Introduction

In the late 1980s, DC ran an advertisement that read, ‘You outgrew comics, now they’ve caught up with you!’ Capitalising on the release of the film Batman (dir. Tim Burton, 1989), this advertisement reused rhetoric that widely circulated in the 1980s, as journalists seized upon the seeming novelty of comics published as books and aimed at adults, especially when they featured superheroes having sex or committing amoral acts of violence. Graphic novels such as Batman: The Dark Knight Returns (1986) by writer and penciller Frank Miller, inker Klaus Janson, and colourist Lynn Varley, Watchmen (serialised 1986–7; first book edition 1987) by writer Alan Moore, penciller and inker Dave Gibbons, and colourist John Higgins, and Batman: Arkham Asylum (1989) by writer Grant Morrison and artist Dave McKean generated column inches and notable sales on both sides of the Atlantic. As comics scholar Marc Singer observes, appearing ‘in the wake’ of the Batman film the timing of Arkham Asylum ‘could not have been more perfect’ and the graphic novel was ‘a smash hit’. According to DC editor Karen Berger sales were close to 500,000 copies.

‘You outgrew comics … ’ was part of a broader publicity campaign as DC placed adverts in general interest magazines assuring the book-buying public that, with graphic novels, they could read comics without the stigma that the medium was child-oriented or artistically bankrupt. Christopher Pizzino’s Arresting Development calls the recurring trope that comics have ‘grown up’ a ‘Bildungsroman discourse’, criticising this formulation for implying that comics have – inevitably, organically – changed ‘from a despised medium […] to a respectable kind of reading with an earned measure of cultural legitimacy’. He acknowledges the Bildungsroman discourse ‘as a path to better status for specific works’ but denounces it for reinforcing ‘the illegitimacy of comics as a whole’: the special pleading for graphic novels insists they are major artistic achievements despite being comics. Since the 1980s, journalists, academics, and reviewers periodically assert that comics are transitioning ‘from crudely and functionally produced commodities, […] to aesthetically complex work created by self-directed writer-illustrators; from adventure-romance serials to closure-oriented narratives modeled after the novel’. According to this discourse, the graphic novel is the apotheosis of comics’ transformation into a form of culture with a broad base of adult readers.