Beyond the Written Word: Graphic Novels in the Twenty-First Century

Abstract

What is or is not a graphic novel has proven notoriously difficult to define. Against this background, the present article explores Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers (2004), Posy Simmonds’ Tamara Drewe (2008), and Sonny Liew’s The Art of Charlie Chan Hock Chye (2016) as three case studies of graphic novels that differ from each other in interesting ways, thus exemplifying the range of what a graphic novel can be in the twenty-first century and further underscoring some of the most salient tensions between what the term ‘graphic novel’ seems to suggest and the corpus of comics works to which it is regularly applied.