The US Graphic Novel

by Paul Williams

Overview

This book analyses the way that changes in the comics industry, book trade and webcomics distribution have shaped the publication of long-form comics. The US Graphic Novel pays particular attention to how the concept of the graphic novel developed through the twentieth century. Art historians, journalists, and reviewers debated whether it was possible for a comic to be a novel – debates that accelerated after the term ’graphic novel’ was coined by the comics fan Richard Kyle in 1964. This study underlines the proximity of the graphic novel to other media, showing that this cultural form is not only the meeting place between periodical comics and books, but that graphic novels are in dialogue with films, posters and computer screens.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781474423373
Publisher:	Edinburgh University Press
Publication date:	09/28/2022
Series:	Critical Insights in American Studies , #1
Pages:	272
Product dimensions:	5.43(w) x 8.50(h) x (d)

About the Author

Paul Williams is Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Creative Writing at the University of Exeter. He has previously published three books: Dreaming the Graphic Novel (Rutgers UP, 2020), Paul Gilroy (Routledge, 2012), and Race, Ethnicity and Nuclear War (Liverpool UP, 2011), and he co-edited the collection The Rise of the American Comics Artist (UP of Mississippi, 2010) with James Lyons.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations Preface

Introduction

1. Precursors and Woodcut Novels: 14 September 1842 to the 1930s

2. Comics, Comics Everywhere at Mid-Century

3. In Search of Adult Comics Readers: 1961–72

4. Declaration of Independents: 1973–9

5. ‘The Comic Book Grows Up’: 1979–91

6. Boom and Bust, Mainstream and Alternative: The 1990s

7. Twenty-First-Century Graphic Novels

Conclusion

Editorial Reviews

In this masterful follow-up to Dreaming the Graphic Novel (2020), Paul Williams illuminates the graphic novel as a form that lives at the borders of various media forms, incorporating aspects of some and rewiring others to create something that is simultaneously new even as it illuminates the media forms of our past.

Jared Gardner