Dreaming the Graphic Novel: The Novelization of Comics by Paul Williams (review)

Comics scholars, and particularly comics historians, have long been vexed by the term “graphic novel,” a descriptor that carries with it so much baggage that some scholars reject its use, while others attempt to tame it by heavily caveating their invocations of the term. The last few years have seen a range of books that have tried to set things straight, establishing histories and genealogies of artists and works that led to what we now consider a stable publishing form, the graphic novel: to name a few, these have included From Comic Strips to Graphic Novels (2013), edited by Daniel Stein and Jan-Noël Thon; The Graphic Novel: An Introduction (2015), by Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey; and The Cambridge History of the Graphic Novel (2018), edited by Baetens, Frey, and Stephen Tabachnick.