Reframing the Graphic Novel: Long-Form Adult Comic Narratives in North America and the UK c.1973-82

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While the graphic novel has become an important area of contemporary academic research, scholars have paid little attention to the 1970s and early 1980s, a seminal period in its development. Using unexplored archives in Britain and North America, and culminating in a three-month exhibition at London's Cartoon Museum in 2016, 'Reframing the Graphic Novel' will reconstruct the creative practices and business decisions that saw comics being published in book form for adult readers. A handful of texts frequently recur in histories of comics, notably Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978), but new graphic novels were created every year from the early 1970s to the early 1980s. This project will uncover those forgotten works and outline the institutional contexts that produced them, from the superhero-dominated comic book industry, to the book trade, to the underground comix scene associated with the 1960s counterculture. The story told in 'Reframing the Graphic Novel' proves that no single country had a monopoly on the graphic novel's development; creators in the United Kingdom, Canada and the United States were working concurrently on the form, and all were influenced by the 48-page albums published by the French comics industry.The material format of these comics-published-as-books was crucial to the literary status that their creators sought to attain, as was the rhetorical invocation of the 'graphic novel' (or 'graphic album' or 'visual novel', as they were sometimes called). 'Reframing the Graphic Novel' will demonstrate that the characteristics ascribed to graphic novels (being published as a book, having pretensions to literariness, having long narratives, and challenging adult readers with formal experimentation and controversial content) could be found in a variety of comics printed during the 1970s and early 1980s. By displaying seminal texts from this era at the Cartoon Museum, members of the public can see how the material form of early graphic novels was a bid to sell comics as long-lasting art objects deserving to be shelved next to literary classics. The exhibition attached to this project is not only about 1970s texts, and it will feature original art from the nineteenth century to the present in order to tell the story of Britain's history of graphic novels - something no exhibition has attempted before.In the mid-1980s the media commotion surrounding the so-called 'Big Three' (volume one of Art Spiegelman's Maus [1986], Frank Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight Returns [1986], and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons's Watchmen [1987]) turned graphic novels into objects of public discussion. The publication of MetaMaus in 2011 and films such as Watchmen (2009) and The Dark Knight Rises (2012) have kept these major mid-1980s texts in the consciousness of the reading and viewing public. But there is a world of graphic novels preceding the 'Big Three', and this project will bring that world to light, showing the artistic ambitions of the 1970s graphic novelists and the currents of the comic industry that they had to negotiate in order to create their innovative, complex, book-length comics.