Achewood
Written by Chris Onstad
It's not a graphic novel in every, or maybe any, traditional sense, since its primary venue is the Web, but Achewood is so profoundly genius it would be a crime to put it anywhere but on this list, and at the top of it. Achewood defies categorization or description, but a brief, futile attempt at a synopsis would go something like this: A bunch of cats, some robots, a bear and an otter who's 5 years old, live together in a fictional neighborhood called Achewood, which you might usefully think of as a grown-up, suburban, stoned version of Pooh's Hundred Acre Wood. The alpha and omega of Achewood are Ray Smuckles, a cat who's incredibly rich and successful at everything he does, but whom you can't quite hate because he enjoys it so much; and his best friend Roast Beef, who suffers from crippling depression. The art is at times crude, but it rises to moments of extreme lyrical beauty, and the writing has enormous emotional range — from aching sadness to some of the most brilliant, bizarre comedy happening anywhere, in any medium.
The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen: The Black Dossier
Written by Alan Moore, illustrated by Kevin O'Neill
This is the third volume of the series by writer Alan Moore (Watchmen, V for Vendetta) and artist Kevin O'Neill, who assembled a supergroup of heroes and other extraordinary beings out of 19th and early 20th century literature to battle badness in a creepy, twilight counterworld England where science and politics are both slightly askew. Besides being effing genius, the conceit allows Moore to run amok in the basement storage of 20th century culture, plucking out the strange and angry and contradictory bits that underlie so much of the culture we live and think with today. (Forget about the movie, which has nothing to do with the books. Just forget it. The movie never happened.) The Black Dossier jumps forward to the 1950s, when Alan Quartermain and his colleague Mina are on the run in an Orwellian England, the League disbanded and disavowed. Moore is in full cry, playing with Shakespeare and Lovecraft and a dozen other literary forebears and disclosing the strange secrets of the League's history, and its even stranger future.
All Star Superman
Written by Grant Morrison, illustrated by Frank Quitely
Superman is tough to write for. He's just too strong and too tough to write good plots around — those big muscles tend to break down any nuanced or believable plot-mechanics, and he's too morally rigid to be interesting or relatable. But writer Morrison seems to get what's fun about Superman: He's ridiculously powerful, and therefore he just sees and does and has lots of incredibly cool, totally bizarre stuff. All Star Superman isn't bound by DC-universe continuity, so the sky isn't even close to the limit: time machines, nanonauts, sun-eaters, a super-dense sphere of black kryptonite from the Underverse, it's all good.
Marvel Zombies 2
Written by Robert Kirkman, illustrated by Sean Phillips and Arthur Suydam
You have to give it up for a company that would take its flagship properties — I'm looking at you, Wolverine, Iron Man, the Hulk, Spider-man, Captain America — and turn them into flesh-eating zombies. A comic where Spider-man eats Aunt May and Mary Jane? That's a comic with the courage of its convictions. The Marvel Zombies series takes place in an alternate world where every hero is infected with a zombifying illness: They crave human flesh and they can't die. The key is that the 'heroes' actually retain their sentience, so they appreciate the horrific nature of their actions, they just can't calm their insatiable hunger for human flesh. The result is a genuinesly subversive orgy of Sadean cruelty, wherein most of the living beings in the universe perish. Good clean fun.
Jack of the Fables, Vol. 1: The (Nearly) Great Escape
Written by Bill Willingham, Matthew Sturges and Tony Aikins, illustrated by Andrew Pepoy
This is just one of two Jack of Fables volumes out this year, both worthy of inclusion, as is another 2007 title, Fables: Sons of Empire. The Fables series has been bubbling under for years now, but for some reason — could it be all the sex and violence? — it rarely gets much mainstream critical hype. The premise is that all the people and creatures in nursery rhymes and fairy tales are real — Cinderella, Little Boy Blue, Humpty Dumpty, Prince Charming, and of course Jack (of beanstalk fame, among other things). They've been exiled from their native lands and forced to live undercover in New York City. What makes the series work is the loving but also very unsanitized treatment the fables get: there's a great deal of fighting and hooking up. Is it a travesty? Or could it just possibly be closer in grim, gritty spirit to the original Grimm-era fairy tales than the Disneyfied, infantilized versions we're used to?
