Faster Than a Speeding Bullet: The Rise of the Graphic Novel

A comics historian offers a short but pithy history of the industry and how it led to the format known as the graphic novel, a term first coined by Will Eisner in the late 1970s. The first third of the book analyzes the factors that influenced the evolution of comic-book content, quality, and readership from The Yellow Kid in 1895 to the first graphic novels, paying special attention to the causes and effects of the Comics Code Authority, the severely restrictive production code established in 1954. Weiner maps out the relationships among publishers, distributors, and retail outlets. This is helpful for understanding the route by which an unconventional, independent title such as Jeff Smith's Bone finds an initial readership, appears in a number of editions, and may be picked up by a larger publishing house. A good portion of the book is dedicated to the revival of the industry in the 1980s, when creators like Frank Miller and Alan Moore reinvented traditional superheroes for a more sophisticated adult audience, and how this revival paved the way for the astonishing diversity we see today. Perhaps most valuable for librarians is Weiner's description of not only the various types of comics and graphic novels, but also of the nature of various types of fans-readers of arty work such as Julius Knipfl, Real Estate Photographer are not likely to embrace the "Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles." Illustrated on every page with pertinent comics panels, this book is meant to be a durable addition to a shelf that also includes Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics (Tundra, 1993) and David Hadju's The Ten-Cent Plague (Farrar, 2008). Break out the reading glasses though-you can't fit all this analysis, plus copious illustrations, into 70 pages without using a typeface that is punishingly small.—Paula Willey, Baltimore County Public Library, Towson, MD