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Graphic novel

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Graphic novel is a term for a kind of comic book, usually with long and fairly complex storylines and often aimed at more mature audiences. However, the term is not strictly delimited, and can be notoriously difficult to pin down. It is often used to imply subjective distinctions in artistic quality between graphic novels and other kinds of comics which can be quite controversial. Graphic novels often encompass several separate issues of comic books and can be published over a period of several months or years and then republished in larger volumes.

The term is commonly used to disassociate works from the juvenile and/or humorous connotations of the terms "comics" and "comic book". It implies that the work is more serious, mature, and/or literary than traditional comics. Following the reasoning behind this distinction, the French term "Bande Dessinée" is occasionally applied to certain comic books - mostly by art historians and those creators and critics who are schooled in the fine arts - in order to further dissociate fine art from popular entertainment. The usage is hotly contested, even though it is mostly limited to those same fine arts university departments. Other roughly synonymous terms, preferred by some to avoid the connotation of indecency in the word "graphic", are "drawn book" and "visual novel".

Particularly in the book trade, the term is sometimes extended to include material that would not be considered a "novel" if produced in another medium. Collections of comic book issues that do not form a single continuous story, anthologies of short loosely-related pieces (by a single creator or even by multiple creative teams), and even non-fiction are stocked by libraries and bookstores as "graphic novels". It is also used sometimes in contradistinction to "trade paperback", to emphasize that the work was created as a single, complex, but finite narrative, and not just collected arbitrarily from an ongoing melodrama. Whether or not 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, book-length comics have been commonly published in hardcover volumes since the end of the 19th century (Franco-Belgian comics such as Tintin and Lieutenant Blueberry, but also Italian ones such as Corto Maltese), so the distinction between graphic novels and the other forms of comic books is even less clear there.

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[edit] History

The term "graphic novel" was popularized by Will Eisner after it appeared on the cover of the trade paperback (though not on the hardcover edition) edition of A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories in 1978, a mature, complex work focusing on the lives of ordinary people in the real world. The label "graphic novel" was intended to distinguish it from traditional comic books, with which it shared a storytelling medium. Eisner cited as inspiration the 1930s books of Lynd Ward, who produced complete novels in woodcuts. 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. [[1]] Chandler: Red Tide by Jim Steranko used the term "graphic novel" in its introduction and was labelled "a visual novel" on the cover, although Chandler is more commonly considered an illustrated novel than a work of comics.

Since the term came into use, it has been applied retroactively to various works which did not use the term but fit (or nearly fit) the popular modern usage. These prototypical examples include Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (1930), a wordless comic published in book format; Gil Kane's self-published, magazine-format comics novel, His Name is... Savage (1968, the same year Marvel Comics published two issues of the similarly magazine-format The Spectacular Spider-Man); and Kane's illustrated novel Blackmark (1971), a sword-and-sorcery paperback published by Bantam. Another often-cited example is Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species by writer Don McGregor and artist Paul Gulacy (Eclipse Books, October 1978). Calling itself a "graphic album," it marked the first time that an original heroic-adventure character in the American comic-book tradition was conceived expressly for the graphic-novel form.

One could also classify the long-form sequential woodcut albums by Belgian Frans Masereel, such as Passionate Journey, as early forms of graphic novel.

[edit] 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.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

[edit] External links

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