What even are graphic novels!?

… so if they publish the content from a comic in a single volume, it becomes a graphic novel

That’s it, that’s all there is to it

What’s the problem again?

5 Likes

That apparently we’re holding our noses up at serialized comics? :woman_shrugging:

3 Likes

jamie-king-ponste9

:wink:

4 Likes

Then what is a series of graphic novels?

Discuss.

7 Likes

We call that manga here. :wink:

5 Likes

Dickens wrote graphic novels based around illustrations to be published in serial form.
https://victorianweb.org/art/illustration/seymour/5.html

3 Likes

OK I don’t think anyone here is sticking there noses up at comics :smiley: I’m not like real life passionately angry about this subject. It’s just an opinion I have about an artform I enjoy, and about the language that’s used to talk about that artform. If you don’t think that’s a worthwhile conversation then go ahead and don’t discuss it?
I just think comics are a great artform unto themselves, and when greatness is achieved within that artform, it should be appreciated for what it is. To reclassify a comic as something other than a comic, on the basis that it’s a great piece of art or literature, is to say that a comic cannot be a great piece of art or literature.
What else could you be saying by doing that? “X has genuine artistic merit, therefore it must be a graphic novel rather than a comic” is absolutely equivalent to saying a comic cannot have genuine artistic merit. I’m not saying you actually believe that just because you use the term graphic novel, I’m saying that the suggestion of that is inherent in the choice of language.
You want to use graphic novel as shorthand for a collected volume of issues of a comic, go ahead, I said at the start that doesn’t bother me. I still think it’s wrong, I don’t think a comic becomes a different artform by being republished as a paperback, but I don’t really care that people do that.
I just think that comics for grownups have been around long enough, and that people fought to be allowed to tell complex, adult stories within the comic form, so give it the respect it deserves, call a comic a comic, don’t “elevate” it to the status of graphic novel, because you’re not actually elevating it at all by doing that.

lAr9W45SDrRs

2 Likes

And how are we supposed to categorize this?

(brain melts)

5 Likes

The estate of Will Eisner took offence at me on Twitter describing the term graphic novel as some marketing nonsense his team came up with. They pointed out it was just him on his own desperately trying to make his work taken seriously. In a world where many of the most prominent “graphic novels” like say, Persepolis, or Fun Home, or Blankets are in fact memoirs I think that book shops and publishers are in fact bullshitting.

I really enjoyed that Kate Beaton’s Ducks had two reviews on the jacket calling it a graphic memoir (and that the publisher hid them on the inside jacket because publishers are relentless bullshitters huffing their own farts).

6 Likes

I smell a wiki.

2 Likes

A hernia, at least when they come in a boxed set.

5 Likes

Are you certain you are in the right thread? Don’t make me split this again :grin:

4 Likes
  1. People ‘fixing’ stuff their municipality hasn’t, aka Jobsworth Councils or underfunded, overworked people trying to do their best in shitty situations?
  2. What even is a graphic novel?

ETA: @Faffenreffer If you are a librarian, apparently the answer is thoroughly :grin:

(Not the Dewey system, since I guess that is proprietary(?), but don’t worry, it’s still named after the same misogynist, serial sexual harassing white guy)

7 Likes

image

I think I love Dewmojis. Library Thing looks great, thanks for posting the site.

2 Likes

Or at least “leg day.”

1 Like

Wold lost girls be a graphic graphic novel?

3 Likes

“I shall not today attempt further to define the kinds of material I understand to be embraced within that shorthand description [“hard-core pornography”], and perhaps I could never succeed in intelligibly doing so. But I know it when I see it , and the…what the fuck do I call this? Book? Graphic novel? Comic?…shit…the thing - involved in this case is not that.”

-Probably Potter Stewart

3 Likes

I’d call it graphic non-fiction/art history?

In my library after experimenting with putting comics in by subject so Fun Home in biography and others in novels we reverted to putting them all in the comics section.

5 Likes