Erfworld
Written by Rob Balder, illustrated by Jamie Noguchi
The setup's like this: A depressed, pudgy nerd who's obsessed with strategy games is zapped into an alternate fantasy world. It turns out that he's been summoned there by a king, probably evil, who's searching for the ultimate strategist to command his troops in their last stand against an army that's besieging them. Everything in Erfworld is clever — the dialogue, the sound effects, the complex relationships between the king and his underlings, and the strange mechanics of Erfworld, which are designed to tweak the clichés of strategy and fantasy gaming. Plus the art is oddly beautiful and very witty. If you've ever wondered what it would look like if a squadron of teddy bears fought a squadron of giant spiders, head straight for Erfworld, which is online
The Principles of Uncertainty
Written by Maira Kalman
Kalman makes paintings with words in and around them. The Principles of Uncertainty collects them into a book that might or might not be a graphic novel — maybe that's part of the uncertainty? — but which is definitely full of off-kilter wisdom and beautiful, lyrical frozen moments.
Exit Wounds
Written by Rutu Modan
An Israeli taxi driver is approached out of the blue by a young woman, a soldier, who tells him that she has been having an affair with his estranged father, and that his father may (or may not) have been the victim of a suicide bombing. This psychically fraught setup, and the question of whether or not the older man truly is dead, drive the fleet-footed, high-spirited plot of Exit Wounds, which is laid out in eloquent, perfectly composed matte panels. The calm clarity of the artwork is at odds with the story's heavy psychological burden: everyone inside those neat squares and rectangles has been wounded in some way, either by the violence of the Middle East or the more universal hazards of family and romantic life.
Sentences: The Life of M.F. Grimm
Written by Percy Carey and Ronald Wimberly
M.F. Grimm was born Percy Carey, a New Yorker who grew up in the joyful, violent early days of hip-hop. A genius on the microphone, Grimm lost his freedom, and the use of his legs, to his second career as a drug dealer. He tells his story in this painfully honest, un-self-pitying graphic memoir, which tracks his dizzying rise (with cameos by P. Diddy, Dr. Dre, and many others), his terrifying flame-out, and his slow, painful resurrection.
The Complete Peanuts, 1963-1964
Written by Charles M. Schulz
Heroic comics publisher Fantagraphics is issuing the entirety of Peanuts' 50-year run in gorgeously designed hardcover volumes at the rate of two per year. By 1963 Charles Schulz had found the strip's voice and was branching out into flights of fancy: Lucy gives a slideshow presentation of Charlie Brown's faults, and we first learn that Snoopy has a Van Gogh stashed in his TARDIS-like dog house. Unbelievably, 150 of these strips have not been reprinted since they first landed on front porches more than 40 years ago.
Watchmen is a twelve-issue comic book limited series written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Dave Gibbons. Originally published by DC Comics as a monthly limited series from 1986 to 1987, it was later republished as a trade paperback, which popularized the "graphic novel" format. To date, Watchmen remains the only graphic novel to win a Hugo Award, and is also the only graphic novel to appear on Time's 2005 list of "the 100 best English-language novels", an annual feature of the magazine since it was founded in 1923.
Watchmen is set in 1985, in an alternate history of the United States where costumed adventurers are real and the country is edging closer to a nuclear war with the Soviet Union; throughout the books, the Doomsday Clock is shown gradually ticking towards midnight. It tells the story of a group of past and present heroes and superheroes and the events surrounding the mysterious murder of one of their own. Watchmen depicts heroes as real people who must confront ethical and personal issues, who struggle with neuroses and failings, and who—with one notable exception—lack anything immediately recognizable as accepted super powers. Watchmen's deconstruction of the conventional superhero archetype, combined with its innovative adaptation of cinematic techniques and heavy use of symbolism, multi-layered dialogue, and metafiction, has influenced both comics and film.
originally published under the title Batman: The Dark Knight, is a Batman comic book mini-series written and drawn by Frank Miller and published by DC Comics from February to June 1986.
It reintroduced Batman to the general public as the psychologically dark character of his original 1930s conception and helped to usher in an era of "grim and gritty" superheroes from the mid-1980s to mid-1990s.
