What is a Graphic Novel?

The concept of a graphic novel goes back quite a while, but there first person to use the phrase in its current form, I believe, was Will Eisner in relation to his book “A Contract with God.”

The rough idea is that it’s a long form comic book containing a single narrative. It might contain multiple stories from different points of view, but they all connect to tell one single cohesive narrative.

It is not an anthology

A 48 hour graphic novel is very different from an anthology, which is a collection of possibly unrelated stories, which all fit a single theme. Those are very easy to do in a short term project like the one we’re discussing in this website, because everyone has complete control and can work independently and never talk to anyone else and just make their thing.

A single narrative with everyone working together, on the other hand, requires the communication and community that this type of project was meant to bring about.

A little jam, A little exquisite corpse

Though they are not directly what we’re doing here, the concepts of a comic jam or an exquisite corpse are also worth understanding, because there’s a bit of that to a 48 hour graphic novel. Those are story telling forms where one creator begins, and another takes what they have written, and creates the next section (in a comic jam, it’s usually page by page). It’s a more linear story telling process, where everyone just builds off of the person who came before.

This isn’t really the idea of a 48 hour graphic novel, but it’s more in-spirit with the idea than an anthology is, because it has that component of trying to tell one story together. The difference is, of course that on a practical level in a 48 hour graphic novel, you don’t have time to wait for the each individual before you to finish their part before it’s your turn.