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Graphic novel



Sabre (1978), one of the first graphic novels. Art by Paul Gulacy.
Sabre (1978), one of the first graphic novels. Art by Paul Gulacy.

The term "graphic novel" began to grow in popularity two months later after it appeared on the cover of the trade paperback edition (though not the hardcover edition) of Will Eisner's groundbreaking A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Oct. 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 distinct category. Eisner cited Lynd Ward's 1930s woodcuts (see above) as an inspiration.

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).

One of the earliest contemporaneous applications of the term post-Eisner came in 1979, when Blackmark's sequel — published a year after A Contract with God though written and drawn in the early 1970s — was labeled a "graphic novel" on the cover of Marvel Comics' black-and-white comics magazine Marvel Preview #17 (Winter 1979), where Blackmark: The Mind Demons premiered — its 117-page contents intact, but its panel-layout reconfigured to fit 62 pages.

Dave Sim's comic book Cerebus had been launched as a funny-animal Conan parody in 1977, but in 1979 Sim announced[citation needed] it was to be a 300-issue novel telling the hero's complete life story. In England, Bryan Talbot wrote and drew The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, described by Warren Ellis as "probably the single most influential graphic novel to have come out of Britain to date"[13]. Like Sim, Talbot also began by serializing the story, originally in Near Myths (1978), before it was published as a three-volume graphic-novel series from 1982-87.

Following this, Marvel from 1982 to 1988 published the Marvel Graphic Novel line of 10"x7" trade paperbacks — although numbering them like comic books, from #1 (Jim Starlin's The Death of Captain Marvel) to #35 (Dennis O'Neil, Mike Kaluta, and Russ Heath's Hitler's Astrologer, starring the radio and pulp fiction character the Shadow, and, uniquely for this line, released in hardcover). Marvel commissioned original graphic novels from such creators as John Byrne, J. M. DeMatteis, Steve Gerber, graphic-novel pioneer McGregor, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walt Simonson, Charles Vess, and Bernie Wrightson. While most of these starred Marvel superheroes, others, such as Rick Veitch's Heartburst featured original SF/fantasy characters; others still, such as John J. Muth's Dracula, featured adaptations of literary stories or characters; and one, Sam Glanzman's A Sailor's Story, was a true-life, World War II naval tale.

Cover art for the 1987 U.S. (left) and U.K. (right) collected editions of Watchmen, published by DC Comics and Titan Books
Cover art for the 1987 U.S. (left) and U.K. (right) collected editions of Watchmen, published by DC Comics and Titan Books

In England, Titan Books held the license to reprint strips from 2000 AD, including Judge Dredd, beginning in 1981, and Robo-Hunter, 1982. The company also published British collections of American graphic novels — including Swamp Thing, notable for being printed in black and white rather than in color as originally — and of British newspaper strips, including Modesty Blaise and Garth. Igor Goldkind was the marketing consultant who worked at Titan and moved to 2000 AD and helped to popularize the term "graphic novel" as a way to help sell the trade paperbacks they were publishing. He admits that he "stole the term outright from Will Eisner" and his contribution was to "take the badge (today it's called a 'brand') and explain it, contextualise it and sell it convincingly enough so that bookshop keepers, book distributors and the book trade would accept a new category of 'spine-fiction' on their bookshelves".[14]

DC Comics likewise began collecting series and published them in book format. Two such collections garnered considerable media attention, and they, along with Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (1986), helped establish both the term and the concept of graphic novels in the minds of the mainstream public. These were Batman: 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 limited series in which Moore notes he "set out to explore, amongst other things, the dynamics of power in a post-Hiroshima world".[15].

These works and others were reviewed in newspapers and magazines, leading to such increased coverage that the headline "Comics aren't just for kids anymore" became widely regarded by fans as a mainstream-press cliché.[16] Variations on the term can be seen in the Harvard Independent[17] and at Poynter Online.[18] Regardless, the mainstream coverage led to increased sales, with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, for example, lasting 40 weeks on a UK best-seller lists.[19]

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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. Writer 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?"

