“Gulliver’s Travels has long been connected to, and appropriated within, visual culture. The maps and portraits in early editions of the text are part of a complex paratextual apparatus which purports to establish its authenticity and veracity while simultaneously debunking that illusion. However, more recent use of imagery taken – often radically out of context – from the Travels bears witness to the work’s changing status, from literary satire to an element of popular visual culture. This chapter studies some of the various forms and representations involved in these processes, including illustrations, paintings, graphic novels, cartoons, and advertisements, and examines the ways in which images of and relating to Lemuel Gulliver and his travels, which were once unconvincing indicators of authorial reliability, have evolved. Over the centuries, Swift’s imaginary voyage has increasingly been epitomised and reworked, becoming part of a collective iconography familiar to a global audience that has often little to no direct knowledge of the original text.”

What makes a comic a graphic novel? Is it having a long, complete narrative? Being published as a book? Having a complex storytelling technique that leads to literary awards and critical acclaim? All these criteria have been deployed at some time or another to define the graphic novel, and they recur throughout this chapter as we follow a history of the ways in which comics have been hailed as novels since the mid-nineteenth century. With an emphasis on the United States, key moments are considered such as the woodcut novels of the 1920s and 1930s, the start of the direct market in the 1970s, the first graphic novel boom of the 1980s, and the popularity of graphic novels in the twenty-first century. Notable texts, creators, and publishers are discussed, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw Books & Graphics, and we see the changing economic contexts out of which graphic novels have emerged. This chapter ends by outlining how the Internet has transformed the production, distribution, and selling of graphic novels, with contemporary creators unshackled from the idea that a graphic novel has to be a book.

This chapter examines the two Chicago-set graphic novels of Chris Ware entitled Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth (2000) and Building Stories (2012), as well as Lost Buildings (2004), Ware’s “on-stage radio & picture collaboration” with Ira Glass for National Public Radio. The chapter argues that Ware’s body of work explores how various human networks engage with the storied history and urban geography of his adopted city, and that it does so in endlessly experimental ways that have continued to redefine the expressive potential of the comics form. In these works, Ware creates complex visual narratives in which the city and its ever-changing urban landscape is often as much of a character as the people inhabiting it, and his meticulously drawn pages are thus an attempt not only to depict and make sense of Chicago but also to create a visual index of the relationship between its spatial and emotional lives. Despite his untraditional choice of form, this approach places him in a lineage of Chicago writers that reaches all the way back to the earliest recorders of life in the city.

This chapter examines the posterity of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four in the comics medium. Drawing from adaptation theory, it examines a broad range of mainstream and alternative comic books, showing how they use, adapt, update, and sometimes reinvent Orwellian material, with strategies ranging from close rewriting (Ted Rall’s 2024) to intertextual reference (Alan Moore’s V for Vendetta with David Lloyd and League of Extraordinary Gentlemen with Kevin O’Neil) and sometimes irreverential allusion (Grant Morrison’s The Invisibles, Warren Ellis’s Transmetropolitan). In so doing, comics writers and artists interrogate the cultural standing of comics and its ties to the literary canon, pointing to their own status as authors. They underline the pleasures of reading, viewing, and rewriting texts, and reflect upon the nature of fiction. They also use Orwellian themes of authoritarianism and control in order to reflect upon the history of the medium, looking at the superhero genre in particular. Finally, they address the specific issue of visibility and surveillance, which is of paramount importance in visual storytelling, and allows them to physically engage the reader in specific ways. Thus, these authors use their Orwellian intertext as the site of a politics of resistance to cultural hierarchies and political oppression.