On the Graphic Novel

A noted comics artist himself, Santiago Garc­a follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. He considers the aesthetic and entrepreneurial innovations that established the conditions for the rise of the graphic novel all over the world.

Garc­a not only treats the formal components of the art, but also examines the cultural position of comics in various formats as a popular medium. Typically associated with children, often viewed as unedifying and even at times as a threat to moral character, comics art has come a long way. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, Garc­a illustrates how the graphic novel, with its increasingly global and aesthetically sophisticated profile, represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comics and what they can achieve.