Graphic What?

This has been burning on my mind for quite a while now.

The graphic novel hype is still in full swing in Germany, and while nobody really wants to alienate the comics fans, sometimes the Graphic Novel hypists get taken away by their arguments about wider thematic range and more diverse audiences they claim they have. Pure mathemetics tell you that can’t be right! Because graphic novels are comics, which logically means comics have the thematic range of graphic novels and all the stuff the graphic novel people would rather not talk about.

I tried to emulate the PDF flyer “Was sind Graphic Novels?” by graphic-novel.info, which is a common info site by several German publishers. It’s actually a pretty decent attempt to draw some fresh media attention to the medium, but it has the side effect of feeding latent anti-comics sentiments in the media by implying that these comics are indeed not at all like those.

Guess you can’t have both.