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Welcome to the LibGuide for graphic literature at the Billington Library at JCCC. Here you'll find information about graphic novels, comics, and related media, how to find them in the library, and how to conduct research about them using library resources.
The term graphic novel was coined by comics critic Richard Kyle in 1964. He used it interchangeably with the term graphic story to refer to comics that he considered to be “artistically serious.” The term gained popularity in the 70s. Some comics artists embraced the term, hoping it would elevate the art form, while others felt its use was exclusionary and rejected it. Today, there isn’t a clear, widely agreed-upon definition of what makes a graphic novel, but in general, it is used more expansively than it was when it was first created.
At its simplest, the term graphic novel is often used to refer to all book-length comics or collections of comics. Some are self-contained narratives—the entirety of the novel is devoted to a single story with a defined beginning, middle, and end--while others are anthologies or collections of shorter comics.
A comic is a narrative that usually combines words and pictures, and often uses many images in sequence to relay events. They can usually be recognized by their use of multiple panels—boxes which contain drawings and text—but there are both single-panel comics and wordless comics.
Jessica Abel’s comic “What is a graphic novel?” explains the typical traits of a comic. The work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.
Dauber, Jeremy. American Comics: A History. W. W. Norton & Company, New York, NY, 2022.
"graphic, adj. and n." OED Online, Oxford University Press, June 2022, https://www.oed.com/view/Entry/80829. Accessed 30 June 2022.
Gravett, Paul. Graphic Novels: Everything You Need to Know. Collins Design, New York, NY, 2005.
Murray, Christopher. “graphic novel.” Encyclopedia Britannica, 2 May 2017, https://www.britannica.com/art/graphic-novel. Accessed 30 June 2022.
Williams, Paul. Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics. Rutgers University Press, New Brunswick, NJ, 2020.
Use the following search terms and strategies to find graphic literature and books about the creation and history of graphic literature in the collection.
You can append any of the following search terms to the phrases “graphic novels,” “comics and cartoons”, “comic books” or "graphic fiction" to find information about their respective history and creation:
AND history
AND creation
