Redrawing Comics into the Graphic Novel: the Historiography of Comics, Canonization, and Authors’ Histories of the Medium

The development of comics studies in the United States has been linked to the institutionalization of the ‘graphic novel’ as a ‘literary’ subset of comics deemed worthy of academic attention. Several voices in North-America are now challenging the need for canon formation by arguing for other approaches to the historiography of comics beyond the graphic novel. Histories and definitions, however, as Thierry Smolderen argues, are not only written by scholars, but generated by a multiplicity of social groups actively participating in the ongoing negotiation of what the medium ‘is’. Drawing on these recent trends, I will engage in a disciplinary reflection on the historiography of comics by focusing on authors' histories of the medium. Cartoonists themselves indeed act as comics historians: suffice to think of Jules Feiffer's pioneering The Great Comic Book Heroes (1965). ‘Graphic novelists’ as Chris Ware, Art Spiegelman, Seth or Daniel Clowes have been deeply engaged in recovering the past of comics in their works as well as in essays, reprints, or exhibitions. These histories are fragmentary, emotionally charged and at times anachronistic, but they complicate teleological accounts of the graphic novel, disrupting the academic canon. Confronting this perspective with recent insights in literary historiography, I will attempt to examine some of the specific epistemological issues raised by cartoonists' histories of comics in their divergence or convergence with other historiographic trends such as fanzines and academic research.