61 points | by paulpauper2 days ago
No argument re: translation, but crime? Was there international copyright at the time? Not at all an expert but it looks to me like there wasn't before this https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Berne_Convention
The bar is clearly set to “no caveats”, and European sourced or copied or adapted from are all more European than “first American” is allowed to bear.
Someone wondering when things “like A” “first” morphed into things “like B” is going to get involved in a lot of discovery driven judgement calls along the way.
The United States acceded to the convention on 16 November 1988, and the convention entered into force for the United States on 1 March 1989
Instead it starts with a random NYT-genre list of "acclaimed" comics, says almost nothing about what they have in common other than that people might have heard of them, then applies shifting criteria for a "graphic novel" as it goes through a list of old comics. I would call this half-assed, but they clearly put some work into it.
But why tell me that something is not a graphic novel because it is too short, never having previously established a specific length requirement, without saying how short the thing is, and without providing a link to the thing if it is out of copyright?
> Do you believe me if I say that these panels are different from the panels of Saddlebags? I hope so.
And I'm supposed to just trust the author that the two Clowes panels are subtly different than the panels from the item above (judged a non-"graphic novel"?) Is it because they didn't have time to explain such subtlety?
The list may be good (I have no idea how comprehensive it is or how much was ignored), but the commentary is bad.
edit: honestly, this sort of random rambling seems like more work than just being clear about what you're looking for and specific about why you haven't found it.
Because this (personally driven) discovery of the first American graphic novel, is itself, written as a narrative of thought.
I expect many, if not most, definitions of the first species of some group were defined in response to the search for some intuited threshold in the same way.
We get “clean” seemingly obvious definitions after the fact. That hide how much the definition got crafted to fit the emergent particulars, instead of the particulars being sifted through a preceding clear definition.
Unlike math & physics, delineations in history emerge from accumulations of happenstance, not fundamental principles.
Often, an Ur-Example doubles as the Trope Maker — but not always, and far less often with ancient tropes, which often evolved over a long period of time rather than suddenly bursting forth from someone's head, fully formed. When they're distinct, a Trope Maker differs from an Ur-Example in that the latter is realized to have met the definition of the trope only after later storytellers started doing it on purpose.
is it hard for you to imagine that those concepts couldn't be naturally transferred to graphic literature, with mutatis mutandis as your modus operandus?
then there's the Bayeux tapestry, or stuff like the extensive mosaics of Villa Romana del Casale in Sicily https://www.thegeographicalcure.com/post/guide-to-villa-roma...
If you require that a graphic novel should be a creative and personal work, I doubt the OP's choice fits. A "trashy melodrama" whose first goal was "to cash in on the rise of mass-market paperback books" did try to expand the comics genre of its time, but it was more a commercial step than an artistic novelty.
Okay, I know this isn't the point of the larger article, and that this makes me a literal Comic Book Guy. But, actually, a graphic novel doesn't have to be released as a graphic novel originally, but it just has to be written to be one. The difference between a graphic novel and an ordinary trade paperback bound volume is that the novel was originally conceived and composed as a single, long-form story, rather than being a collection (either a story arc, or just a series of disconnected issues) from an ongoing series.
There are edge cases to this, such as whatever they call the comic equivalent of a stitch-up in book publishing. That's where you take a few stories that were all published separately, and turn them into a novel by adding a frame story, or editing them to seem like they were meant to form a single narrative the whole time. FWIW, those aren't novels by my definition, even if they seem like it, but I wouldn't get mad if somebody disagreed.
I've never flossed three times in one day, if someone did that I'd assume they were a robot pretending to be a human.
As a category in the world of multinational book publishing conglomerates, two hundred pages of words and pictures that tell a coherent story aimed at a (young) adult reading level are just about indistinguishable from a hundred pages of words and pictures that tell a succession of one- to three-page-long stories aimed at a middle-grade kid. And from a collection of issues of Batman, whether or not those issues form a coherent story. We all fit into the same box on a publisher's spreadsheet. Most of it's taken up by the stuff for kids.
This doesn't work; by this definition, Charles Dickens never wrote any novels.
Dickens didn’t write ‘novels’, he wrote ‘serials’, which are a subtly different thing: they were not composed in one sitting, rather in instalments.
The question is, of course, were they conceived and planned as a single entity and in advance. The answer to that is… complicated. But, mostly, no too.
Here’s an article about his method:
https://www.dickensnotes.com/introduction/general/
Much as there’s debate whether you can consider a collection of comics with a single story arc a ‘graphic novel’, we can debate whether a Dicken’s serial published over 18 months is a ‘serial novel’ when republished in a single volume.
In my opinion, they both are or they both are not—and I personally tend towards ‘are’.
What I do know is that comics fans are especially fixated on the distinction and it has little to do with those kinds of technicalities. It's about prestige.