“I thought it would never catch on. It’s a terrible term. They’re not novels; most of them are memoirs, in fact. ‘Graphic’ implies an illustrated novel; that’s not what it is. I just thought people would say, ‘It’s a comic book, why are you trying to trick us?’ But it worked: ‘Graphic novel’ now means something very specific. People hear those two words and take them to mean a type of book that is generally correct. I give up—it works. The branding guys won.”
Daniel Clowes, the creator of Ghost World, Eightball, and so, so much more, talks with Mother Jones about the phrase “graphic novel,” his new book Wilson, “his recent heart surgery, and how he broke one of The New Yorker‘s biggest taboos.”
