If I were to describe the aim of Williams’s book in a nutshell, I might be tempted to reply that it traces how ›comics‹ became ›graphic novels‹. To be sure, the endeavor of Dreaming the Graphic Novel is much more ambitious. The study focuses on a short albeit decisive period of North American comics history – namely the long 1970s – that lasts from »the second half of the 1960s to the end of the 1980s« (2). The introduction provides a concise outline of the book’s research questions, its objects as well as its methodology. Williams announces that besides »research taking place in history, visual culture, art history and economics«, »literary close reading techniques are heavily present too« (12). In fact, close readings appear more frequently in the second half of Dreaming the Graphic Novel and constitute the most convincing and most readable passages of this fascinating study. Furthermore, the introduction explains the key terms used throughout the book such as ›novelization‹, ›novels‹, and ›graphic novels‹. Williams clarifies that he aims to discuss questions like »How were comics conceived of as novels? How were lengths and physical format important to those conceptions?« or »How dominant was the term graphic novel?« (2) The author maintains that the concept of the graphic novel has not yet been analyzed regarding how »it was articulated and rearticulated by communities of readers in the 1960s and 1970s« (12) – a gap he intends to fill with the study at hand.

Chapter 1 »The Death of the Comic Book« addresses the decrease of new comic book titles towards the end of the 1960s and explains how the decline of comics »as we know them« (30) is rooted in both the magazine distribution system prevailing at the time and the homogeneity of the audience. The sale-or-return system allowing wholesalers to return unsold copies to the publisher became less economic as the cost of paper rose in the 1970s. The Comicmobile, a van »decorated with superhero stickers and stocked with the returns held in DC’s library« (29) is a case in point of how publishers were trying to counter the old distribution system rooted in the 1940s. Yet, the attempt at selling issues by driving around with a van finally had to be abandoned. Critics presume that one reason for this was that the car was »›not given access to places of peak sales‹ such as Long Island’s beaches and parks« (30). Short digressions like the story of the Comicmobile are a welcome change for readers of Dreaming the Graphic Novel insofar as they counteract the load of information assembled on most pages, which makes it impossible for recipients to dwell on any of the fascinating examples. Whilst this abundance might overwhelm readers who are not familiar with all the details of American comics history, Williams seems never lost but successfully foregrounds his key arguments. The first chapter clarifies that another task (besides rethinking distribution) comics artists and publishers had to face was the diversification of their readership: the need for comic books to attract the interest of adults who would be willing to spend more money on comics than children or young adults was widely agreed upon. Therefore, comics artists and publishers wished to discard the thirty-two-page periodical and turn towards the album format.

The second chapter »Eastern Promise« picks up on the first insofar as it explores how readers in the U.S. began to fetishize Franco-Belgian comics and the album format associated with these works. Williams convincingly argues that the symbolic capital of comics became inextricably tied to its material signifier (the album’s hard cover, its thick paper and specific color reproductions). Fans and creators further explained their preference for Franco-Belgian comics with the »greater variety of genres« which these works deploy. They maintained that outside the U.S, »the graphic story [was treated] as an adult art form« (42). In fact, the album format circulating among comics collectors facilitated the desired diversification of readership. Williams outlines how the American market started to cater »to the demand for Franco-Belgian comics« (46) and how an increasing number of adult readers became interested in these comics despite the language barrier. The latter prompted readers to pay more attention to the images and neglect the writing. The success of the Franco-Belgian album format reinforced the wish to renew American comics on behalf of creators, fans, and publishers. The second chapter also traces the first shifts regarding the terminology of graphic narratives: the comics produced by European artists were referred to as ›graphic albums‹. As Williams puts it: »Album was often combined with the graphic of graphic story and graphic novel to create graphic album« (54, italics in the original). Altogether, the chapter unravels how the desire to enhance the cultural and economic value of comics paved the way for their novelization.

