If you happened to enjoy this essay, you might also like Jess Nevin's new podcast on the history of comics; more global, less focused on graphic novels in particular, and Rodolphe Töpffer appears in both. I believe his Patreon posts are public, and there are transcripts if you prefer reading to listening: https://www.patreon.com/c/jessnevins/posts
> So let’s look back; all the way back. The first comic printed in America is The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which appeared as a newspaper supplement in 1841 and a book in 1849. At eighty pages of continuous picaresque story,2 it’s certainly a novel. But it is immediately disqualified for not being American. It’s an unlicensed ripoff of an unlicensed British ripoff of a Swiss comic by Rodolphe Töpffer! You can’t just make your Eurocomics American through translation and crime!
No argument re: translation, but crime? Was there international copyright at the time? Not at all an expert but it looks to me like there wasn't before this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
Someone wondering when things “like A” “first” morphed into things “like B” is going to get involved in a lot of discovery driven judgement calls along the way.
The OP's definition of "US graphic novel" is apparently a comics that has a story similar to an adult's novel. In France, a "roman graphique" also means something akin to "film d'auteur". I thought that meaning was also present in the USA. Emblematic authors of the genre, like Eisner and Spiegelman, certainly point to this direction.
If you require that a graphic novel should be a creative and personal work, I doubt the OP's choice fits. A "trashy melodrama" whose first goal was "to cash in on the rise of mass-market paperback books" did try to expand the comics genre of its time, but it was more a commercial step than an artistic novelty.
The author skips right over the real heart of the definition: The difference between illustrated books and graphic novels is that the graphics are essential. Any text can be aided by illustrations, but one cannot understand a graphic novel without its associated graphics.
Why doesn't this set up specific criteria at the beginning based on references to the people who came up with the term, and apply those criteria to each work it goes over? [Also, why aren't there links to the works that are out of copyright?][Correction: there are, they're just all collected at the end. Makes the article completely worthwhile actually.]
Instead it starts with a random NYT-genre list of "acclaimed" comics, says almost nothing about what they have in common other than that people might have heard of them, then applies shifting criteria for a "graphic novel" as it goes through a list of old comics. I would call this half-assed, but they clearly put some work into it.
But why tell me that something is not a graphic novel because it is too short, never having previously established a specific length requirement, without saying how short the thing is, and without providing a link to the thing if it is out of copyright?
> Do you believe me if I say that these panels are different from the panels of Saddlebags? I hope so.
And I'm supposed to just trust the author that the two Clowes panels are subtly different than the panels from the item above (judged a non-"graphic novel"?) Is it because they didn't have time to explain such subtlety?
The list may be good (I have no idea how comprehensive it is or how much was ignored), but the commentary is bad.
edit: honestly, this sort of random rambling seems like more work than just being clear about what you're looking for and specific about why you haven't found it.
> But why tell me that something is not a graphic novel because it is too short, never having previously established a specific length requirement
Because this (personally driven) discovery of the first American graphic novel, is itself, written as a narrative of thought.
I expect many, if not most, definitions of the first species of some group were defined in response to the search for some intuited threshold in the same way.
We get “clean” seemingly obvious definitions after the fact. That hide how much the definition got crafted to fit the emergent particulars, instead of the particulars being sifted through a preceding clear definition.
Unlike math & physics, delineations in history emerge from accumulations of happenstance, not fundamental principles.
Often, an Ur-Example doubles as the Trope Maker — but not always, and far less often with ancient tropes, which often evolved over a long period of time rather than suddenly bursting forth from someone's head, fully formed. When they're distinct, a Trope Maker differs from an Ur-Example in that the latter is realized to have met the definition of the trope only after later storytellers started doing it on purpose.
The started doing it on purpose means that something arise first but could take some time to get into the `shape` we recognize as such.
with written literature, did anybody ever tell you the specific difference between a short story, a novella, and a novel, or did you just pick it up from repetition of contexts?
is it hard for you to imagine that those concepts couldn't be naturally transferred to graphic literature, with mutatis mutandis as your modus operandus?
> Some people claim they reserve the term graphic novel for a book appearing originally as a bound volume as opposed to serialized in a comic. These people are probably having you on; they probably also claim to floss thrice daily.
Okay, I know this isn't the point of the larger article, and that this makes me a literal Comic Book Guy. But, actually, a graphic novel doesn't have to be released as a graphic novel originally, but it just has to be written to be one. The difference between a graphic novel and an ordinary trade paperback bound volume is that the novel was originally conceived and composed as a single, long-form story, rather than being a collection (either a story arc, or just a series of disconnected issues) from an ongoing series.
There are edge cases to this, such as whatever they call the comic equivalent of a stitch-up in book publishing. That's where you take a few stories that were all published separately, and turn them into a novel by adding a frame story, or editing them to seem like they were meant to form a single narrative the whole time. FWIW, those aren't novels by my definition, even if they seem like it, but I wouldn't get mad if somebody disagreed.
