Graphic novel Critical Essay | Graphic Narratives

Critical Essay by Keith R. A. DeCandido

SOURCE: "Picture This: Graphic Novels in Libraries," in Library Journal, Vol. 115, No. 5, March 15, 1990, pp. 50-5.

[DeCandido is a librarian and a reviewer for The Comics Journal. In the following excerpt, he presents a general description of the graphic novel genre, suggests where to acquire graphic novels, and surveys some of the available works.]

Not many libraries have discovered graphic novels yet. The American Heritage Dictionary has not discovered them yet either; it does not define the term. A graphic novel is a self-contained story that uses a combination of text and art to articulate the plot. It is equivalent in content to a long short story or a short novel (or novella, or novellini, as the old New Yorker cartoon has it) and is in some ways a larger version of a comic book. It differs from the fotonovela in that the art is generally drawn...
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