At the end of the 2010s the cultural valence of comics and graphic novels was hard to ignore. Black Panther, directed by Ryan Coogler and based on the Marvel superhero character, was the biggest film at the US box office in 2018, and soon reached third on the list of highest-grossing films in US cinema history. It was also the first superhero film nominated for Best Picture at the Academy Awards held in February 2019. Later that year Avengers: Endgame (dir. Joe Russo and Anthony Russo), another comics adaptation, became the highest-grossing film ever at the global box office (a title held until March 2021). And cinema screens are not the only sign of the ubiquity of US comics: in July 2018 the graphic novel Sabrina (2018) by Chicago-based creator Nick Drnaso was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize, the most prestigious and publicised of the UK’s literary awards. The judges commented that Sabrina, an account of online hysteria surrounding a young woman’s disappearance, was a standard-bearer for the new visibility of long-form comics: ‘given the changing shape of fiction, it was only a matter of time before a graphic novel was included on the Man Booker longlist’.

In 2006 graphic novels became the pre-eminent means of selling comics in the United States. That year, sales of comics in book form ($330 million) exceeded sales of periodical comics ($310 million). Where the number of consumers is concerned, the US ‘comic book’ industry has been in overall decline since the 1950s, but there has been a revival this century due to sales of hard- or soft-cover books, commonly referred to as ‘graphic novels’. The financial health of US comics is evident when surveying estimated sales for 2020, with graphic novels at $835 million, periodicals at $285 million, and digital comics at $160 million. Beyond these figures, graphic novels have become a notable component of US reading habits; in a 2010 Harris Poll 11 per cent of Americans reported reading a graphic novel in the preceding year.

There are reasons to tread carefully, however, when proclaiming the pre-eminence of the book-format graphic novel in the twenty-first century. Books might generate more revenue than periodicals, but those 2018 figures are misleading as a representation of how Americans are reading comics. Those sales of digital comics do not include subscription services or the tens of thousands of webcomics freely available online.