Enough “Graphic Novels”

March 10, 2008
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There has been a mild buzz around the comic book blogosphere in regards to the ICv2 Guide #52: Graphic Novels report that the number of Graphic Novels published increased 19% from 2,785 volumes in 2006 to 3,314 in 2007,. This should not be shocking to anyone. The amount of material that is being sold has increased from year to year and because of that the way we look at Graphic Novels and how we report on the subject must now change.

The term Graphic Novel has now become too much of a catch-all phrase that has anything to do with words mixed in with pictures. Yes, it’s also a fancy way to saying “comic books”, but even that term implies either superheroes or something you would see in the Sunday funny pages.

Just look at the following examples of what a Graphic Novel is:
Marvel Comics - Marvel Zombies Army of Darkness
Del Rey - Negima v16
Tokyo Pop - Samurai Deeper Kyo v26
Dark Horse - Buffy the Vampire Slayer Omnibus v3
DC Comics - League of Extraordinary Gentlemen Black Dossier
IDW Publishing - Complete Terry and the Pirates v2
Archaia Studios Press - Okko Cycle of Water

Now that we have crossed over the 3,000 mark, it’s time to break Graphic Novels into their rightful segments for statistical analysis (these are just to name a few):
Graphic Novel: A single self contain story IE Pride of Baghdad
Manga: Asian or Asian inspired IE Naruto
Art Books/Non-Fiction/Reference:IE Art of 300 or Spider-Man Encyclopedia
Comic Book Collected Editions: Marvel Comics, DC, Dark Horse, Image Comics, etc.

Comic Book Collected Editions could be broken down further to include genres like Adventure, Horror, Sci-Fi, Crime, and even Humor. Classic Era Collected Editions could also be segmented Pre-Golden Age, Golden Age, 1950’s, 60’s, 70’s and 80’s. The publisher would be responsible to Tag the book into their respective segments, thus insuring accuracy. Diamond would oversee the operation to double check that all books have been tagged correctly and consistently. This could conceivably help consumers in the pre-order phase; they could browse by era, genre, and a host of other Searchable words.

The time to do this is now while we still can or all too soon the market will grow even further and confusion and will abound.

Related posts:

  1. CCL Podcast #113 – Graphic Novels Take Manhattan!

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0 Responses to Enough “Graphic Novels”

  1. Terry on March 11, 2008 at 7:51 am

    I’m not sure I completely agree with you. If called a collected edition a “graphic novel” helps raise awareness for the industry or makes some hipster in a Barnes & Noble pick one up or gets asses into comics stores, then fine by me. Call them whatever you want (comics, graphic novels, comic book, collected editions, my mom used to call them funny book, etc.), just get people to read them. Once the industry in good enough shape that we don’t have people like Siegel and Shuster dying penniless, then we can split hairs about semantics like what we are supposed to call them.

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