"Pictures and Conversations" Redefining the Graphic Novel

Graphic Novel is a rather recent term, it marks distinct qualities of a group of artefacts to allow for differentiation and sales in late-modern (or post-modern) cultural context. Comics add their particular narrative potential to what the novel has done: they transplant novel-style narrations into image-based stories. In novels their author’s individual way with words, their voice is crucial. It defines the style, perspective, tone – the novel is about how a particular voice is expressed, it is not about the plot of the story as such. Comics are built from graphic representations that mark the distinct individuality of the auteur and/or graphic artist. Their view is expressed in the execution of each image and page design: "its 'graphiation’ – that is, the presence, within the very act of storytelling, of its maker" (Marion 1993 after Baetens 2001b, 146-150). There are enough comics labelled as graphic novels that are meeting the criteria for other literary genres to introduce differentiated labels: auto/biography, historiography, reports, travel writing, novels, …Even the difference between graphic adaptations of prose novels in difference to auteur comics matters (s. Schmitz-Emans 2013, 397 ff.). We need to invent the Graphic Novel twice. The marketing term is established, now we need to differentiate the academic use to understand and describe better specific literary forms and genres. To restrict “graphic novel” to visually narrated novel-type literature instead of all longer comics is a beginning