The Introduction begins by considering two dominant critical approaches to the graphic novel. While prominent authors have denied the relevance of the concept, instead preferring the term comics, many scholars have sought to align the graphic novel with prestigious literature. The chapter identifies the practical and institutional resources that the term provides, tracing the evolution of book-length comics under this mantle. Section 1.1 considers the relevance of Ian Watt’s The Rise of the Novel for understanding the graphic novel and puts forward a new periodization of the latter. The first cycle, lasting from 1980 to 2000, centers on the book for the first time in US comics history. Starting in the early 2000s, integration into the literary marketplace initiates a second cycle that effects several important changes, from an increase in the use of color to a diversification of visual styles. Engaging with recent work in cultural sociology and political economy, Section 1.2 situates the aesthetic evolution of the graphic novel in the ongoing transformation of contemporary society.

Reissuing old comics as books has become a chief process of transmission in the graphic novel. In the mid-2000s, alternative comics publishers Fantagraphics and Drawn & Quarterly released a series of extensive reprint projects, drafting “their” cartoonists to visually repackage past comics. This chapter provides an in-depth inquiry into the idea of the “archival reprint” that has become a mainstay of twenty-first-century graphic novel publishing through its various interconnected issues: preservation technologies, collecting culture, copyright, publishing economy, graphic style, book design, and reception all constitute a dense set of constraints that variously shape reprinting today. In this context, cartoonists have become a vital asset in reprinting strategies and their book designs confer new ways of reframing comics history, as clearly evidenced in the graphic contributions by Seth for Charles Schulz’s The Complete Peanuts and Chris Ware for Frank King’s Gasoline Alley. These two case studies offer key insights into the challenges of reprinting long-length serials and the role played by book design in framing contemporary understandings of comics history.

The conclusion starts with a look back at literary critic Leslie Fiedler’s defense of comics during a nationwide campaign that led to the self-censorship of the so-called Comics Code. Half a century later, the rise of the graphic novel has dispelled most of the prejudices against comics but often at the price of an unduly narrow understanding of the medium. Critiquing the blindspots of existing scholarship on the graphic novel, the author discusses how the digital humanities can contribute to a more expansive conception of this genre. Drawing on important interventions by Stuart Hall and Raymond Williams, this chapter emphasizes the need to analyze the interplay of socioeconomic factors and formal elements. Thus, the conclusion looks at the technical and methodological limitations that characterize the digital humanities at present and envisions future directions for research at the intersection of literary and visual studies.

This chapter considers the shift towards artisan production in comic books, a process that has led to the elevation of its creators to the status of auteurs. While acknowledging the continued relevance of the term graphic novel, Section 2.1 argues for the adoption of graphic narrative as a scholarly designation. This section also introduces a representative corpus of graphic narratives and reflects on sampling and digitization processes. The author shows how existing scholarship focuses on a remarkably small percentage of an increasingly diverse field, preferring titles created by single authors, published originally in book form, and within the subgenre of the graphic memoir. Section 2.2 argues that the growth of this publishing category has been driven by a complex pattern of appropriation, differentiation, and the reinvention of popular form. Demonstrating how formal features interact with the demands of the literary marketplace, the author traces the evolution of brightness and color – features that have rarely been the focus of sustained consideration.

The introduction starts with a concise discussion of three capsule examples (Chris Ware’s McSweeney’s anthology, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and Seth’s design for The Complete Peanuts, all published in 2004) as different markers of the archival impulse in the graphic novel. From there, and relying on these examples, the chapter sets out the methodological problems that come with historicizing the graphic novel by analyzing the backward look of contemporary cartoonists. It tackles three core issues: definitional and media-historical questions around the graphic novel, canonization and what gets forgotten in today’s cartoonists’ limited embrace of the past, and the archival turn in comics studies. It finishes by introducing the notion of gestures of transmission as a way of approaching comics memory as a visual material culture that is variously reframed, reshaped, and redrawn into the present.

The use of rape was common during the 1971 war in Bangladesh. Six days after the war ended, the new government publicly declared that any woman raped in the war was a birangona or ‘war heroine’. There exists a public memory of wartime rape through various literary, visual and testimonial forms, ensuring that the raped woman endures as an iconic figure. However, women’s experiences of wartime sexual violence are often explained through the limited lenses of silence, voice, shame, honour, gender, patriarchy, stigma, trauma and ostracisation, which help to create the figure of the horrific raped woman – meaning that birangonas are often assumed to have a horrific life trajectory. This can undermine the very resilience that characterises many of the women who were raped. In contrast, this chapter focuses on generative resilience, as offering a different narrative of sexual violence that emphasises women’s abilities to continue to live with and pass on the experiences of sexual violence in ways that are uniquely relational. It is this contextualised and social ecological understanding of resilience that needs to inform adaptive peacebuilding, in order to foster a nuanced understanding of the effects of rape as a weapon of war.

Histories of dissolving high/low culture divides inform Katalin Orbán’s discussion of contemporary graphic fiction, as she posits the critical and popular emergence of long-form, verbal-visual works that push narrative conventions in new directions, such as spatial-temporal experiments (e.g., by Chris Ware and Richard McGuire), the use of visual metaphors and other conventionally linguistic literary devices, and genre blurring distinctive to the drawn medium.

Julia Lee identifies temporal, spatial, and affective innovation in 21st century transpacific fiction. Locating formally innovative contemporary Asian American writing in the post-1965 contexts of migration, global economies of labor, environmental anxiety, language difference, and racialized violence, Lee shows how writers have represented new technologies of immediate communication across oceanic flows of migrants, commodities, information, and waste in disjointed, parallel, and non-sequential narrative structures. Childhood trauma lingers across time and geography in a story about a Filipino nurse by Mia Alvar, while novels by Min Jin Lee, Ruth Ozeki, and Thi Bui layer Asian and American modernities, postmodernities, and contemporary present-tenses.

This chapter considers how the rising interest in human rights, humanitarianism, and the humanities has coincided with the arrival of the graphic novel as an object of serious attention in literary studies. To notable effect, comics and graphic novels have in turn taken human rights crises as a central thematic concern: works such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, Magdy El Shafee’s Metro, and the comics of Joe Sacco have all brought international attention to the violence of war, occupation, and political corruption. Paying particular attention to the conjunction of visual, narrative, and textual representations that takes place in the genre, this chapter considers the way in which the graphic novel has taken up both documentary and advocacy functions in regards to human rights.

This chapter considers how forms of narrative literature, particularly life-writing, serve as technologies in the making of the modern personhood that in turn anchor contemporary human rights. Drawing from Benveniste’s work on the relationship between grammatical personhood and subjectivity, the chapter is structured into “gradations” of personhood, examining their implications on human rights discourse and its subjects. The first-person form common to life-writing, with its centering of the speakerly “I,” operates in the ethical domain of sentiment and empathy; whereas the second-person form of the testimony, with it’s construction of an “I-you,” depends more on a process of interpellation than empathizing. Meanwhile, the third-person form, which may seem less relevant to human rights discourse, provides insight into the ways in which collective bodies, such as corporations, lay claim to human rights. The chapter closes with a reflection on posthumanism and the zero-person or non-human as a potential departure point for probing the limits of the human subject that underlies human rights discourse.