I've never flossed three times in one day, if someone did that I'd assume they were a robot pretending to be a human.
I am a person who has made things that are unambiguously A Graphic Novel by any modern definition that wants to set them apart from other forms of "comics" and I am also very aware that I am making several orders of magnitude less off of my work than my friend whose "graphic novels" are collections of her comic strips that barely have three or four days of continuity.
As a category in the world of multinational book publishing conglomerates, two hundred pages of words and pictures that tell a coherent story aimed at a (young) adult reading level are just about indistinguishable from a hundred pages of words and pictures that tell a succession of one- to three-page-long stories aimed at a middle-grade kid. And from a collection of issues of Batman, whether or not those issues form a coherent story. We all fit into the same box on a publisher's spreadsheet. Most of it's taken up by the stuff for kids.
I hate to miss a good chance to compliment an artist, so while it's off topic for your comment allow me to note that I've been enjoying your work for quite a while now -- thank you for what you do.
> The difference between a graphic novel and an ordinary trade paperback bound volume is that the novel was originally conceived and composed as a single, long-form story, rather than being a collection (either a story arc, or just a series of disconnected issues) from an ongoing series.
This doesn't work; by this definition, Charles Dickens never wrote any novels.
Dickens didn’t write ‘novels’, he wrote ‘serials’, which are a subtly different thing: they were not composed in one sitting, rather in instalments.
The question is, of course, were they conceived and planned as a single entity and in advance. The answer to that is… complicated. But, mostly, no too.
Much as there’s debate whether you can consider a collection of comics with a single story arc a ‘graphic novel’, we can debate whether a Dicken’s serial published over 18 months is a ‘serial novel’ when republished in a single volume.
In my opinion, they both are or they both are not—and I personally tend towards ‘are’.
Not this again. No other medium has this problem. There is TV, there are movies, but there are TV movies. The only people who care about the distinction are the Awards Boards. Many great novels were originally released in a serialized format. The term graphic novel is as meaningless as the term comic book. I tend to go for the Eisner/McCloud definition of sequential art, but if you push me, then it's all comics, whether it wants to be or not.
If you happened to enjoy this essay, you might also like Jess Nevin's new podcast on the history of comics; more global, less focused on graphic novels in particular, and Rodolphe Töpffer appears in both. I believe his Patreon posts are public, and there are transcripts if you prefer reading to listening: https://www.patreon.com/c/jessnevins/posts
> So let’s look back; all the way back. The first comic printed in America is The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck, which appeared as a newspaper supplement in 1841 and a book in 1849. At eighty pages of continuous picaresque story,2 it’s certainly a novel. But it is immediately disqualified for not being American. It’s an unlicensed ripoff of an unlicensed British ripoff of a Swiss comic by Rodolphe Töpffer! You can’t just make your Eurocomics American through translation and crime!
No argument re: translation, but crime? Was there international copyright at the time? Not at all an expert but it looks to me like there wasn't before this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
> No argument re: translation, but crime?
The bar is clearly set to “no caveats”, and European sourced or copied or adapted from are all more European than “first American” is allowed to bear.
My question is only if it was a crime. It's OK to question evidence without being for the thing being evidenced against.
That kind of turns this into a subjective semantic pursuit.
Or it always was that?
Someone wondering when things “like A” “first” morphed into things “like B” is going to get involved in a lot of discovery driven judgement calls along the way.
and according to that wiki page, the US didn't join the Berne Convention until 1988!
The United States acceded to the convention on 16 November 1988, and the convention entered into force for the United States on 1 March 1989
A fascinating article! As with attempts to find the first “video game,” you end up making interesting decisions about what really qualifies.
in a tangential vein, what's the first "bible in pictures"? started with stained glass windows of course, but when did it really catch on in print?
then there's the Bayeux tapestry, or stuff like the extensive mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily https://www.thegeographicalcure.com/post/guide-to-villa-roma...
Doesn't answer the question but pretty sure painted iconography and mosaics predate stained glass by a fair bit.
The OP's definition of "US graphic novel" is apparently a comics that has a story similar to an adult's novel. In France, a "roman graphique" also means something akin to "film d'auteur". I thought that meaning was also present in the USA. Emblematic authors of the genre, like Eisner and Spiegelman, certainly point to this direction.
If you require that a graphic novel should be a creative and personal work, I doubt the OP's choice fits. A "trashy melodrama" whose first goal was "to cash in on the rise of mass-market paperback books" did try to expand the comics genre of its time, but it was more a commercial step than an artistic novelty.
The author skips right over the real heart of the definition: The difference between illustrated books and graphic novels is that the graphics are essential. Any text can be aided by illustrations, but one cannot understand a graphic novel without its associated graphics.
Why doesn't this set up specific criteria at the beginning based on references to the people who came up with the term, and apply those criteria to each work it goes over? [Also, why aren't there links to the works that are out of copyright?][Correction: there are, they're just all collected at the end. Makes the article completely worthwhile actually.]
