Graphic Novel vs Comic Book: What's the Difference

Walk into a bookshop and you will find graphic novels shelved with literature; walk into a comic shop and you will find comic books in racks by the door. Often they look like the same thing in different clothes, and the argument over what separates them has been running for sixty years.

The short answer is that the difference is partly about form, partly about publishing, and partly about prestige. The long answer explains a lot about how comics went from newsstands to libraries and prize shortlists.

What a comic book is

In the United States, comic book usually means a periodical: a thin, regularly published issue that tells one part of a continuing story. The format grew out of newspaper strips. Funnies on Parade is described as the first standard-sized comic book, and Dell's 36-page Famous Funnies, released in 1933, is called the first true newsstand comic. At first these books simply reprinted humour strips from newspapers, which is where the name comic book comes from.

Superman's first appearance, in Action Comics number 1 in 1938, began what is called the Golden Age and is generally considered the start of the modern comic book. From then on, the format meant serial adventures sold cheaply on newsstands, and from the 1970s in specialist comic shops.

What a graphic novel is

A graphic novel, in the usual definition, is a self-contained, book-length work of comics. The term is applied loosely to fiction, non-fiction and anthologies, which is one reason scholars and professionals still argue about it. In American usage it is generally contrasted with comic book, the periodicals and the trade paperbacks that collect them.

The idea of a book-length story told in pictures is older than the term. Rodolphe Töpffer's picture stories of the 1820s and Lynd Ward's 1929 wordless novel Gods' Man, told in woodcuts, are often named as ancestors.

Where the term came from

The fan historian Richard Kyle used the phrase graphic novel in November 1964 to describe artistically serious comics. It reached wide use through Will Eisner's A Contract with God, published in 1978, a collection of stories about tenement life in New York aimed at adult readers. Eisner said he did not know anyone had used the term before him.

Marvel ran its own Graphic Novel line from 1982 to 1988. Then came the years that changed the form's reputation: in 1986 and 1987, Maus, The Dark Knight Returns and Watchmen raised the profile of comics with readers who had never bought one. Our piece on Maus and the graphic novel tells how Art Spiegelman's book went on to win a Pulitzer Prize.

A category on the shelf

The term became official in the book trade in 2001, when the Book Industry Study Group began using graphic novel as a bookstore category. That decision put comics into ordinary bookshops and libraries in a lasting way, and it is one reason many people meet comics today as books rather than as monthly issues.

It also blurred the line further. Many books shelved as graphic novels are collections of serialised comic books, gathered into one volume after the fact. By the strict definition they are not graphic novels at all, but that is how they are sold.

Why some creators dislike the term

Not everyone welcomed it. Alan Moore, the writer of Watchmen, called graphic novel a marketing term that came to mean an expensive comic book. The critic Glen Weldon has argued that both graphic novel and sequential art should be retired as phrases that try too hard to sound respectable.

Jeff Smith, the creator of Bone, objected to the name too, but offered a useful distinction: a graphic novel has a beginning, a middle and an end. A comic book series can run for decades with no ending in sight; a graphic novel is designed to be complete.

The differences that matter

Put the arguments aside, and three practical differences remain. A graphic novel is complete in itself, while a comic book is usually one part of an ongoing story. A graphic novel is planned as a whole and often made by a single author or a small team, while ongoing comic books pass between many writers and artists. And they are sold differently: issues in comic shops on a regular schedule, graphic novels in bookshops and libraries.

Japanese comics add a third model: manga are usually serialised in magazines first and then collected into volumes, which makes them closer to American comic books in how they are made and closer to graphic novels in how most readers buy them. We compare the traditions in manga vs Western comics.

The art form underneath is the same: panels, gutters, words and pictures working together. Our guide on how to read a comic covers what both have in common, and our short history of the comic strip shows where it all began.