A sequel, Batman: The Dark Knight Strikes Again, was published in 2001. All Star Batman and Robin the Boy Wonder, a prequel to the series began running in 2005. An additional prequel, Holy Terror, Batman!, is planned to be released in 2008.
is a ten-issue comic book series written by Alan Moore and illustrated mostly by David Lloyd, set in a dystopian future United Kingdom imagined from the 1980s about the 1990s. A mysterious anarchist named "V" works to destroy the totalitarian government, profoundly affecting the people he encounters.
The series is set in a near-future Britain after a limited nuclear war, which has left much of the world destroyed. In this future, a fascist party called Norsefire has arisen and is the ruling power. "V", an anarchist revolutionary dressed in a Guy Fawkes mask, begins an elaborate, violent and theatrical campaign to bring down the government.
is a French-language autobiographical graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi depicting her childhood in Iran after the revolution. The title is a reference to the historical town of Persepolis.
Drawn in black and white, the graphic novel found great popularity following its release. The English edition combines the first two French books and was translated by Blake Ferris and Satrapi's husband, Mattias Ripa. The French editions of Persepolis 3 and Persepolis 4 were combined into a single volume, Persepolis 2 for the United States market. In the U.S., the Persepolis series is published by Pantheon Books.
Buffy comics refers to comic books based on the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer (TV series). While many of these comics were published when the television show was on air they are not considered canonical and often deal with characters that do not appear on in the television series, most notably in the Tales of the Slayers and Tales of the Vampires mini-series'.
Despite not being canonical, series creator Joss Whedon and a number of writers involved with the television series authored many of the comic books which elevates them above the level of fan fiction in many people's eyes. Overviews summarizing the comic books' storylines were written early in the writing process and were 'approved' by both Fox and Joss Whedon (or his office), and the books were therefore later published as official Buffy merchandise.
The books were published by Dark Horse Comics between 1998 and 2004, originally in comic format but then gathered into volumes of trade paperbacks. A small number of Buffy comics have not been included in trade paperbacks such as the books entitled "Giles", "Jonathan", and "Reunion".
Starting in 2007 a new series of Buffy comics has been produced, also published by Dark Horse Comics. These are a canonical continuation of the television series and as such are considered Buffy the Vampire Slayer Season Eight.
A graphic novel is a type of comic book, usually with a lengthy and complex storyline similar to those of novels, and often aimed at mature audiences. The term also encompasses comic short story anthologies, and in some cases bound collections of previously published comic book series (more commonly referred to as trade paperbacks).
Graphic novels are typically bound in longer and more durable formats than familiar comic magazines, using the same materials and methods as printed books, and are generally sold in bookstores and specialty comic book shops rather than at newsstands. The evolving term graphic novel is not strictly defined, and is sometimes used, controversially, to imply subjective distinctions in artistic quality between graphic novels and other kinds of comics. It suggests a story that has a beginning, middle and end, as opposed to an ongoing series with continuing characters; one that is outside the genres commonly associated with comic books, and that deals with more mature themes. It is sometimes applied to works that fit this description even though they are serialized in traditional comic book format. The term is commonly used to disassociate works from the juvenile or humorous connotations of the terms comics and comic book, implying that the work is more serious, mature, or literary than traditional comics. Following this reasoning, the French term Bande Dessinée is occasionally applied, by art historians and others schooled in fine arts, to dissociate comic books in the fine-art tradition from those of popular entertainment, even though in the French language the term has no such connotation and applies equally to all kinds of comic strips and books.
In the publishing trade, the term is sometimes extended to material that would not be considered a novel if produced in another medium. 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). It is also sometimes used to create a distinction between works created as stand-alone stories, in contrast to collections or compilations of a story arc from a comic book series published in book form.
Whether manga, which has had a much longer history of both novel-like publishing and production of comics for adult audiences, should be included in the term is not always agreed upon. Likewise, in continental Europe, both original book-length stories such as La rivolta dei racchi (1967) by Guido Buzzeli, and collections of comic strips have been commonly published in hardcover volumes, often called "albums", since the end of the 19th century (including Franco-Belgian comics series such as "The Adventures of Tintin" and "Lieutenant Blueberry", and Italian series such as "Corto Maltese").
As the exact definition of graphic novel is debatable, the origins of the artform itself are open to interpretation. Cave paintings may have told stories, and artists and artisans beginning in the Middle Ages produced tapestries and illuminated manuscripts that told or helped to tell narratives.
