The Us Graphic Novel

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.

Paul Williams is Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century Literature and Culture in the Department of English and Film 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.