Instead it starts with a random NYT-genre list of "acclaimed" comics, says almost nothing about what they have in common other than that people might have heard of them, then applies shifting criteria for a "graphic novel" as it goes through a list of old comics. I would call this half-assed, but they clearly put some work into it.
But why tell me that something is not a graphic novel because it is too short, never having previously established a specific length requirement, without saying how short the thing is, and without providing a link to the thing if it is out of copyright?
> Do you believe me if I say that these panels are different from the panels of Saddlebags? I hope so.
And I'm supposed to just trust the author that the two Clowes panels are subtly different than the panels from the item above (judged a non-"graphic novel"?) Is it because they didn't have time to explain such subtlety?
The list may be good (I have no idea how comprehensive it is or how much was ignored), but the commentary is bad.
edit: honestly, this sort of random rambling seems like more work than just being clear about what you're looking for and specific about why you haven't found it.
> But why tell me that something is not a graphic novel because it is too short, never having previously established a specific length requirement
Because this (personally driven) discovery of the first American graphic novel, is itself, written as a narrative of thought.
I expect many, if not most, definitions of the first species of some group were defined in response to the search for some intuited threshold in the same way.
We get “clean” seemingly obvious definitions after the fact. That hide how much the definition got crafted to fit the emergent particulars, instead of the particulars being sifted through a preceding clear definition.
Unlike math & physics, delineations in history emerge from accumulations of happenstance, not fundamental principles.
I like it how is done in https://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/UrExample
The started doing it on purpose means that something arise first but could take some time to get into the `shape` we recognize as such.with written literature, did anybody ever tell you the specific difference between a short story, a novella, and a novel, or did you just pick it up from repetition of contexts?
is it hard for you to imagine that those concepts couldn't be naturally transferred to graphic literature, with mutatis mutandis as your modus operandus?
> Some people claim they reserve the term graphic novel for a book appearing originally as a bound volume as opposed to serialized in a comic. These people are probably having you on; they probably also claim to floss thrice daily.
Okay, I know this isn't the point of the larger article, and that this makes me a literal Comic Book Guy. But, actually, a graphic novel doesn't have to be released as a graphic novel originally, but it just has to be written to be one. The difference between a graphic novel and an ordinary trade paperback bound volume is that the novel was originally conceived and composed as a single, long-form story, rather than being a collection (either a story arc, or just a series of disconnected issues) from an ongoing series.
There are edge cases to this, such as whatever they call the comic equivalent of a stitch-up in book publishing. That's where you take a few stories that were all published separately, and turn them into a novel by adding a frame story, or editing them to seem like they were meant to form a single narrative the whole time. FWIW, those aren't novels by my definition, even if they seem like it, but I wouldn't get mad if somebody disagreed.
I've never flossed three times in one day, if someone did that I'd assume they were a robot pretending to be a human.
I am a person who has made things that are unambiguously A Graphic Novel by any modern definition that wants to set them apart from other forms of "comics" and I am also very aware that I am making several orders of magnitude less off of my work than my friend whose "graphic novels" are collections of her comic strips that barely have three or four days of continuity.
As a category in the world of multinational book publishing conglomerates, two hundred pages of words and pictures that tell a coherent story aimed at a (young) adult reading level are just about indistinguishable from a hundred pages of words and pictures that tell a succession of one- to three-page-long stories aimed at a middle-grade kid. And from a collection of issues of Batman, whether or not those issues form a coherent story. We all fit into the same box on a publisher's spreadsheet. Most of it's taken up by the stuff for kids.
I hate to miss a good chance to compliment an artist, so while it's off topic for your comment allow me to note that I've been enjoying your work for quite a while now -- thank you for what you do.
oh hey you're welcome! <3
> The difference between a graphic novel and an ordinary trade paperback bound volume is that the novel was originally conceived and composed as a single, long-form story, rather than being a collection (either a story arc, or just a series of disconnected issues) from an ongoing series.
This doesn't work; by this definition, Charles Dickens never wrote any novels.
You are correct.
Dickens didn’t write ‘novels’, he wrote ‘serials’, which are a subtly different thing: they were not composed in one sitting, rather in instalments.
The question is, of course, were they conceived and planned as a single entity and in advance. The answer to that is… complicated. But, mostly, no too.
Here’s an article about his method:
https://www.dickensnotes.com/introduction/general/
Much as there’s debate whether you can consider a collection of comics with a single story arc a ‘graphic novel’, we can debate whether a Dicken’s serial published over 18 months is a ‘serial novel’ when republished in a single volume.
In my opinion, they both are or they both are not—and I personally tend towards ‘are’.
Didn’t Jules Verne mostly do serials as well?
Not this again. No other medium has this problem. There is TV, there are movies, but there are TV movies. The only people who care about the distinction are the Awards Boards. Many great novels were originally released in a serialized format. The term graphic novel is as meaningless as the term comic book. I tend to go for the Eisner/McCloud definition of sequential art, but if you push me, then it's all comics, whether it wants to be or not.