The first Western artist who interlocked lengthy writing with specific images was most likely William Blake (1757-1826). Blake created several books in which the pictures and the "storyline" are inseparable in his prophetic books such as Marriage of Heaven and Hell and Vala, or The Four Zoas.
The Adventures of Obadiah Oldbuck (1837) is the oldest recognized American example of comics used to this end. The United States has also had a long tradition of collecting comic strips into book form. While these collections and longer-form comic books are not considered graphic novels even by modern standards, they are early steps in the development of the graphic novel.
The 1920s saw a revival of the medieval woodcut tradition, with Belgian Frans Masereel often cited as "the undisputed King" (Sabin, 291) of this revival. Among Masereel's works were Passionate Journey (1926, reissued 1985 as Passionate Journey: A Novel in 165 Woodcuts ISBN 0-87286-174-0). American Lynd Ward also worked in this tradition during the 1930s.
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 1950s saw this format broadened, with popular movies being similarly adapted. By the 1960s, British publisher IPC had started to produce a pocket-sized comic-book line, the "Super Library", that featured war and spy stories told over roughly 130 pages.
In 1950, St. 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. Touted as "an original full-length novel" on its cover, the 128-page digest by pseudonymous writer "Drake Waller" (Arnold Drake and Leslie Waller), penciler Matt Baker and inker Ray Osrin proved successful enough to lead to an unrelated second picture novel, The Case of the Winking Buddha by pulp novelist Manning Lee Stokes and illustrator Charles Raab.
By the late 1960s, American comic book creators were becoming more adventurous with the form. Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin self-published a 40-page, magazine-format comics novel, His Name is... Savage (Adventure House Press) in 1968 — the same year Marvel Comics published two issues of The Spectacular Spider-Man in a similar format. Columnist Steven Grant also argues that Stan Lee and Steve Ditko's Doctor Strange story in Strange Tales #130-146, although published serially from 1965-1966, is "the first American graphic novel
Other prototypical examples from this period include American Milt Gross' 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. That same year, the first European comic-strip collections, called "albums", debuted with The Adventures of
Meanwhile, in continental Europe, the tradition of collecting serials of popular strips such as The Adventures of Tintin or Asterix had allowed a system to develop which saw works developed as long form narratives but pre-published as serials; in the 1970s this move in turn allowed creators to become marketable in their own right, auteurs capable of sustaining sales on the strength of their name.
By 1969, the author John Updike, who had entertained ideas of becoming a cartoonist in his youth, addressed the Bristol Literary Society, on "the death of the novel". Updike offered examples of new areas of exploration for novelists, declaring "I see no intrinsic reason why a doubly talented artist might not arise and create a comic strip novel masterpiece".
Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin's Blackmark (1971), a science fiction/sword-and-sorcery paperback published by Bantam Books, did not use the term originally; the back-cover blurb of the 30th-anniversary edition (ISBN 1-56097-456-7) calls it, retroactively, "the very first American graphic novel". The Academy of Comic Book Arts presented Kane with a special 1971 Shazam Award for what it called "his paperback comics novel". Whatever the nomenclature, Blackmark is a 119-page story of comic-book art, with captions and word balloons, published in a traditional book format. (It is also the first with an original heroic-adventure character conceived expressly for this form.)
Hyperbolic descriptions of "book-length stories" and "novel-length epics" appear on comic-book covers as early as the 1960s. DC Comics' The Sinister House of Secret Love #2 (Jan. 1972), one of the company's line of "52-Page Giants", specifically used the phrase "a graphic novel of gothic terror" on its cover.
The first six issues of writer-artist Jack Katz's 1974 Comics and Comix Co. series The First Kingdom were collected as a trade paperback (Pocket Books, March 1978, ISBN 0-671-79016-1), which described itself as "the first graphic novel". Issues of the comic had described themselves as "graphic prose", or simply as a novel.
