, not sequencing, may be the true heart of comics—and perhaps the heart of poetry, too” (51). What?! Yes! Juxtaposition delights me so! This gift to my thought box salves the comment he made seven years ago that my piece, rejected by Ink Brick, went “too far into cartooniness.”

For a cartoonist, being too cartoony has been a repeated critique that befuddles me, but I think I understand it in the same way that some work gets called literature and some doesn’t, despite both being “printed matter generally.” It’s the old highbrow/lowbrow debate. Elevation has long been a way to stratify things. To decide what is and isn’t of real value. It’s why real estate favors hillsides. I wouldn’t recommend worrying about any of this when you read the Field Guide to Graphic Literature. Rather, embrace the book for its rich and inspiring content. The color pages of each author’s excerpted work are reason enough to keep the book in hand when you venture out to explore the universe of visual hybrid form. Think of it not as an exhaustive compendium of all species of word/image art, but instead as a collection of twenty-eight guided explorations into graphic narratives, poetry comics, and literary collage.

Each author shares their work and illuminates elements of their creative process and decision-making. Because of the book design, the essays come before the authors’ excerpted pages. You can flip back and forth between essay and excerpts, or, as I did, imagine the work being described in the essays and then look at it afterwards. At first I did this out of my dogged conditioning that books are to be read from front to back one page at a time, but as I read further, I enjoyed the surprise of the work after I had imagined it while I read the essays, especially for author’s with whom I wasn’t already familiar. This process magnified the fact that comics art can be deceptive in its depth of meaning, design, and creation. I think this is why it often gets its genius missed. Like it’s child’s play and not the serious business of grownups with elbow patches on their tweed jackets.

I’m excited that there is a field guide like this one out in the world. I hope it helps academia change itself to create habitats for more comics art species. And encourages anyone aspiring to venture into creating visual hybrid stories to sally forth, guidebook in hand!

Poet/cartoonist, Rebecca Fish Ewan's passion is mingling text with visual art, primarily in ink and watercolor, to tell stories of place and memory. Her hybrid-form work has appeared in After the Art, Brevity, Crab Fat, Survivor Zine, Hip Mama, Mutha, TNB, Punctuate and Under the Gum Tree. Her illustrations and essay, “The Deepest Place on Earth,” were published in the Literary Kitchen anthology, Places Like Home. Rebecca has an MFA in creative writing from ASU, where she has been a landscape design professor for 25+ years. Rebecca grew up in Berkeley, California, and lives with her family in Arizona. Books/chapbook: A Land Between, By the Forces of Gravity, Water Marks, and her newest book, Doodling for Writers, which released October 2020.