Chapter 3 – auspiciously titled »Making Novels« – accounts for the synergies between comics and film, for the increasing serialization of comics and how the idea of the series was intertwined with a new distribution system. The direct market, in which mainstream companies like Marvel and DC participated, implied that unsold copies could not be returned, and that orders would be shipped straight from the printers. For one thing, the direct market led to a significant growth of specialist shops; at the same time independent and underground publishers increasingly relied on postal sales. The longest part of the chapter is dedicated to underground comix. Amongst others, we learn that works like Jackson’s Comanche Moon and Gonick’s Cartoon History of the Universe addressed a wider audience by »softening the norms of underground comix« (79) and that long-form comix were printed as both books and periodicals (a famous example of this being Justin Green’s Binky Brown). The most exciting part of this passage, however, takes a closer look at Lee Marrs’s The Further Fattening Adventures of Pudge, Girl Blimp. Here, Williams’s explicates how individual works encouraged the novelization of comics. What is more, this passage hints at the concept that lends itself to the title of the study, namely »dreaming« and its connection to the graphic novel: on the inside front cover of her comic, we see Lee Marrs sleeping and dreaming of a hardcover collection of Pudge 1-3. In her dream, celebrities – amongst others, President Jimmy Carter – crave the Pudge hardcover so much that they »charge through a broken window to grab copies« (86). The example of Pudge impressively underlines that the desire for a reevaluation of comics’ cultural standing was promoted by both economic and artistic decisions.

Chapter 4 »The Graphic Novel Triumphant« moves from the economic aspects that laid the ground for the novelization of comics towards the power of language. Williams unravels how different »novel-related term[s]« (96) began to intrude the comics universe from the mid-1960s on. Using different graphs, lists, and tables throughout the chapter that illustrate the development of denominations such as ›graphic novel‹, ›comics novel‹, or ›visual novel‹, the author sets out to trace the instability of these terms, how they »were deployed and contested, clarified and rejected« (96). Before moving to the novel aspects of comics, the chapter discusses the term ›graphic story‹ which Richard Kyle introduced in 1964. ›Graphic story‹ was considered »a shorthand idiom for complex adult comics« (104) »free of toxic associations« (105) and far more common than ›graphic novel‹ in the long 1970s. Moreover, we learn that disclaimers like ›novel-length‹ (often used interchangeably with ›book length‹) did not necessarily refer to the number of pages but rather implied aspects of narrativity (i.e., that a work contains a sole, unified narrative) or the alleged ›importance‹ of the narrative. Ultimately, the author concludes that there were different criteria that turned comics into novels. Either they contained 48 or more pages or they met certain demands in terms of narrativity, such as Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. The latter Art Spiegelman described as »›epic‹« (108). Chapter 4 closes with another elaborate discussion of a key text: Williams shows to which extend Will Eisner’s A Contract with God has popularized the term ›graphic novel‹. As with the analysis of Purge in chapter 3, the example helps readers of Dreaming the Graphic Novel to comprehend how comics artists, publishers, critics, and fans collaborated in promoting the novelness of comics. The case of Eisner’s work illustrates that inventing the graphic novel gave rise to heated debates about fundamental categories of graphic narratives (like drawing style or the construction of the plot).

Chapter 5 »Putting the Novel into Graphic Novel« sheds light upon the ›bookification‹ of the comics medium. Williams reveals that the ›novelizers’‹ desire to accumulate symbolic capital and their endeavor to turn comics into novels is intertwined with aspects of materiality, length, and readership. Critics claimed that the comics scene needed to turn away from periodical comics whose »materiality connoted ephemerality as well as juvenilia« (125) and which demanded artificial cliffhangers and unnecessary repetitions. They presumed that book publication would encourage readers to preserve comics instead of throwing them away after reading. What is more, critics opined that book publication allows for longer narratives. In fact, some considered the brevity of graphic narratives the reason for »the failure of the medium to develop« (125). They maintained that book publication would enable uninterrupted narratives that could be read in a single sitting. In this chapter, Williams’s scholarly background comes to the fore as he shifts towards a methodology rooted in the field of literary studies. It is surely not by chance that this chapter slows down and takes its time to unfold its line of argument. Amongst others, it examines the comparison between Victorian serial novels or pulp fiction and comics and discusses the connection between the modernist novel and comics. Williams takes Art Spiegelman’s Breakdown as an example of how some comics artists demanded that their works be read differently – »slowly and often« (149) as Spiegelman points out – and hence aimed to distinguish their texts from mainstream comics. The most intriguing section of this well-made chapter contains short analyses of Eisner’s Life on Another Planet and Corben’s Neverwhere. Here, the author unveils the texts’ respective conceptions of realism and their relation to the nineteenth-century novel.

