Geek Syndicate
WHAT IS A GRAPHIC NOVEL?
Graphic Novel is a somewhat overused term these days. By and large it is taken to mean any volume of collected sequential-art, bound together with a catchy title, whether it contains a single story, a complete serialised story, or just a chunk of standalone comic issues between its pages. These of course are very different things, written in different ways. You may think that this is semantic hair-splitting, but actually it’s far more interesting than that. The term “Graphic Novel” originated in the 1970s, but really came to prominence in the late eighties and early nineties, mostly as a way of differentiating what was perceived as “quality” comic-format stories from “mere” monthly stories about guys in capes. This is pretty ironic when you consider that Watchmen is often held up as the great example of the type, and was of course published monthly and featured guys in capes. But in era when collected volumes were comparatively rare, and costs of them comparatively high, it was the prestige projects that lived on in these volumes, usually complete stories, and many many more people will have read Watchman (or The Dark Knight Returns, or many others) as collected volumes than have even seen a single standalone issue. To an extent though, this is a red herring - the format existed well before the coining of the term as far back as the nineteen-twenties, but most
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notably the “Picture Novel” It Rhymes With Lust published by St John Publications in nineteen-fifty. Mostly unheard of these days, even a quick scan over its wikipedia page makes it feel like something a long way ahead of its time, and whilst it sold well enough, subsequent stories from the same publisher fell flat. Meanwhile the format was florishing over in Europe, both with Herge’s Adventures of Tintin (first published 1929) and Goscinny and Uderzo’s “Asterix the Gaul (first published 1959) although neither gained a great deal of traction in the US market, despite some great English adaptation work. But it is the late nineteen-seventies when the term starts to appear properly, and the format of a longer, self contained work started to catch hold within the Comics Industry. Will Eisner used the term in A Contract with God and throughout the early 1980s Marvel in
particular published a line of “Graphic Novels”, all self-contained stories and featuring a wide range of creative talent and subject matter. About the same time, nonsuperhero artists also began producing long-form works and the format suddenly became more widely noticed. Art Speigelman’s Maus (1986) was a genuine breakout hit that has probably been read by more non-comics readers than regular comics readers, and that amongst others fuels a realisation in the literary mainstream that this whole words’n’pictures format is a vehicle for telling stories as legitimate as any other. Which is stating the bleeding obvious really, but that’s the literary mainstream for you. Having a serialised, yet contained story bound into a single volume suddenly meant a wider audience for prestige projects and a way into “proper” bookshops. Moving forward and the idea of the Graphic Novel is increasingly diluted on the bookshelves of Waterstones and Amazon. Alongside Palestine, Persepolis and the like are reprints of Crisis on Infinite Earth, The Walking Dead vol. 94, and so on - not to disparage the latter or place it beneath the former, but the idea of a graphic novel - a novel told in graphic form, is actually a rare thing to find, and writers working solely in that format are even rarer. Even a lot of self-contained stories originally published as individual issues are distinct from a true novel structure