graphic novel

graphic novel, in American and British usage, a type of text combining words and images—essentially a comic, although the term most commonly refers to a complete story presented as a book rather than a periodical.

Comic versus graphic novel

The term graphic novel is contentious. From the 1970s, as the field of comic studies was first emerging as an academic discipline, scholars and others have attempted to define the word comics and to generate a critical terminology appropriate to support that definition. The debate over so-called graphic novels touches upon this complex situation. For many, the word comics denotes a periodical for children, published on a weekly or monthly basis, sold at newsstands or in speciality comic book stores, often with pages devoted to advertising and, when intended for younger readers, competitions and puzzles. In contrast, graphic novel is usually taken to mean a long comic narrative for a mature audience, published in hardback or paperback and sold in bookstores, with serious literary themes and sophisticated artwork.

However, these distinctions are somewhat spurious, as comics are found in all shapes and formats, appeal to many different groups and age ranges, and encompass a huge variety of genres and styles. Moreover, graphic novels are often not original publications but rather repackaged collections of serially published comics. While some material is produced especially for the graphic novel market, bookshops and libraries make no real distinction, so the term graphic novel often serves no serious descriptive purpose. It may perhaps be more properly understood as a marketing term intended to resituate comics for an audience uncomfortable with or embarrassed by the associations that surround them (i.e., that a reader of comics is juvenile and subliterate). The extent to which the term signifies a difference in style or form from comics is negligible, but it must be noted that texts that are originally intended for publication in book form sometimes take advantage of the possibilities for a longer narrative, different formats, and superior paper quality, which can be seen as an argument for preserving the distinction between comics and graphic novels.

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The argument is further complicated by the fact that the supposed need for the term graphic novel grows out of what might be considered American and British cultural prejudices. No equivalent term is required in continental Europe or in Japan, where the acceptance of comics as both an art form and a literary mode is unproblematic. In Europe, and especially in France, comics, or bande dessinée (“drawn strips”), have long been collected in high-quality albums, with themes and styles appropriate to a mature audience. This adult comic culture has coexisted very comfortably with comics for children, with no supposed contradiction in terms. In Japan a huge proportion of the population routinely reads comics (called manga), which achieve a dizzying variety of genres and themes. The emergence of the term graphic novel must therefore be understood in terms of the cultural attitudes that shaped it.

From comic strips to comic books

The term comics derives from the so-called funny pages that were found in late 19th- and early 20th-century newspapers. In the United States these comic strips were first published as separate entities when the modern-format comic book was born, in the 1930s. In Britain at about the same time, publications featuring illustrated text stories slowly gave way to comic strips and then to comic books in their own right. At that time the humour genre started to give way to action, crime, and fantasy books. These combined to create the superhero genre, which came to dominate the American market. In Britain war, sports, and science fiction were most popular. However, even though comic books diversified in terms of content, their association with humorous and juvenile entertainment persisted, so the term comics stuck (and is commonly used as a singular noun to refer to the medium). The appearance of underground comics by the likes of R. Crumb in the 1960s brought with it a new term—comix—denoting X-rated and taboo content that responded to the counterculture movement. Although such work was clearly adult-orientated, it was also distinguished from the mainstream by its distribution and its material quality. Underground comix circulated via “head shops” (stores that sold marijuana pipes and other drug paraphernalia) and independent bookstores, rather than via newspaper stands. The paper comix were printed on was sometimes cheaper, and the printing quality was variable.

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The academic study of comics

In the 1970s there was a groundswell of academic interest in comics, and many of these commentators celebrated the work of Crumb alongside Winsor McCay and George Herriman, comic strip creators from the early 20th century. They also sought to validate the importance of comics by delving into the prehistory of the medium, finding a lineage of word-image texts that evolved from cave paintings, Egyptian hieroglyphs and Mayan carvings, illuminated manuscripts, the Bayeux Tapestry, early woodcut printing, the serial illustrations of William Hogarth and Rodolphe Töpffer, and the engravings of William Blake. Töpffer, a 19th-century Swiss artist, was particularly important, and he is often described as the father of the modern comic. Hogarth, an 18th-century English broadsheet satirist, anticipated the funny pages in the late 19th century with visual techniques that would become comic conventions. In the early 20th century, film was influenced by comics, and woodcut novels by the likes of Frans Masereel and Lynd Ward (themselves partially influenced by German Expressionist cinema, and perhaps vice versa) were precursors of the graphic novel.

Within this larger historical context, comics can be seen both as an ancient medium that combines words and images, two of the primal building blocks for communication, and as a modern medium that continues to develop and evolve. By the last quarter of the 20th century, the term comics had suddenly become anachronistic. In 1985 Will Eisner used the term sequential art to describe the medium in his influential book Comics and Sequential Art, and in 1993 critic Scott McCloud offered this definition in his book Understanding Comics: comics are “juxtaposed pictorial and other images in deliberate sequence, intended to convey information and/or produce an aesthetic response.” This academic interest was paralleled by a growth in production of comics for adults in Britain and the United States. As cultural critic Roger Sabin explains in his book Adult Comics (1993), there had always been comics for adults, and adults had always gained enjoyment from comics regardless of the material’s supposed audience, but in the late 1970s those children who had embraced the comics boom of the 1960s were now older and sought more realistic and mature comics. The major American comic publishers responded with more violent material and, sometimes, more intelligent comics—many of them in the form of books and albums, mimicking the marketing of comics in Europe. These were the immediate precursors of what would come to be known as graphic novels. The emergence of this format was supported by the birth of the direct-sales market (specialty comic shops), which helped to formalize a culture of fandom around comics and revealed the presence of an audience of readers with high disposable income who could therefore be relied upon to buy these new expensive books. This move away from the newsstands created new possibilities, not just in terms of format but with regard to content. The once strict censorship of the Comics Code Authority—an industry group that policed depictions of sex and violent content in mass-market comics—lessened and ultimately became irrelevant to most publishers and consumers.

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