How do graphic novels influence and shape our worldview? Specifically, how do graphic novels serve as the principal means and primary ends to establishing power and silence? 

 

     These guiding questions serve as the foundation of our analysis of The Graphic Narrative Corpus (GNC), a dataset that provides a historical overview of the genre as it came into fruition in the 1970s and has continued to evolve since.

 

     The interplay between words and images have been used throughout millenia to help shape narratives. From Egyptian hieroglyphic writing dated approximately 5,200 years ago,  to the genesis of the graphic novel in the 1970s,  humans continue to develop innovative, thought-provoking ways in which to communicate in various contexts. The graphic novel was borne out of the effort of scholars to establish the importance of comics as it gained academic attention in the 1970s. This initiative was not only enacted to continue to establish comics as a literary and artistic medium, but also to gain a better understanding of comics as a means to learn more about the human condition. The Graphic Novel Corpus (GNC), a digital dataset for graphic novels that serves as the backbone for our analyses, was produced from such an initiative. Upon a closer look, we discovered that our dataset reflects the graphic novel industry’s bias towards White authors and characters that cater to a White audience. To explore how this is connected to the questions we ask above, we focused on a diverse set of narratives that help set cultural and social context. Understanding that creators’ ideologies, experiences, and biases are intertwined with the making of their narratives, we believe that graphic novels contribute to the creation of history. In learning more about the role of graphic novels in establishing power and silence as a form of media, we assert that there must be appropriate minority representation within the graphic novel industry.

 

     The GNC was created by the Hybrid Narrativity (HN), a junior research group formed from joint efforts of the University of Potsdam and the University of Paderborn. HN drew from a wide range of sources including international comic book prize winners, Amazon's bestseller list, online biographies, library collections, literary histories, comic book experts, and newspaper articles. In total, they noted that the corpus includes over 240 entries. It is important to note that they also include suggestions made by individuals and add them accordingly; the process in which they have acquired these suggestions from the contributors was not made explicit on their database. In doing so, the researchers explain that “by casting [their] net widely, [they] aim to balance popularity and prestige and to offset the biases of individual sources.”

 

     Academic literature on the field of graphic novels places the genre at the intersection of prose writing and visual art. Grown out of the creative energies of the early 20th century, what would become comics and eventually novels took existing forms of illustrative storytelling and adapted them for the new forms of mass media. Primarily founded in America as well as Western Europe, other places—notably Japan—began to develop their own style, diversifying the possibilities of what a graphic novel constitutes. With this in mind, it isn’t difficult for any one demographic to find some book of interest. The topics, tones, and purposes of a graphic novel can vary from light humor to serious, traumatic stories, which makes the genre difficult to pinpoint yet also very versatile in its applications. It not only entertains but can also educate and catalyze its audience to create change. This has created a new medium for authors to convey a message to the public like never before.