European creators were also experimenting with the longer narrative in comics form. In the United Kingdom, Raymond Briggs was producing works such as Father Christmas (1972) and The Snowman (1978), which he himself described as being from the "bottomless abyss of strip cartooning", although they, along with such other Briggs works as the more mature When the Wind Blows (1982), have been re-marketed as graphic novels in the wake of the term's popularity. Briggs notes, however, "I don't know if I like that term too much".[9]
Regardless, the term in 1975 appeared in connection with three separate works. Bloodstar by Richard Corben (adapted from a story by Robert E. Howard) used the term on its cover. George Metzger's Beyond Time and Again, serialized in underground comics from 1967-72, was subtitled "A Graphic Novel" on the inside title page when collected as a 48-page, black-and-white, hardcover book published by Kyle & Wheary.And the digest-sized Chandler: Red Tide (1976) by Jim Steranko, designed to be sold on newsstands, used the term "graphic novel" in its introduction and "a visual novel" on its cover, although Chandler is more commonly considered an illustrated novel than a work of comics.
The following year, Terry Nantier, who had spent his teenage years living in Paris, returned to the United States and formed Flying Buttress Publications, later to incorporate as NBM Publishing (Nantier, Beall, Minoustchine), and published Racket Rumba, a 50-page spoof of the noir-detective genre, written and drawn by the single-name French artist Loro. Nantier followed this with Enki Bilal's The Call of the Stars. The company marketed these works as "graphic albums"
Similarly, Sabre: Slow Fade of an Endangered Species by writer Don McGregor and artist Paul Gulacy (Eclipse Books, Aug. 1978) — the first graphic novel sold in the newly created "direct market" of United States comic-book shops — was called a "graphic album" by the author in interviews, though the publisher dubbed it a "comic novel" on its credits page. "Graphic album" was also the term used the following year by Gene Day for his hardcover short-story collection Future Day (Flying Buttress Press).
Another early graphic novel, though it carried no self-description, was The Silver Surfer (Simon & Schuster/Fireside Books, August 1978), by Marvel Comics' Stan Lee and Jack Kirby. Significantly, this was published by a traditional book publisher and distributed through bookstores, as was cartoonist Jules Feiffer's Tantrum (Alfred A. Knopf, 1979) described on its dustjacket as a "novel-in-pictures".
The term "graphic novel" began to grow in popularity two months later after it appeared on the cover of the trade paperback edition (though not the hardcover edition) of Will Eisner's groundbreaking A Contract with God, and Other Tenement Stories (Oct. 1978). This collection of short stories was a mature, complex work focusing on the lives of ordinary people in the real world, and the term "graphic novel" was intended to distinguish it from traditional comic books, with which it shared a storytelling medium. This established both a new book-publishing term and a distinct category. Eisner cited Lynd Ward's 1930s woodcuts (see above) as an inspiration.
The critical and commercial success of A Contract with God helped to establish the term "graphic novel" in common usage, and many sources have incorrectly credited Eisner with being the first to use it. In fact, it was used as early as November 1964 by Richard Kyle in CAPA-ALPHA #2, a newsletter published by the Comic Amateur Press Alliance, and again in Kyle's Fantasy Illustrated #5 (Spring 1966).
One of the earliest contemporaneous applications of the term post-Eisner came in 1979, when Blackmark's sequel — published a year after A Contract with God though written and drawn in the early 1970s — was labeled a "graphic novel" on the cover of Marvel Comics' black-and-white comics magazine Marvel Preview #17 (Winter 1979), where Blackmark: The Mind Demons premiered — its 117-page contents intact, but its panel-layout reconfigured to fit 62 pages.
Dave Sim's comic book Cerebus had been launched as a funny-animal Conan parody in 1977, but in 1979 Sim announced[citation needed] it was to be a 300-issue novel telling the hero's complete life story. In England, Bryan Talbot wrote and drew The Adventures of Luther Arkwright, described by Warren Ellis as "probably the single most influential graphic novel to have come out of Britain to date". Like Sim, Talbot also began by serializing the story, originally in Near Myths (1978), before it was published as a three-volume graphic-novel series from 1982-87.
Following this, Marvel from 1982 to 1988 published the Marvel Graphic Novel line of 10"x7" trade paperbacks — although numbering them like comic books, from #1 (Jim Starlin's The Death of Captain Marvel) to #35 (Dennis O'Neil, Mike Kaluta, and Russ Heath's Hitler's Astrologer, starring the radio and pulp fiction character the Shadow, and, uniquely for this line, released in hardcover). Marvel commissioned original graphic novels from such creators as John Byrne, J. M. DeMatteis, Steve Gerber, graphic-novel pioneer McGregor, Frank Miller, Bill Sienkiewicz, Walt Simonson, Charles Vess, and Bernie Wrightson. While most of these starred Marvel superheroes, others, such as Rick Veitch's Heartburst featured original SF/fantasy characters; others still, such as John J. Muth's Dracula, featured adaptations of literary stories or characters; and one, Sam Glanzman's A Sailor's Story, was a true-life, World War II naval tale.
