
John Publications produced the digest-sized, adult-oriented "picture novel" It Rhymes with Lust, a film noir-influenced slice of steeltown life starring a scheming, manipulative redhead named Rust. In 1947, Fawcett Comics published Comics Novel #1: "Anarcho, Dictator of Death", a 52-page comic dedicated to one story. Citizen 13660, an illustrated, novel length retelling of Japanese internment during World War II, was published in 1946.
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The 1940s saw the launching of Classics Illustrated, a comic-book series that primarily adapted notable, public domain novels into standalone comic books for young readers. The digest-sized "picture novel" It Rhymes with Lust (1950), one precursor of the graphic novel. Similarly, Charlotte Salomon's Life? or Theater? (composed 1941–43) combines images, narrative, and captions. Other prototypical examples from this period include American Milt Gross's He Done Her Wrong (1930), a wordless comic published as a hardcover book, and Une semaine de bonté (1934), a novel in sequential images composed of collage by the surrealist painter Max Ernst. American Lynd Ward also worked in this tradition, publishing Gods' Man, in 1929 and going on to publish more during the 1930s. His works include Passionate Journey (1919). The 1920s saw a revival of the medieval woodcut tradition, with Belgian Frans Masereel cited as "the undisputed king" of this revival. In 1897, the Hearst Syndicate published such a collection of The Yellow Kid by Richard Outcault and it quickly became a best seller. In the United States, there is a long tradition of reissuing previously published comic strips in book form. In 1894, Caran d'Ache broached the idea of a "drawn novel" in a letter to the newspaper Le Figaro and started work on a 360-page wordless book (which was never published). Read, inspired by The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck. Another early predecessor is Journey to the Gold Diggins by Jeremiah Saddlebags by brothers J. A. D. The first American edition was published in 1842 by Wilson & Company in New York City using the original printing plates from the 1841 edition. Vieux Bois by Swiss caricaturist Rodolphe Töpffer, and was first published in English translation in 1841 by London's Tilt & Bogue, which used an 1833 Paris pirate edition. It originated as the 1828 publication Histoire de M. The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck is the oldest recognized American example of comics used to this end. In continental Europe, both original book-length stories such as Una ballata del mare salato (1967) by Hugo Pratt or La rivolta dei racchi (1967) by Guido Buzzelli, and collections of comics have been commonly published in hardcover volumes, often called " albums", since the end of the 19th century (including such later Franco-Belgian comics series as The Adventures of Tintin in the 1930s).Īs the exact definition of the graphic novel is debated, the origins of the form are open to interpretation. The term is also sometimes used to distinguish between works created as standalone stories, in contrast to collections or compilations of a story arc from a comic book series published in book form. Collections of comic books that do not form a continuous story, anthologies or collections of loosely related pieces, and even non-fiction are stocked by libraries and bookstores as "graphic novels" (similar to the manner in which dramatic stories are included in "comic" books). The term is not strictly defined, though Merriam-Webster's dictionary definition is "a fictional story that is presented in comic-strip format and published as a book".

įan historian Richard Kyle coined the term "graphic novel" in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha. It is, at least in the United States, typically distinct from the term " comic book", which is generally used for comics periodicals and trade paperbacks (see American comic book).

Although the word " novel" normally refers to long fictional works, the term "graphic novel" is applied broadly and includes fiction, non-fiction, and anthologized work. A graphic novel is a book made up of comics content.
