We Need the Term Graphic Novel to Actually Mean Something

If I talk about a “graphic novel” vs a “comic” in a very casual way, you’d probably generally understand what kind of distinction I’m trying to make there. At the same time, comic book writers haven’t always had a positive interaction with the term “graphic novel.” Alan Moore is famous for relegating it to a “marketing term.” That “the term ‘comic’ does just as well for me.”
It’s a linguistic oddity that critics can’t really seem to agree on, which kind of seems stupid from the outside, honestly. Is it genuine contention due to nuances of the issue or something poisoned with bias and perceptions of pretension?
What the Moore quote fails to fully acknowledge is that most of the vocabulary we use around media is, at its core, marketing. Doesn’t mean they’re not useful. Genre definitions, for example, have long, storied histories of development, but they’re still, ostensibly, part of a larger classification system.
And there is this problem where we view certain genres more highly than others (the big literary vs genre fictions dichotomy), but that’s a social perception issue rather than a genre construction one. Just because someone might not want to call their book a science fiction book, doesn’t mean it doesn’t meet those parameters as they’re generally defined.
If we’re considering the “comic books” vs “graphic novel” dichotomy agnostic of perception, from a totally functional perspective, what exactly does that leave us to work with?
First we kind of have to put together what kind of story we’re working with. For now we’ll limit it to Anglophonic print. Webcomics introduce some confounding variables when talking terminology while the Franco-Belgium and Japanese industry have a slightly different pattern to their publishing practices, historically.
Just something that uses a combination of illustration and text doesn’t quite do it. Children’s picture books are the largest contingent multi-element text storytelling, and we recognize them as their own thing. And text, in and of itself, isn’t even necessarily the deciding element.
The Lion the Mouse by Jerry Pickney, The Arrival by Shaun Tan, and The Punisher Vol 6 # 7: “’Nuff Said” by Steve Dillion all share a similar method of wordless storytelling, yet they’re described as three different things (wordless picture book, graphic novel, and comic, respectively). This underscores that it’s more about the construction of the narrative over its method of presentation. That’s the thing that we’re drawn to when putting our definitions together.
The shortest form of this are “newspaper” style comics, short little punchy jokes or tiny pieces of a bigger storyline (a la Prince Valiant). We’re pretty comfortable calling those “comic strips” and their reprinted book forms “comic strip collections” or “compilations.” So we can move on to physically bigger formats from there.
On one end, we have our big IPs. Batman, Spider-Man, Judge Dredd. Where we’re looking at multi-decade long ongoing stories that get passed from team to team. When you account for renumberings, Uncanny X-Men is up in the 650s in terms of number of issues that technically lead into each other one after the other. Venom’s about to hit #250. If they happen to end at some point, they’re still sort of designed to go on forever.
Then down from that we have the serialized complete story. It’s released issue by issue monthly, but it eventually ends or ended and is typically handled by a single artist or team. Sometimes it’s a longer series up in the 300s (like Cerberus or Gold Digger) or a small one like the four issue Whiteout and everything in between.
When comparing these two approaches to storytelling, you do run into a bit of an issue at the intersection of authorial intent and execution.
If I produce a comic and I’m only planning it arc by arc or episode by episode with no overall ending in mind, I’m going to approach it differently as a writer than I would for something I know is only going to be six issue. And if you were writing for a big IP and you thought you were on board for a fifty issue run just to get off at ten, that’s also going to dramatically change the planning.
That’s sort of why the sub terms ongoing, series, limited series, and one-shots evolved into their own things. If I call something a “series” you tend to expect to end at some point compared to if I call something an “ongoing series.” One-shots represent a single issue of completed story or, perhaps, a few mini-one shots of only a few pages in a single issue (like Cruel Kingdom and similar anthology series).
Then we have the comic-style stories that release as a single book all at one time like Blankets, Fun Home, and Gender Queer. These are books that have never been serialized. This is the kind of book where the term graphic novel makes a whole hell of a lot of sense when in comparison to any kind of serialized comic.
Because say I’m writing Watchmen. I’ve planned twelve chapters to complete a full story. If I’m releasing chapter by chapter, I need to keep people coming back for the next issue. That might change my approach to planning each chapter compared to if I just drop all twelve chapters at once.
At the same time, all these decades later, no one is buying Watchmen chapter by chapter anymore, they’re buying it as a single book. Alan Moore would have known that. That at some point, the story would have been read cover-to-cover so to speak.
So then the question becomes, at what point do we or should we bridge between “limited series” and “graphic novel.” Is it construction of the narrative as it was produced or consumption by the reader after the fact?
From a reader’s perspective, there is no functional difference between a collected limited series and novel-length one-shot. From a writer, distributor, or collectors perspective, there might be.
When Bug Wars ends, it’ll likely be collected into a single volume and probably end up on a “graphic novels” list because that’s what tends to happen. I’m reading it as it’s coming out, so I have the individual issues. To me, it’s a limited series because that’s how I read it. To someone a year down the line reading as a single volume, they might think of it as a graphic novel. So in conversation, we’d be using two different labels to describe the same story. It’s a potential obstacle to communication.
One way to solve this hypothetical is to solidify our definitions and possibly introduce new terms into the general nomenclature. Would having the phrase “collected series” on hand bridge a linguistic gap?
Because we have a lot of middle grade graphic novels coming out, now. Doing historical media critique years down the line, we’re going to need a term to describe those b0oks that distinguishes them from traditional serialized comic books you pick up at the store once a month in magazine form.
And the term “graphic novel” does that extremely well as long as we’re not weird about.