In England, Titan Books held the license to reprint strips from 2000 AD, including Judge Dredd, beginning in 1981, and Robo-Hunter, 1982. The company also published British collections of American graphic novels — including Swamp Thing, notable for being printed in black and white rather than in color as originally — and of British newspaper strips, including Modesty Blaise and Garth. Igor Goldkind was the marketing consultant who worked at Titan and moved to 2000 AD and helped to popularize the term "graphic novel" as a way to help sell the trade paperbacks they were publishing. He admits that he "stole the term outright from Will Eisner" and his contribution was to "take the badge (today it's called a 'brand') and explain it, contextualise it and sell it convincingly enough so that bookshop keepers, book distributors and the book trade would accept a new category of 'spine-fiction' on their bookshelves".
DC Comics likewise began collecting series and published them in book format. Two such collections garnered considerable media attention, and they, along with Art Spiegelman's Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus (1986), helped establish both the term and the concept of graphic novels in the minds of the mainstream public. These were Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986), a collection of Frank Miller's four-part comic-book series featuring an older Batman faced with the problems of a dystopian future; and Watchmen (1987), a collection of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' 12-issue limited series in which Moore notes he "set out to explore, amongst other things, the dynamics of power in a post-Hiroshima world"..
These works and others were reviewed in newspapers and magazines, leading to such increased coverage that the headline "Comics aren't just for kids anymore" became widely regarded by fans as a mainstream-press cliché. Variations on the term can be seen in the Harvard Independent and at Poynter Online. Regardless, the mainstream coverage led to increased sales, with Batman: The Dark Knight Returns, for example, lasting 40 weeks on a UK best-seller lists.
Some in the comics community have objected to the term "graphic novel" on the grounds that it is unnecessary, or that its usage has been corrupted by commercial interests. Writer Alan Moore believes, "It's a marketing term ... that I never had any sympathy with. The term 'comic' does just as well for me. ... The problem is that 'graphic novel' just came to mean 'expensive comic book' and so what you'd get is people like DC Comics or Marvel comics — because 'graphic novels' were getting some attention, they'd stick six issues of whatever worthless piece of crap they happened to be publishing lately under a glossy cover and call it The She-Hulk Graphic Novel...."
Author Daniel Raeburn wrote "I snicker at the neologism first for its insecure pretension — the literary equivalent of calling a garbage man a 'sanitation engineer' — and second because a 'graphic novel' is in fact the very thing it is ashamed to admit: a comic book, rather than a comic pamphlet or comic magazine."
Writer Neil Gaiman, responding to a claim that he does not write comic books but graphic novels, said the commenter "meant it as a compliment, I suppose. But all of a sudden I felt like someone who'd been informed that she wasn't actually a hooker; that in fact she was a lady of the evening." Comedian and comic book fan Robin Williams joked, "'Is that a comic book? No! It's a graphic novel! Is that porn? No! It's adult entertainment!'"
Some alternative cartoonists have coined their own terms to describe extended comics narratives. The cover of Daniel Clowes' Ice Haven describes the book as "a comic-strip novel", with Clowes having noted that he "never saw anything wrong with the comic book". When The Comics Journal asked the cartoonist Seth why he added the subtitle "A Picture Novella" to his comic It's a Good Life, If You Don't Weaken, he responded, "I could have just put 'a comic book'... It goes without saying that I didn't want to use the term graphic novel. I just don't like that term".
Charles McGrath (former editor, The New York Times Book Review) in The New York Times: "Some of the better-known graphic novels are published not by comics companies at all but by mainstream publishing houses — by Pantheon, in particular — and have put up mainstream sales numbers. Persepolis, for example, Marjane Satrapi's charming, poignant story, drawn in small black-and-white panels that evoke Persian miniatures, about a young girl growing up in Iran and her family's suffering following the 1979 Islamic revolution, has sold 450,000 copies worldwide so far; Jimmy Corrigan sold 100,000 in hardback...."