The US Graphic Novel has shown that complete long comics narratives in book form aimed at adult readers have been published in the United States for over 100 years. One could enter a bookshop in 1930 – or 1960 – or 1990 and pick up a text that would now be recognised as a graphic novel, even if the label was only coined in 1964. The comics fans who debated the concept in the mid-1960s held to three ingredients as defining features of the graphic novel: length, book publication, and adult readers. We have seen, though, how ragged around the edges those principles seem, especially in the twenty-first century, when two of the most proliferating varieties are e-graphic novels and graphic novels for children and young adults.

Literary publishing currently frames the graphic novelist as an autonomous artist, a notion powered by the underground comix of the 1960s, which abided by a different commercial logic to mainstream comics. Nonetheless, the majority of graphic novelists remain subject to economic concerns, even if their work is free to access. There has never been a single model for making and selling graphic novels, and because long-form comics have been published by organisations with very different financial imperatives – companies with roots in pulp magazines, charitable institutions, long-established trade presses, creators self-publishing their own comics – it is sometimes difficult to see them as part of the same tradition. By bringing them together, this book has shone a light on their interconnectedness, how ideas, techniques, and personnel have migrated across the different spheres of the US graphic novel and the industries that make them.

The history I have told confirms that the graphic novel has never been a discrete medium. It exists in a symbiotic relationship with periodical comics, film, posters, zines, prints, and the computer screen, as well as the literary forms that the word ‘novel’ suggests, with modes of visual storytelling passing back and forth between different media. These exchanges will endure and mutate, though I’ll hold back any predictions for the future. Who would have guessed that the graphic novel would have the qualified visibility that it currently possesses, even twenty years ago?