Chapter 6 »Comics as Literature?« begins by recalling how fans’ desire to establish comics as a literary form led to the founding of professional fanzines, fan societies, and conventions. Williams stresses that the 1970s represent a turning point in this regard: it was in this decade that fandom »underwent a metamorphosis, developing institutional structures of increasing complexity and drawing in more participants« (162). However, when the comics scene began to organize encounters between fans more professionally, potential speculators, people who were not interested in comics but in »which texts made the best assets« (163), began to invade the comics scene; comics became a commodity. This commercialization of fandom was not only considered to jeopardize the »mutual respect and friendship« (166)  among comics fans but also endangered fans’ insistence on the cultural capital of comics and their desire to abolish the distinction between comics culture and ›legitimate culture‹. The next section tackles the question whether comics are literature. Williams cites critics’ widely held opinion that »comics were literature but not Literature« (167) which acknowledges that comics have a literary value but still denies them the status of serious literature. Based on several examples from different academic disciplines, Williams illustrates that, despite these devaluations, thorough, medium-specific scholarly readings of comics increased in the 1970s. Eventually, he introduces us to those who do not consider the academic study of comics desirable. Promoting anti-intellectual positions, critics located on the political right dismissively spoke of ›graphic leftists‹ whom they accused of wanting to bring comics closer to more established art forms or to »allude to Shakespeare« (175). It is also in his section that Williams ultimately accounts for the gendered aspects of comics. He concedes that comics fandom, advertising, and many other aspects of the comics scene address male readers and rely upon the idea of hypermasculinity. There are some passages in the previous chapters that would have profited from critical commentaries on the aspect of gender where the author remains silent – at least he ends his book with critical remarks on the issue so that they can resonate in his readers’ minds (as the book’s famous last words).

As mentioned above, the abundance of facts, dates, ideas, and titles of comics, periodicals and magazines is occasionally overwhelming albeit they bespeak the thoroughness with which the author traces the multi-faceted developments in his field of study. The book might have benefitted from more exemplary digressions of the kind offered by the elaborate discussion of Pudge or the close reading of Neverwhere. Here, Williams takes his time to dwell on case examples that are key to the history of comics’ novelization. What is more, the book does not assess the limitations that arise with terms such as ›novel‹ and ›novelization‹, namely that the idea behind all things ›novel‹ privileges (sequential) storytelling over other forms of expression. This is even more surprising given the fact that in chapter 5, Williams discusses narrative experiments invested in countering mainstream comics and even mentions abstract comics when referring to Robert Crumb’s »Abstract-Expressionist Ultra-Super Modernist Comics«.

Regardless of these minor points of criticism, Dreaming the Graphic Novel provides both a stunningly detailed overview over the comics history of the long 1970s and well-wrought sample analyses. Williams’s book takes its readers on a whirlwind journey with many sights in sight: almost every page presents ideas that invite readers to dig deeper and reconsider the benefits, problems, or even necessity of the ›novelness‹ of comics. One the one hand, Williams’s book reveals that ›graphic novel‹ remains a fuzzy and utopian construct that is perhaps rather dreamlike than feasible. On the other hand, inventing the graphic novel has provoked indispensable debates about the literariness of graphic stories in the last 50 years which allowed for comics to claim their rightful place on the market, on bookshelves, and in scholarly debates.

Dreaming the Graphic Novel
The Novelization of Comics
Paul Williams
New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2020
278 p., 29.95 USD
ISBN 978-1-9788-0506-4