What is a graphic novel? One story, told in panels

The short answer

A graphic novel is one complete story told in comics form and bound as a book. You read it the way you read a novel. Front to back, and then you are finished.

The Library of Congress catalogues these for a living. Its cataloguing program for children and young adults describes graphic novels as narratives in which the text and illustrations are equally important to the conveyance of the story. The drawings carry half the book. Skim past them and you have read half of it.

What it shares with a comic book

The Library of Congress applies one test to both. To be catalogued as either, a work has to do three things: show its characters and action in a succession of panel drawings, advance a story line across a series of those panels, and put its dialogue in balloons or something that does the same job.

Panels, balloons, sequence. Both formats run on the same equipment.

Where a single issue parts company

A single issue is an instalment. It arrives thin, stops somewhere uncomfortable, and the next piece turns up next month.

A graphic novel arrives finished. The Oxford English Dictionary definition quoted by the University of Maryland Libraries calls it a full-length story published as a book in comic-strip format. The same guide offers a blunter version from the critic Stephen Weiner: book-length comic books meant to be read as one story.

Binding is part of it too. That same cataloguing program observes that graphic novels are generally hard-bound, or in soft bindings sturdier than a comic book cover. A book built to be reread gets a spine that survives the rereading.

Two ways one gets built

The cataloguing manual recognises two shapes. Some graphic novels are a single continuous narrative made for that one book. Others collect several separate narratives that ran somewhere else first.

That second shape is why one story can sit in the back-issue bin in six thin parts and on the shelf behind it as one fat book.

Where the name came from

Will Eisner published A Contract with God: And Other Tenement Stories in 1978 and used the phrase while hunting for a publisher. He thought he had invented it, and learned later that others had used it first. He also thought it was the wrong name, and preferred "graphic literature" or "graphic story".

He had a point about the "novel" half. The same guide quotes a wider definition from Michael Schumacher: book-length sequential art that has expanded past science fiction and fantasy into biography, memoir, history and other non-fiction. A great deal of the shelf is true stories.

Which shelf it lands on

Libraries file them by who they are for. Since late 2007 the Library of Congress has classified a graphic novel by its publisher's primary intended audience. One range of call numbers covers readers over about fifteen, and another covers younger readers. One building has to shelve a war memoir and a book of talking-animal gags, so both need a sensible home.

The scale is easy to miss. The Library of Congress holds the world's largest publicly available comic book collection: over 190,000 original print issues and 20,000 titles, running from the 1930s to the present, with new ones added almost daily.

Field note: any format with its own government cataloguing instruction sheet has officially stopped being a phase.

What one looks like while it is still being built

We are making one, which is the reason this article exists.

Atomic Critters is a graphic novel set on a wildlife sanctuary in Wyoming, where the animals do not stay ordinary for very long. There is a sanctuary guide called Renji, a bernedoodle called Coop, a fennec fox called Cheeseball, a house cat of considerable mass called Slug Cat, and a river otter with red eyes whose name is Murder Otter.

The chapters go up on this site as they are finished, in the format this article has been describing: panels and balloons, with one story running through all of them. Chapter one is where it opens. Start here lays out the reading order, for anyone who would rather be pointed at the front door. The Universe page holds the cast, the places, and the Atomic Heart Engine itself, the machine at the middle of all of it. It has also ended up on a few shirts.

So, the definition

One complete story, told in panels, bound as a book, where the drawings do as much work as the words. A single issue is one chapter of a serial. A graphic novel is the finished story in your hands.

If you want to watch one get built in public, ours is up, unfinished, and the next chapter is still unwritten.