The Cambridge Companion to the American Graphic Novel provides students and scholars with a state-of-the-art collection of essays from experts in the field who are working on contemporary publications as well as the history of the medium. Through the pages of this book, they provide a series of new and original readings of the graphic novel. By focusing attention exclusively on the “American graphic novel,” one is able to explore critically and in depth how – since at least the 1970s – writers and artists have worked to provide a range of new content and style of cartooning to tell long-length stories, conduct journalism, interpret history, narrate autobiography, and develop original works of fiction. Graphic novelists and their work are today an established and important part of the cultural-literary landscape; they are honored by prestigious literary prizes, as well as play a part in mirroring American society back to their readers. Here, one thinks immediately of Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), dedicated to the 9/11 attacks and the American response thereto, which was selected as one of the ten most important works on the subject at the time of the tenth anniversary of the atrocity. Equally noteworthy are Alison Bechdel’s ground-breaking analyses of gay and lesbian experiences in times of changing values and attitudes in her memoir Fun Home (2006), and through her subsequent Are You My Mother? (2012) and The Secret of Superhuman Strength (2021). Just as important, and different again, are examples of works from Asian American and African American graphic novelists that offer autobiographical narratives on their specific lives and historical circumstances: to note one recent example, Thi Bui’s The Best We Could Do (2017) is a remarkable personal testimony on the history of America and Vietnam and the migrant experience of the author and her family. So, if American comics are filled with action-packed genre materials that provide excitement and spectacle, then one can equally generalize to say that the American graphic novel, in all its diverse forms, is proving to be a sounding board for highly personal, democratic, identity-based, and informed, often autobiographically slanted, representations of the state of the nation. The graphic novel (supported by mainstream corporate literary-oriented publishers, such as Abrams, Pantheon, and Penguin Random House) has developed to provide a key cultural space for broadly liberal values to be espoused through sometimes complex, sometimes deliberately simple, text and image, panel grids, and page layouts. While this is a still relatively young form of graphic narrative, one can say that in the last forty years, it has become more and more important for American literature per se. There is no longer any need to assert the genre’s legitimacy or spend pages defending the choice to study our subject.

This chapter addresses the representation of war in the American graphic novel. It begins with a historical discussion of the decline of the war comic in light of social change in the 1960s. While pop art appropriation of war comics questioned the jingoistic content of the tradition, older-generation comics artists (Milton Caniff, Jack Kubert, et al.) and the National Cartoonist Society continued to promote American militarism in their work. In this culturally compromised context, war comics declined in status and circulation, facilitating the rise of the American graphic novel, which inverted the aesthetics of the old war comics. By contrast, war graphic novels account for the suffering of war, reveal personal and family tragedies, bring forward women’s experiences, and (in translation) offer an international perspective. The recognition given to graphic novels in the public sphere has also facilitated the exhibition and republication of previously marginalized works (e.g., material from Vietnam War veteran Vernon Grant). The chapter concludes with a discussion of Florent Silloray’s graphic novel biography of the famous war photographer Robert Capa, which includes a new theorization of the status of the war image and the human cost of military violence.

This chapter deals with the specific role and place of the graphic novel in the contemporary literary field. It first addresses the widely debated analogies and differences between comics and graphic novels, while making a clear plea for the autonomy of the latter. It then studies the history of the graphic novel, with a strong emphasis on questions of publication format and cultural reception. Finally, it also discusses the question of canon formation and the relationships between mainstream and minority cultures in the field.