On the Graphic Novel

"For the first time in English, an essential history of the narrative art form's global rise. A noted comics artist himself, Santiago García follows the history of the graphic novel from early nineteenth-century European sequential art, through the development of newspaper strips in the United States, to the development of the twentieth-century comic book and its subsequent crisis. With such examples from around the world as Spain, France, Germany, and Japan, García illustrates how the graphic novel represents a new model for graphic narrative production that empowers authors and challenges longstanding social prejudices against comics."