On the Graphic Novel

<p>A noted comics artist himself Santiago Garcia 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.</p><p>Garcia 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 Garcia 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.</p>