Comics and Novelization

<p>This book opens a novel perspective on comics and literature interactions. It claims that the two artistic media have always maintained a mutual emulation for as long as they have coexisted in media culture. To demonstrate this the present research does not focus on literary adaptations in comics form but rather on a literary corpus that remains virtually unexplored: comics-related novels. The purpose of this volume is to inventory French comics-related novels and to study them. Within the limits of the French-speaking world this book pieces together a literary history of <i>bande dessinée</i> through its novels from the nineteenth to twenty-first centuries. Although the comic strip – including the aptly named graphic novel – has sometimes been regarded as the disciple of an unsurpassable literary model do these under-studied adaptations in novel form not rather indicate a mutual relationship or even an emulation between the two media?</p>