The quest for a place in culture: The verbaliconical production and the evolution of comic-books towards graphic novels

Abstract

The comic-book genre has gone through several important changes along the twentieth century in the Anglo-Saxon world. This verbal-iconical genre seems to have been able to overcome the Manichean vision of the comic-book as something childish, and thus find a new space for the maturation of its own devices. As the latest outgrowth of the comic-book expansion, the graphic novel has become the corner stone whereby a link is established between the pure narrative form of the novel and the visual quality of the verbal-iconical genres. The daring and yet successful combination of these different trends has contributed to elevating the graphic novel to the status of proper art form. Hence, the aim of this essay is to offer a modest and serious proposal for the analysis of the four verbal-iconical genres directly related to the comic-book, to wit: the illustrated novel, the comic strip, the comic-book, and, finally, the graphic novel. The latter has given a new breath to the narrative forms of the verbal-iconical genres, especially to the comic-book, allowing for an experimentalism inside this trend, producing a new independent hybrid genre, and making possible a reorientation of narrative techniques concerning the time factor –chronotope– in the comic-book genre towards a more complex and coherent structure.