Paul Williams, "The US Graphic Novel" (Edinburgh UP, 2022)

New Books in American Studies

This book analyses the way that changes in the comics industry, book trade and webcomics distribution have shaped the publication of long-form comics. The US Graphic Novel (Edinburgh UP, 2022) pays particular attention to how the concept of the graphic novel developed through the twentieth century. Art historians, journalists, and reviewers debated whether it was possible for a comic to be a novel – debates that accelerated after the term ’graphic novel’ was coined by the comics fan Richard Kyle in 1964. This study underlines the proximity of the graphic novel to other media, showing that this cultural form is not only the meeting place between periodical comics and books, but that graphic novels are in dialogue with films, posters and computer screens.

Dr. Paul Williams is an Associate Professor of Twentieth-Century literature and culture at the University of Exeter in the UK. His research is centrally concerned with comics and graphic novels. His monograph Dreaming the Graphic Novel broke new ground by explaining how graphic novels were published, circulated, and discussed in North America between the mid-1960s and 1980. Dr. Williams has also co-curated the exhibition The Great British Graphic Novel at the Cartoon Museum in London, which was visited by over 10,000 people.

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