Okay, I will admit it. When the semester first started I was one of those people who believed that comics were not a serious form of literature. "Comics were those bright, colorful magazines filled with bad art, stupid stories and guys in tights"; this is a statement Scott McCloud made in his Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art novel, and it summed up my opinion on comics perfectly. The one thing I learned throughout the course of the semester is that comics are more than my above position. Some comics do fit into that particular category, but you can say the same thing about our more standard concept of novels (a good example of this would be romance novels). The truth behind Graphic Novels comes out to that they can take on serious topics and be very effective with the message they are relating to the reader. The difference is in the way the message is delivered, and the best way to describe this delivery system is as a deconstruction of the novel form. It is this theme of deconstruction I want explore, and I plan to do this by showing how comics can deconstruct historical events, their own genre, and even social issues.
             Before I go any further I would like to give some definitions on what on what is being discussed in this paper. First Deconstruction, "a method of literary analyses originated in France in the mid-20th century and based on a theory that, by the very nature of language and usage, no text can have a fixed, coherent meaning" (Webster's Dictionary 358). Now the definition of novel, "a relatively long fictional prose narrative with amore or less complex plot or pattern of events, about actions, feelings, motives, etc. of a group of characters" (Webster's 929). Finally the Graphic Novel, "juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or to produce an aesthetic response to the viewer" (McCloud 9). Now by looking at...