VOA标准英语2010年-Like Words, Drawings Tell Stories

（单词翻译）

Manga, a longstanding Japanese version of graphic¹ novels, is such a popular literary form that ian entire category in several bookstores.t's

In a recent Washington Post story, Michael Dirda described young people sprawled² on the floor at bookstores, their eyes riveted³ on the books in front of them. In fact, Dirda wrote, no other readers look quite so utterly⁴ absorbed.

The books belonged to a hot but, until recently, somewhat obscure genre⁵ that many Americans have never heard of.

Franklin Park Library, Flickr Creative Commons
This is an obviously well-attended workshop, specifically on how to create graphic novels, at a library in Franklin Park, Illinois.

It's the graphic novel. And the graphic part has nothing to do with explicit⁶ written descriptions of people, places, acts, or events. It refers to the illustrations, or graphics⁷, that, in this form of book, carry the story as much as, or more than, the words.

Graphic novels - whose format⁸ has been traced all the way back to medieval woodcuts and to adult 19th Century Japanese illustrated⁹ stories called manga - look a lot like comic strips in book form. But each volume tells a full and complex story. 

Graphic novels are mocked in some literary quarters as simplistic - another example of what some consider the dumbing down of the American culture.

portlant, Flickr Creative Commons
The first word is washed out a bit from the flash reflection, but it reflects a meeting announcement for a book club of folks who read graphic novels in Portland, Oregon.
Writer Alan Moore, for instance, scoffs¹⁰ that graphic novel is nothing but a marketing¹¹ term . . . meaning 'expensive comic book.'

That's an interesting take, since Moore is himself a British comic-book writer.