Why I Hate The Term "Graphic Novel"

Page from Watchmen by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons

I hate the term Graphic Novel, but I hate the term Sequential Art almost as much, because each term has roughly the same problem. In the term Graphic Novel, the Novel element gets the emphasis. Not only does this sell the artist short, but it reeks of trying vainly to leech credibility from another medium that hardly has enough credibility to sustain itself. Call me cynical, but a medium that counts Dan Brown and Snooki among its most profitable contributors, no matter how old and venerable, is not one whose blood it is wise for even the most vampiric of mediums to imbibe.

But Sequential Art has roughly the opposite problem, in that it places the art in a place of exclusive privilege, making only a fleeting reference to the whole story element of what is ostensibly a storytelling medium.

If we are to describe this medium of words and pictures, Comics is as good a word as any. It is its own entity, not a hodgepodge of only tenuously related words meant to make the whole enterprise sound more credible.