“Faster Than a Speeding Bullet” – What The Reviewers Are Saying…

If you haven’t picked up this new edition of Stephen Weiner’s groundbreaking Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel, here’s what the critics are saying… “Though its title gives the impression that the book’s focus will be on superhero GN fare like Knight or Neil Gaiman’s Sandman, Weiner provides a broader [...]

NBM Review Round-Up!

Here we are, back again, with some recent reviews of various NBM titles. Faster Than A Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel “A a perfect book for anyone trying to wrap her or his head around the field of comics, a quick and smart overview of the field that spans both decades and [...]

NBM Review Round-Up!

It’s not too late to get some of our fantastic books to give away as holiday gifts (or buy one or two for yourself, you deserve it!). Here’s what the critics are saying about some of our recent titles. Abelard “A beautifully crafted piece of storytelling from Hautiére that tugs mercilessly at the heartstrings but doesn’t [...]

How Graphic Novel got into Libraries

As the graphic novel form took off in the 1990s, one of the first places it landed was public libraries. The respectability of MAUS as well as the initial buzz generated by the publicity generated by DARK KNIGHT & WATCHMEN raised the visibility of the comics medium. Lots of people in the library were more [...]

Elfquest & The Graphic Novel

The first graphic novel to explode out of the comic book marketplace & into bookstores was Elfquest by Wendy & Richard Pini. In many ways it was the model for some of the break out graphic novels we’ve seen over the last several years. Elfquest was self published under the Pini’s own WaRP Graphics company [...]

Camelot 3000 & the Graphic Novel

Camelot 3000 and the Graphic Novel Pioneering cartoonists creating the first graphic novels followed a bumpy road. Although the concept was out there in the late 1970s & early 1980s, the acceptance of the new longer format was mixed. Many early graphic novels were big news at the time but are now virtually forgotten. One [...]

The Independents & the Graphic Novel

In the 1980s comics began to recognize that a long form comic’s story had potential, based in part on Eisner’s Contract with God & Jules Feiffer’s Tantrum. Various names for this longer comics story form were thrown around. Among them “Sequential Narrative” and “Picture Novella” gained some weight but the term that stuck was “Graphic [...]

Trade Publishers and early Graphic Novel attempts

As far back as the 1940s, trade publishers experienced success publishing graphic novel like books, collections of newspaper comics, and early book length comic stories by recognized children’s book author-illustrators Crockett Johnson and Don Freeman. Pogo collections by Walt Kelly published in the 1950s and early 1960s paved the way for the book length graphic [...]