Tazz
Haigh
Graphic Novels
A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content. Although the word "novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. It is distinguished from the term "comic book", which is used for comics periodicals.
Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term "graphic novel" in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha
What are Graphic Novels?
Simply: It’s a story told in pictures.
It is not the same as a comic even though it’s related. Japanese manga’s can be considered either depending on the length of the story and how many volumes there are. There is no set style, layout or format to it as it almost entierly depends on what method the artist prefers creating a range from clasic flat colour comics with dramatic shading to individual fully painted pannels each with intricate detail. No set genre; It doesn’t all have to be fun and light entertainment, such as proven with Maus which is semi autobiographical about the events of the WW2 Holocaust told in a form where the mice are the jews and the pigs and cats are the serbs and nazis.
Thanks to the internet, there's no need for physical publishing as it can be a webcomic or start as a webcomic before progressing further into print, not to say that print is dead as paper formats of graphic novels and comics still sell and often can become collector items for franchises such as Marvel.
Over all, it's a highly popular medium with quite a lot of original content involved in it, though
Graphic Novels vs
•A story arc restricted to just one or two volumes.
•Comes as a full book rather than issues.
•Focuses on one storyline and doesn’t expand on it.
•Often the result of personal projects.
•Can span many volumes and serializations.
•Often is first established in paper volume issues.
•Has multiple arcs and character stories that span off each other.
•Often created by a team working under a lead artist.
Comic
History
s the exact definition of graphic novel is debatable, the origins of the artform itself are open to interpretation. Cave paintings may have told stories, and artists and artisans beginning in the Middle Ages produced tapestries andilluminated manuscripts that told and helped to tell narratives.
Will Eisner was the first to coin the term, as one of earliest cartoonists to work in the American comic book industry, and his series The Spirit was noted for its experiments in content and form, but there were graphic novels well before this time and he was not the first to create them. In 1978, he popularized the term "graphic novel" with the publication of his book A Contract with God.
Another early graphic novel, though it carried no self-description, was The Silver Surfer (Simon & Schuster/Fireside Books, August 1978), by Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Significantly, this was published by a traditional book publisher and distributed through bookstores, as was cartoonist Jules Feiffer's Tantrum (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979) described on its dustjacket as a "novel-in-pictures".
Writer Neil Gaiman, responding to a claim that he does not write comic books 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."
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