Comics, Graphic Novels, Graphic Narrative: A Review

Abstract

Abstract Despite the popularity and critical impact of comics and graphic narrative, academics have been late to the examination of the field, and critic‐practitioners like Art Spiegelman and Scott McCloud have been the most influential critics, advocates and spokespeople for the medium. This article presents a brief history of American comics and comics criticism, which has long defined itself as emergent, oppositional and underground, alongside scholarly attempts to frame the impact and importance of the medium. The mixture of advocacy and analysis, fandom and critique, amateur and professional study, and artistic self‐definition and critical examination characteristic of comics criticism poses challenges to the border between high art and popular culture and between word and image; it also confounds the distinction between academic and amateur scholarship. Comics criticism, in other words, has the potential not only to incorporate this new medium into the field of literary criticism, but to challenge and transform some of the basic assumptions of that criticism.

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