History and Uses of the Term "Graphic Novel"

Definition

The term “graphic novel” came into currency at the end of the 1970s to describe comic-strip narratives published in book form, as opposed to the periodical pamphlets called “comic books,” which circulated since the 1930s. It has come to be used in the book trade to refer to any non-periodic book featuring comics. In academia, it designates auteur comic-strip narratives produced outside mainstream periodical comic books. It is used occasionally in the plural as a synonym for “comics.”

Introduction

The history of the designation “graphic novel” should not be mistaken for the elusive, fan-centric, and ultimately sterile debate about the “first” graphic novel. Rather, this history concerns how, in contemporary American usage, the term came to refer to books of comics, regardless of the discrepancy between the commercial meaning of the term in the book trade and its scholarly meaning in academia.

Prior to the 1970s, American comics were either syndicated newspaper comic strips, the most popular of which were collected in cheap paperbacks, or periodical newsstand comic books. The overwhelming majority of comics readers had no familiarity whatsoever with book-form comics such as the so-called albums that had become the high-end segment of comics publishing in francophone Europe with the publication of best-selling series such as Les Aventures de Tintin (1929-1976; The Adventures of Tintin, 1958-1991) and Astérix(1961-1979, Asterix, 1969-1975).

Out of several terms coined during the 1970s to encapsulate the concept (graphic album, comic album, and picture novel, among others), “graphic novel” was co-opted by both the book industry and the specialty comic store market to label usually expensive, high-production-value books designed for bookstores instead of newsstands. The general public became gradually aware of the term beginning in 1986, following the increasing media coverage granted to contemporary comics that were breaking out of mainstream formats in both tone and theme.

The term graphic novel was first used by fan-writer Richard Kyle in November 1964, in issue 2 of Capa-Alpha, a newsletter associated with an Amateur Press Association comics gathering with a few dozen subscribers. In his “Wonderworld” column, Kyle stated he would use the terms “graphic story” and “graphic novel” to describe the artistically serious “comic book strip,” which, in his mind, referred to outstanding comics such as Harvey Kurtzman’s and Bernard Krigstein’s EC Comics stories. Kyle used the term again in the “Graphic Story Review” column he contributed to Bill Spicer’s Fantasy Illustrated, issue 5 (1966).

In its early incarnation, the term referred not to long-form comics, complete-in-one-volume stories, or European albums but to an implicit aesthetic agenda summarized by Kyle as “great artistic creativity . . . that no child could have appreciated—but which would have electrified many intelligent adults, if they’d permitted themselves to read ‘comic books.’” The initial vagueness of the notion, the slight pompousness of the term, and its risqué overtones explain why it failed to catch on outside the subcultural circles of comics fandom.

Rise of a Trade Term

By the mid-1970s, the term gradually rose from obscurity to become a catchword in the book trade. Three books described as graphic novels in their editorial blurbs were published in 1976: Richard Corben’s Bloodstar and George Metzger’s landscape format Beyond Time and Again were expensive, low-print-run hardcovers, while Jim Steranko’s Chandler: Red Tide was a mass-market, digest-sized paperback.

Except for the shared moniker, the books were quite different. Nonetheless, the term stuck in the book trade. “Graphic novels” was used once in a paragraph heading in Ray Walters’s “Paperback Talk,” in the January 22, 1978, issue of The New York Times, in which he explained that the previous year’s unprecedented success of science-fiction and fantasy publications (such as the adaptations of the films Star Wars, 1977, and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1978) had encouraged the book industry to explore these genres. In fact, at this time, two publishers were about to release “large-format paperbacks that depend upon pictures as much as words to tell their stories”; the two titles were Corben’s Neverwhere (1978), published by Ballantine and Jack Katz’s The First Kingdom (1978), published by Pocket/Wallaby.

Katz was an essential, if inconspicuous, participant in the late 1970s popularization of the term. In 1973, he created the idea of a mammoth 768-page sustained comic-strip narrative, The First Kingdom, which he sold to his publisher Bud Plant as a “graphic novel.” He used the same term in an August 7, 1974, letter to Will Eisner: “What I am starting is a graphic novel in which every incident is illustrated.” Eisner would have been responsive to the concept. In an interview granted to John Benson in 1968, he had expressed his interest in “the so called ‘graphic story,’ . . . a whole novel in comic form.” It is no wonder that “graphic novel” was the term that occurred to him when he started pitching the project that became A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (1978); the softcover edition of the book bore the subtitle “A Graphic Novel by Will Eisner.” Still, the term did not appear in the introduction, where he placed his work under the aegis of Lynd Ward’s woodcut novels instead. Hence, although Eisner did not coin the term graphic novel, A Contract with God popularized the term within the comic book industry.

