A graphic novel (GN) is a long-form comic book, usually with lengthy and complex storylines, and often aimed at more mature audiences. The term can also encompass a short story collection, or collected issues of previously published comic books republished in a single large volume.
Comics work created and published as a single narrative, without prior appearance in magazines, comic books or newspapers, are called original graphic novels (OGN).
The evolving term "graphic novel" is not strictly defined, and is sometimes used, controversially, to imply subjective distinctions in artistic quality between graphic novels and other kinds of comics. It is commonly used to disassociate works from the juvenile and/or humorous connotations of the terms "comics" and "comic book", implying that the work is more serious, mature, and/or literary than traditional comics. Following this reasoning, the French term "Bande Dessinée" is occasionally applied, by art historians and others schooled in fine arts, to dissociate comic books in the fine-art tradition from those of popular entertainment.
In the publishing trade, the term is sometimes extended to material that would not be considered a novel if produced in another medium. Collections of comic books that do not form a continuous story, anthologies or collections of loosely related pieces, and even non-fiction are stocked by libraries and bookstores as "graphic novels" (similar to the manner in which dramatic stories are included in "comic" books).
Whether manga, which has had a much longer history of both novel-like publishing and production of comics for adult audiences, should be included in the term is not always agreed upon. Likewise, in continental Europe, collections of comic strips have been commonly published in hardcover volumes, often called "albums", since the end of the 19th century (including Franco-Belgian comics such as Tintin and Lieutenant Blueberry, and Italian comics such as Corto Maltese).
History
Antecedents
Comics have long been collected into book form, Ally Sloper having been collected as early as 1873, and there has been a long tradition of the comic annual within the United Kingdom. The United States has also had a long tradition of collecting comic strips into book form, and of producing "bumper editions". Whilst these collections and longer form comic books are not considered graphic novels even by today's standards, they show the presence of a market for such works, and thus can be thought of as part of the development of the graphic novel.
The 1920's saw a revival of the woodcut tradition, with Belgian Franz Masereel often cited as "the undisputed King" (Sabin, 291) of this revival. Among Masereel's works were Passionate Journey (1926, reissued 1985 as Passionate Journey: A Novel in 165 Woodcuts ISBN 0872861740). American Lynd Ward also worked in this tradition during the 1930s, and such works have been described by Eddie Campbell as "'antecedents of the graphic novel', which is to say they that they are not comics proper but an early intimation of that particular type of comic we call the graphic novel"
Other prototypical examples from this period include Milt Gross', He Done Her Wrong (1930), a wordless comic published as a hardcover book.
The 1940s saw the launching of Classics Illustrated, a series within which notable novels were adapted into standalone comic books. The 1950s saw this format broadened, with popular movies being similarly adapted. By the 1960s, British publisher IPC had started to produce a pocket-sized comic book line, the "Super Library", that featured war and spy stories told over roughly 130 pages.
The first European comic-strip collections, called "albums", debuted with The Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930), the first Tintin book. These were followed by collections of other strips, including the Asterix stories.
By the late 1960s, American comic book creators were becoming more adventurous with the form. Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin self-published a 40-page, magazine-format comics novel, His Name is... Savage (Adventure House Press) in 1968 — the same year Marvel Comics published two issues of The Spectacular Spider-Man in a similar format. Columnist Steven Grant also argues that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Dr. Strange story in Strange Tales #130-146, although published serially from 1965-1966, is "the first American graphic novel".[1]
Another Kane-Goodwin work, Blackmark (1971), a science fiction/sword-and-sorcery paperback published by Bantam, did not use the term originally; the back-cover blurb of the 30th-anniversary edition (ISBN 1560974567) calls it, retroactively, "the very first American graphic novel." The Academy of Comic Book Arts presented Kane with a special 1971 Shazam Award for what it called "his paperback comics novel". Whatever the nomenclature, Blackmark is a 119-page story of comic-book art, with captions and word balloons, published in a traditional book format. It is also the first with an original heroic-adventure character, conceived expressly for this form.
In a related, very early use of the term "graphic novel" in a mainstream publication, the planned second book, Blackmark: The Mind Demons, was called a graphic novel on the cover of the black-and-white comics magazine Marvel Preview #17 (Winter 1979), where it eventually premiered — its 117-page contents intact, but its panel-layout reconfigured to fit 62 pages.
