The Influence of Manga on the Graphic Novel

Abstract

There is a noticeable, though imperfect, historic parallel between the increase in the readership of Anglophone manga since the early 1990s and the maturation of concepts of the graphic novel, as an “Anglophone” comics genre, since the 1980s. According to a number of approaches, this historic parallel offers opportunities to scrutinize relationships between the development of the two genres (Couch 2010, Hatfield 2005).In particular, this parallel offers the opportunity to historicize descriptions of the complex ways in which these emerging relationships revised diverse practices of visioning, producing and reading comics, in order either to entrench or transform specific markets and cultures, precipitating new types of product and creating new types of reading experience.