– [20]

Author Daniel Raeburn wrote "I snicker at the neologism first for its insecure pretension — the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a 'sanitation engineer' — and second because a 'graphic novel' is in fact the very thing it is ashamed to admit: a comic book, rather than a comic pamphlet or comic magazine."[21]

Writer Neil Gaiman, responding to a claim that he does not write comic book but graphic novels, said the commenter "meant it as a compliment, I suppose. But all of a sudden I felt like someone who'd been informed that she wasn't actually a hooker; that in fact she was a lady of the evening.|[22]}}

Some alternative cartoonists have coined their own terms to describe extended comics narratives. The cover of Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven describes the book as "a comic-strip novel", with Clowes having noted that he "never saw anything wrong with the comic book".[23] 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".[24]

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Quotes

Charles McGrath (former editor, The New York Times Book Review) in The New York Times: "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...."[25]

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See also

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Footnotes

  1. ^ Gertler, Nat; Steve Lieber (2004). The Complete Idiot's Guide to Creating a Graphic Novel. Alpha Books. ISBN 1592572332. 
  2. ^ Friday, Brad. A few graphic novel gift ideas…. CMJ.com staff blogs. CMJ.com. Archived from the original on 2007-12-22. Retrieved on 2007-12-22.
  3. ^ Kaplan, Arie (2006). Masters of the Comic Book Universe Revealed!. Chicago Review Press. ISBN 1556526334. 
  4. ^ {{cite web|
  5. ^ Buzzeli's work was presented at the International Comics Festival of Lucca in 1967, with a complete edition published in 1970 before being serialised in French magazine Charlie Mensuel. Dino Buzzati 1965-1975 (http (Italian)). Associazione Guido Buzzelli (2004). Retrieved on 2006-06-21., Domingos Isabelinho (2004). The Ghost of a Character: The Cage by Martin Vaughn-James (http). Indy Magazine. Retrieved on 2006-04-06.
  6. ^ Collector Times (n.d.): "TheComicsBooks.com - The History of Comic Books: See You in the Funny Pages"
  7. ^ Grant, Steven (December 28, 2005). The First Graphic Novel. Comicbookresources.com. Retrieved on 2007-03-20.
  8. ^ Gravett, Paul (2005). Graphic Novels: Stories To Change Your Life, 1st ed., Aurum Press Limited. ISBN 1-84513-068-5. 
  9. ^ Grand Comics Database: The First Kingdom
  10. ^ Nicholas, Wroe. "Bloomin' Christmas", The Guardian, December 18, 2004. 
  11. ^ Comics historian R.C. Harvey noted this fact in a letter to Andrew Arnold, Time columnist, in response to Arnold's column celebrating the 25th anniversary of the term. Andrew Arnold (Nov. 21, 2003). A Graphic Literature Library. 'Time'. Retrieved on 2006-06-21.
  12. ^ America's First Graphic Novel Publisher. NBM Publishing official home page. Retrieved on 2006-06-21.
  13. ^ Warren Ellis. Book Review: The Adventures of Luther Arkwright (html). artbomb.net. Retrieved on 2006-06-21.
  14. ^ 2006 interview with Igor Goldkind
  15. ^ Moore letter,  Cerebus  #217 (April 1997)  Aardvark Vanaheim
  16. ^ Comic-book writer J.M. DeMatteis interview in Caught in The Nexus: J.M. DeMatteis. The Nexus (February 19, 2005). Retrieved on 2007-03-20.
  17. ^ Wilson, Shane (March 18, 2004). Holy Pretension, Batman!. Harvard Independent. Retrieved on 2007-03-20.
  18. ^ Hammond, Margot (September 2, 2004). Comic Books for Big People. Poynter Online. Retrieved on 2007-03-20.
  19. ^ Campbell, Eddie (2001). Alec:How to be an Artist, 1st ed., Eddie Campbell Comics, 96. ISBN 0-9577896-3-7. 
  20. ^ Kavanagh, Barry (October 17, 2000). The Alan Moore Interview. Blather.net. Retrieved on 2007-03-20.
  21. ^ Chris Ware (Monographics Series) (2004), p. 110
  22. ^ Bender, Hy (1999), The Sandman Companion, Vertigo, ISBN 1-56389-644-3 
  23. ^ Bushell, Laura (July 21, 2005). The Ghost World creator does it again. BBC - Collective. Retrieved on 2006-06-21.
  24. ^ ""Seth", by Gary Groth", The Comics Journal #193, February, 1997, pp. 58-93. 
  25. ^ McGrath, Charles. "Not Funnies", The New York Times, July 11, 2004, pp. 24. Retrieved on 2007-03-20. 

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References

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External links




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