Breaking into Bookstores and Mainstream Culture

In the 1980s, the emerging direct-distribution market embraced the graphic novel as one of the formats designed for specialty bookstores. The Marvel Graphic Novels, a line launched in 1982, were glorified vehicles for otherwise fairly traditional superhero narratives or new concepts liable to be turned into continuing titles. The format established by Marvel (8.5-inch-by-11-inch softcover one-shots printed on quality paper and written and illustrated by big-name creators) became the template of the graphic novel lines issued by DC Comics and various alternative publishers of the day, including Pacific Comics, Eclipse Comics, and First Comics.

While they thrived in the direct market, graphic novels were a tiny niche market for regular bookstores by the mid-1980s. According to an article in the May 1987 issue of the trade publication American Bookseller, the attention paid to comics by mainstream media had turned graphic novel into “an industry buzz-word” even though most booksellers at first saw it as “a two or three-book field,” referencing Art Spiegelman’s Maus (1986), Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor (first published in 1976), and Frank Miller’s Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986). Over the following fifteen years, the book trade gave up its decades-long reluctance to carry nonperiodical comics.

By the late 1980s, it seemed that the term was about to go mainstream and become the label that would eventually dissociate comics art from its traditional connotations of juvenile entertainment and lowbrow escapism, as had been happening in Western Europe since the 1970s. The term subsequently became a marketing category encompassing trade paperback or hardback reprints of syndicated strips or periodical comic books, original graphic novels, and translations of foreign material, including manga. Throughout the 1990s, general bookstores moved books featuring comics from “humor” sections to newly created “graphic novels” sections.

Many saw the Pulitzer Prize awarded to Maus in 1992 as a signal of definitive cultural recognition. The same could be said about the entry of graphic novels into libraries. However, in a 1998 piece for The New York Times Book Review, Tom De Haven pointed out a persistent cultural reticence among college students and highbrow types: Visibly, graphic novels had not managed to overcome the stigma of comics. However, the positive reception of several high-profile books in the following decade, such as Jimmy Corrigan (2000), In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Black Hole (2005), and Fun Home (2006), turned the tables and settled the graphic novel in middlebrow-to-highbrow culture.

In the mid-2020s, the term graphic novel became widely accepted and can be found in bookstores, libraries, on the Internet, and in social media. It has played a vital role in the acceptance of comics as legitimate forms of literature. While Maus led the way to this acceptance after winning the Pulitzer, graphic novels such as March: Book Three (2009) by John Lewis, Andrew Aydin, and Nate Powell, which won the National Book Award, have continued this trend, leading to academia’s increased approval of graphic novels. Still, the debate regarding the term continues. 

Impact

Regardless of the public and media interest in the format, various criticisms of the term have risen among creators. Some say graphic novels is a marketing term that lumps together the best and worst of the industry’s output. Others have argued it is an unnecessarily pretentious way to designate comic books. Still others have created alternate appellations—“picture novella” (Seth), “comic-strip novel” (Dan Clowes)—as tongue-in-cheek responses to what they perceive as the term’s increasingly commercial connotations.

It is undeniable that the popularization of the term “graphic novel” has played a significant role in the cultural acceptance of comics art. Regarding the genre’s long-term history, the simultaneous shift of the industry’s dominant economic model from magazine to book publishing has been a fairly unique example of Europeanization (or, arguably, Japanization) of an American popular cultural medium.

Bibliography

Couch, Chris. “The Publication and Formats of Comics, Graphic Novels, and Tankobon by Chris Couch.” Image & Narrative, Dec. 2000, www.imageandnarrative.be/inarchive/narratology/chriscouch.htm. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.

Gabilliet, Jean-Paul. Of Comics and Men: A Cultural History of American Comic Books. Translated by Bart Beaty and Nick Nguyen. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2010.

Hatfield, Charles. Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2005.

Weldon, Glen. “The Term 'Graphic Novel' Has Had A Good Run. We Don't Need It Anymore.” NPR, 17 Nov. 2016, www.npr.org/2016/11/17/502422829/the-term-graphic-novel-has-had-a-good-run-we-dont-need-it-anymore. Accessed 3 Aug. 2024.