European creators were also experimenting with the longer narrative in comics form; in the United Kingdom, Raymond Briggs was producing works such as Father Christmas (1972) and The Snowman (1978), which although he himself described as being from the "bottomless abyss of strip cartooning", have, along with other Briggs works like the more mature When The Wind Blows (1982), been re-marketed as graphic novels in the wake of the term's popularity, although as Briggs notes: "I don't know if I like that term too much".[2]
Meanwhile, in continental Europe, the tradition of collecting serials of popular strips such as Tintin or Asterix had allowed a system to develop which saw works developed as long form narratives but pre-published as serials; by the 1970s this move in turn allowed creators to become marketable in their own right, auteurs capable of sustaining sales on the strength of their name.
Coining of the term and its adoption
The term "graphic novel" was popularized by Will Eisner after it appeared on the cover of the trade paperback edition (though not on the hardcover edition) of A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories in 1978. This collection of short stories was a mature, complex work focusing on the lives of ordinary people in the real world, and the term "graphic novel" was intended to distinguish it from traditional comic books, with which it shared a storytelling medium. This established both a new book-publishing term and a category distinct from paperback, although Eisner cited as inspiration the works of the previously mentioned Lynd Ward, who produced complete novels in woodcuts in the 1930s.
The critical and commercial success of A Contract with God helped to establish the term "graphic novel" in common usage, and many sources have incorrectly credited Eisner with being the first to use it. In fact, it was used as early as November 1964 by Richard Kyle in CAPA-ALPHA #2, a newsletter published by the Comic Amateur Press Alliance, and again in Kyle's Fantasy Illustrated #5 (Spring 1966).
In 1976, the term appeared in connection with three separate works. Bloodstar by Richard Corben (adapted from a story by Robert E. Howard) used the term on its cover. George Metzger's Beyond Time and Again, serialized in underground comics from 1967-72, was subtitled "A Graphic Novel" on the inside title page when collected as a 48-page, black-and-white, hardcover book published by Kyle & Wheary [3]. And the digest-sized Chandler: Red Tide (1976) by Jim Steranko, designed to be sold on newsstands, used the term "graphic novel" in its introduction and "a visual novel" on its cover, although Chandler is more commonly considered an illustrated novel than a work of comics.
In 1976, Terry Nantier, who had spent his teenage years living in Paris, returned to the United States and formed Flying Buttress Publications, later to incorporate as NBM, and published Racket Rumba, a spoof of the noir detective genre, written and drawn by the single-name French artist Loro. Nantier followed this with Enki Bilal's The Call of the Stars, although the company marketed these works as "graphic albums" rather than graphic novels. [4]
Still another example of the evolution of the term is Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species by writer Don McGregor and artist Paul Gulacy (Eclipse Books, August 1978). Published two months before A Contract with God, it called itself, on its credits page, "a comic novel", though the author, in interviews, referred to it as a "graphic album" — a term used the following year by Gene Day for his hardcover short-story collection Future Day (Flying Buttress Press). The word "album" is borrowed from European publishers, who use the term to describe such comic-strip collections as The Adventures of Tintin in the Land of the Soviets (1930), the first Tintin book.
Another historically significant early work is the original graphic novel The Silver Surfer (Simon & Schuster/Fireside Books, August 1978), by Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. This was distributed through bookstores; the same month's Sabre is, historically, the first graphic novel created for and sold in the "direct market" of United States comic-book shops.
The build to wider acceptance
The early 1980s saw publishers such as NBM (formerly Flying Buttress Press), Marvel and DC continue to publish graphic novels, with Dave Sim and Bryan Talbot also creating works regarded as graphic novels. Sim's Cerebus had been launched as a Conan parody in 1977, but in 1979 Sim announced it was to be a 300 issue series, telling the life of the titular character, with Sim publishing the first 25 issue collection in 1986. Talbot, meanwhile, an English creator, produced The Adventures of Luther Arkwright as a three volume graphic novel series, published between 1982 and 1987.
Marvel's line of original graphic novels, launched in 1982 with Jim Starlin's Death of Captain Marvel, saw the company commission original storylines from numerous creators, amongst them John J Muth, who adapted Dracula for the line, Rick Veitch, John Byrne and Frank Miller. The books themselves were published in a standard size, 10 inches by 7.
