I’m now missing my Grease 2 photo movie adaptation book.

Small digressive note. Yeah, it seems that the U.S. (and maybe the UK) has used the term “fumetti” to describe comics where the illustrations are photographs–like the “Marvel Fumetti Book” from years back, or the kind of thing Wizard does with their Twisted Toyfare feature (or whatever that’s called.)

But in Italian “fumetti” is just the word for “comics” (like how “manga” is just the Japanese word for comics.) Years and years back, I had an amusing conversation with an Italian literary agent who represented one of Italy’s big comics properties. I was apparently confused that they’d refer to “fumetti” but the work was clearly drawn, not photographed. And they were confused to hear that “fumetti” was used in the U.S. to mean photograph-illustraed comics. Ah, good times…

Regardless, “fumetti” doesn’t seem to have caught on as a mainstream to describe the form. Publishers have called them “photo novels” before. Tokyopop coined (and trademarked) the term “cine-manga”. But I don’t know that there really is a popular, good, accepted, and generic term for the format.

Using a single photo in the background (like in the old Fantastic Fours from the 60′s)might work, or using a cut out photo in a comic panel as in Bloom County, but if every panel of every page is a photo, then no. You can stage the scene, and pose the characters, but I never could stomache this kind of thing… especially after the 3 years it took me to illustrate my own graphic novel. ;0)

Cheers, JOHN :0)

I think the term for this is “fumetti” (sp?), an Italian term for books that are photos with word balloons over them. One of the biggest challenges I had on BPM was to integrate the photo elements and the drawn elements. The only nit I would pick on the art is that sometimes the panels get a little flat because of all the same intensity on all the details.

The other thing that seems kind of off-putting is that it DOES seem too close to the subject matter, meaning that this is like looking at someone’s personal pictures, which I guess could be the whole intent of the author to make you in close and personal with a very personal story. “Fun Home” and “Blankets” were masterpieces because of the distance and perspective the author had on the subject matter. I’m not sure this has that same distance. I’d have to see the whole book to really make that assessment.

As for whether this is a graphic novel; I’d say yes. Your problem may be stemming from whether or not the author made the best artistic choices for storytelling with the techniques he used.

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