recommendations?

The GN version of 'I Am Legend' is pretty good.

Almost anything by Barry Windsor Smith has that quality.

The Invention of Hugo Cabret is an awesome book, mixing narrative and illustrations (instead of just referencing the narrative, the illustrations actualy take over the story for a few pages). I'd definately give it a look.

Watchmen. It's not really prose, but the writing is strong and integral.

Tamara Drewe Sounds like it would fit your bill exactly:

Tamara Drewe

Posy Simmonds uses a lot of prose, but also blends it with comics, so you'll get pages that look like your typical comics page, but also pages which are half prose/half art. It's also a really nice book and her artwork is fine. Worth a look.

Here's an excellent formal analysis WARNING: SPOILERS!

Hope that helps.

Fun Home is pretty heavy on the narration, but I'm not sure if that's what you're looking for. A blend of prose and comic pages is pretty rare, from what I've seen. I know a lot of readers' eyes glaze over and they skip long-winded text bubbles or narration boxes (I am definitely guilty of this), so I imagine it would be hard to avoid the same thing happening with what you're talking about.

Diary of a Wimpy Kid is the only other one I can think of off the top of my head. The diary format seems to be the one that lends itself most naturally to the mixing of the two.

The problem that arises is the age old adage "if you want to write a novel write a novel"

for graphic novels to work you have to tell as much of the story as possible through images. Once you have enough images to do that if you start writing 400+ words per page most, if not all, readers will skim over the text to get to the next page.

and really, that is the true merge, writing with pictures.

On the other side you have prose with pictures to reinforce the prose which is definitely not what your looking for by the sounds of it as you want the pictures to move the story along at the same time it seems.

Idk, your really attempting a hard an unnatural idea as your trying to keep the narrative from being empty while having the pictures have a flow. The best way might be to switch from focusing on one and then switching to the other like the examples mentioned above... once you start introducing pictures its all about the flow, and if you interject that with narrative of what is going on the jolty effect could be quite a turn off.

If you handle it well, It could be fantastic to though... able to tell a much grander story than is possible in the typical graphic novel.

I certainly haven't ever read one that truly merges them instead of going from one to the other.

Also check out French Milk. Again, it's in a journal format, not a novel... but it's probably still worth checking out for what you're interested in doing.

wandergirl said:

One mitigating factor: my intended audience wouldn't just be the teens who typically read graphic novels (which are still in the act of trickling over onto the mainstream, as you guys know better than anybody) but teen readers in general. They'd be less averse to thicker wedges of text.

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Hm... I don't know. Every kid grew up reading at least some comics: Archie, superheroes, Garfield. Most will skip large clumps of text even in newspaper comics. Kids are exposed to comics enough that thick wedges of text would still stand out to them, I'd think.

Honestly, though, I'm just interested in all the various formats that merge words and art; in this case, with a (rarer) emphasis on words. So maybe comic format wouldn't work so much as illustrations all over the place. Another example is Rent Girl by Michelle Tea.

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Thanks for the recommendation! I'd never heard of it- it definitely looks like an interesting way of combining text and image, and one a teen & older audience would be interested in reading. (I am! I'll have to hunt it down.) Strange that all the reviews call it a graphic novel, though.

wandergirl said:

Rent Girl's definitely a graphic novel, but in the other sense -- like everything Michelle Tea writes, it's an autobiographical train wreck. when I was in undergrad, she actually came in and spoke to one of my writing classes. it's pretty bizarre reading the raciest details of someone's life (with illustrations!) and then meeting them in person.

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I'll definitely have to check it out Are her other works in a "normal" novel format? I wonder where the decision came from to make it into that hybrid form... it definitely works, though. The preview on Google looks really stunning.

Alan Moore had a really interesting blend of media in The Black Dossier. Everything from regular graphic novel to text only to some fairly awesome 3-D.

Sandman, might be something to look at.

Just heard about this series: The Prince of Underwhere by Bruce Hale and Shane Hillman. It's for kids, not YA, but still a mix of comics and prose.

Also check out Bad Habits: A Love Story by Cristy C. Road. It's probably a lot closer to what you're looking for than the kids' stuff I posted... Illustrations and comic interludes all woven up together in the grimy narrative.