Pages 24-25: Form is Genre/Style? Exposition (Read First)

In Dylan Horack's response to Understanding Comics, one of his criticisms is that McCloud's "'form as vessel' metaphorical system . . . suppresses alternative conceptions which erode the borders between the arts, for example 'form as genre.'"

By now we are all sensitive to certain generic conventions which help to locate us within a specific genre. As certain stories have been told retold over the years (decades? centuries? . . . ), generic transformation is required to keep the descerning viewer/reader interested. Paul Auster's City of Glass is a prime example of the transformation of the hard boiled detective fiction (the type which Quinn writes). The semantic elements of the genre are present, but arranged in such away that we come away from the experience of reading it with a different sense than we would a traditional hard boiled novel.

If City of Glass is generically the offspring of hard boiled detective fiction, stylistically, Karasik and Mazzucchelli's graphic rendering of it, with its moody black and whites and imposing gritty cityscapes, more effectively nods to film noir (a style emerging from hard boiled waters) than the all prose version is capable of.