Introduction

At the start of the twenty-first century, sales of graphic novels grew year on year, sometimes at staggering rates. In 2003 they were up nearly 50 per cent on the year before, and in 2004 that increase was around 35 per cent, taking annual graphic novel sales in the United States to $205–10 million. Sales declined slightly as a consequence of the Great Recession that started in 2007–8, but the overall upward trajectory is clear, with the North American graphic novel market estimated at $835 million in 2020. And unlike the late 1980s boom, the presence of graphic novels in bookstores, libraries, and in the wider reading consciousness has not subsided.

Writing in 2009, comics scholar Paul Lopes offered several explanations for this rise in sales: first, the high visibility of graphic novel properties as a result of successful film adaptations; second, the popularity of Japanese comics in translation; third, academic research indicating that graphic novels assist children’s literacy; and finally, the promotion of graphic novels without embarrassment or qualification by notable taste-making institutions. Some of these causes are as much evidence of cultural acceptance as they are drivers of popularity; when the British newspaper The Guardian gave Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth its prestigious First Book Award, this was recognition that the graphic novel was a legitimate object of cultural acclaim as well as a form of publicity generating extra sales. Nonetheless, Lopes’s list provides a useful way of organising the contexts surrounding twenty-first-century graphic novels, and we will examine each factor in turn before considering life-writing, the genre that has been especially well-received by cultural gatekeepers.

Lopes also argued the World Wide Web changed comics by ‘providing a new social space’ for fans, but failed to revolutionise ‘the commercial’ side of comics. From our vantage point in the 2020s, clearly the internet has substantially transformed the way comics are produced, distributed, and sold. The demographics of comics creators and readers is being transformed too. E-graphic novelists are producing ambitious work that evokes the serial publication of centuries past whilst straining at the very definition of what a graphic novel is and might be.