What is a Graphic Novel?

So, what is a graphic novel? Go ahead, look it up on Wikipedia: "A graphic novel is a narrative work in which the story is conveyed to the reader using sequential art in either an experimental design or in a traditional comics format. The term is employed in a broad manner, encompassing non-fiction works and thematically linked short stories as well as fictional stories across a number of genres." Everybody knows that Wikipedia is unreliable, except when it isn't. As it happens, this page isn't bad at all, especially because it starts with a definition from that very reliable source, the Oxford English Dictionary. 



The term graphic novel began to be used in the 1960s to describe larger, more serious works combining the visual and the verbal in a sequence of images and sequence of text--most often applied to the work of Will Eisner (1917-2005), author of A Contract With God (1968):

See the official Will Eisner website

But definitions invite exceptions, and the available definitions are almost immediately problematic, since there are some graphic novels with few or no words, and some with many levels of text, and still others without an immediately comprehensible sequence. Moreover, the medium invites innovation. There is graphic journalism, there are graphic memoirs, graphic biographies, graphic autobiographies, graphic histories, graphic songbooks, graphic instruction manuals... We make up the rules as we go along.

Self-portrait by Alison Bechdel, making it up as she goes along.

So we'll keep refining our definitions during the progress of discussion on this blog. Comments and responses are welcome.

Detail from Yoshihuro Tatsumi's A Drifting Life