Titan Books, a British company, were also publishing collections and translations. Titan held the license to reprint strips from 2000 AD, including Judge Dredd beginning in 1981 and Robo-Hunter, (1982). They also published British collections of American graphic novels, including Swamp Thing, notable for being printed in black and white, and of British newspaper strips, including Modesty Blaise and Garth.
DC were also collecting series and publishing them in book format, and it was two of these collections which garnered media attention and, along with Maus (1986), by Art Spiegelman, helped establish the term graphic novel in the minds of the wider public. The two works were The Dark Knight Returns (1986), a collection of Frank Miller's four part comic book series featuring an older Batman faced with the problems of a dystopian future; and Watchmen (1987), a collection of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 12 issue comic book series which used the superhero story as a metaphor for the dynamics of power in the atomic age.[5]
These three works were reviewed in various newspapers and magazines and led to such increased coverage that the headline "Comics aren't just for kids anymore" is now widely regarded as a cliche [6], [7]. The coverage in turn led to increased sales, with The Dark Knight Returns managing to last 40 weeks on the United Kingdom's best seller lists. (Campbell, 96)
Quotes
Charles McGrath (former editor, The New York Times Book Review) in The New York Times, July 20, 2004 [8]: "Some of the better-known graphic novels are published not by comics companies at all but by mainstream publishing houses — by Pantheon, in particular — and have put up mainstream sales numbers. Persepolis, for example, Marjane Satrapi's charming, poignant story, drawn in small black-and-white panels that evoke Persian miniatures, about a young girl growing up in Iran and her family's suffering following the 1979 Islamic revolution, has sold 450,000 copies worldwide so far; Jimmy Corrigan sold 100,000 in hardback...."
Artistic movement
Eddie Campbell has issued a manifesto (2004) to the effect that the "graphic novel" is more the product of an artist, and that it follows that the term is therefore better used as a description of an artistic movement. Members of the movement are known as "Graphic Novelists".
Campbell defines the major goal of the movement as being "to take the form of the comic book, which has become an embarrassment, and raise it to a more ambitious and meaningful level." Campbell sees the movement as drawing on many antecedents, notably woodcut novels, such as those by Lynd Ward, but does not wish the movement to be applied in relation to such antecedents. Further, Campbell rejects the notion that the term can be applied to the form of the work with any objective meaning, beyond those necessary for marketing purposes.
Criticism
Some in the comics community have objected to the term "graphic novel" on the grounds that it is unnecessary, or that its usage has been corrupted by commercial interests. Alan Moore believes, "It's a marketing term. I mean, it was one that I never had any sympathy with. The term 'comic' does just as well for me. ... The problem is that 'graphic novel' just came to mean 'expensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel comics - because 'graphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel, you know?" [9]. Others, including Stuart Moore, author of the serialized comics study A Thousand Flowers, note a distinction between graphic novels and trade paperback collections, writing about them separately ("Of course, graphic novels — like trade paperbacks, which we'll get into next time....") [10].
As a result of this dissatisfaction, some alternative cartoonists have coined their own terms to describe extended comics narratives. For example, the cover of Daniel Clowes' book Ice Haven describes the book as "a comic-strip novel". When The Comics Journal asked the cartoonist Seth why he added the subtitle "A Picture Novella" to his comic It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, he responded, "I could have just put 'a comic book'... It goes without saying that I didn't want to use the term graphic novel. I just don't like that term."
See also
References
- The Comics Journal Message Board: The history of the term "graphic novel"
- Archive of The Comics Journal Message Board: The history of the term "graphic novel"
- The Graphic Novel Silver Anniversary
- A Brief History of the Graphic Novel", by Stan Tychinski
- The Eddie Campbell Interview. (September, 2004) Graphic Novel Review In Depth - The Eddie Campbell Interview - Sidebar - Eddie Campbell's (Revised) Graphic Novel Manifesto. URL accessed on May 1, 2005.
- The Comics Journal Message Board Thread. The Comics Journal Message Board: NYTimes Mag Article 7/11/04 - within which Eddie Campbell formulated his Graphic Novel Manifesto). URL accessed on May 1, 2005. Note: This is a dead link.
- Image & Narrative #1 (Dec. 2000): "The Publication and Formats of Comics, Graphic Novels, and Tankobon", by Chris Couch
- Sabin, Roger (1993). Adult Comics An Introduction, Routledge. ISBN 0-415-04419-7.
- The Comics Journal #193 (Feb. 1997): "Seth", by Gary Groth, pp. 58-93
External links
