Graphic Novel
by
Comics have traditionally marked the gap between adult-sanctioned children’s literature and self-selected children’s reading. Though internationally popular and crucial to the literacy narratives of many, they have been doubly stigmatized, viewed as both a danger to children and yet the quintessence of childishness. However, in anglophone cultures, comics have at last rebounded as a children’s genre, spurred by enthusiasm for the graphic novel: the bulwark of comics’ recent claims to literariness, or at least legitimacy. The graphic novel ideal has recuperated comics in anglophone children’s literature circles (Abate and Tarbox 2017) even as it threatens to eclipse a good part of comics’ history. In short, the graphic novel has proven a great legitimizing force for comics—though at the same time a mystifying circumlocution for what is, after all, an old form. The history of comics is contentious and unsettled, shaped by conflicting formal, definitional, and nationalist agendas. How far back to go, where to look for points of origin and aesthetic breakthroughs, and even the very question of what makes comics distinct—these basic questions remain up in the air. The most convincing scholarly histories of comics in the West (Kunzle 1973, 1990; Smolderen 2014; Gordon 1998; Gardner 2012) have argued...
This essay may be found on page 100 of the printed volume.