Graphic Novels - What? How?

How does a graphic novel work, anyway?

By now, most of you have probably read at least one graphic novel or comic book, like New Kid by Jerry Craft, Awkward by Svetlana Chmakova, American Born Chinese by Gene Luen Yang, or the Amulet series by Kazu Kibuishi.

Did you know that there are graphic novels about history, science, and civil rights too?

A collage of five narrative nonfiction Graphic Novels for middle schoolers, including The Stonewall Riots by Archie Bongiovanni & A. Andrews, March by John Lewis, They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Tomboy by Liz Prince, and Amazons, Abolitionists, and Activists by Mikki Kendall and A. D'Amico.

Graphic Novel COnventions

You may have noticed that comic book and graphic novel creators use images and text to tell their stories in very specific ways. These specific ways are called conventions.

The following images illustrate the most commonly used conventions, so that you can use them in your graphic novels too.

Image shows a page from Jerry Craft's graphic novel, New Kid. Text boxes provide definitions for various conventions, along with arrows pointing to an example of that convention. This image illustrates the difference between a panel and a frame.

Image uses the same page from Jerry Craft's New Kid. Text boxes and arrows identify speech bubbles, narration boxes, and gutters.

This image uses a page from Burnett et al's 2021 Batman The Adventure Continues. Text boxes define graphic novel conventions like onomatopoeia, bleeds, and emanata. Arrows connected to the text boxes point to examples of each convention on the page.

How do you Create a graphic novel?

Note: Although we did not create them for this project, if we were to do this lesson with a class, we would also provide graphic organizers and supports to help the students create characters, plan their storylines, and break their narrative into scenes.

References

Burnett, A., Dini, P., & Templeton, T. (2021). Batman the adventures continue: Season 1. DC Comics.

Craft, J. (2019). New Kid. Quill Tree Books. https://jerrycraft.com/books/new-kid/

Read Write Think. (n.d.). Graphic novel / comics terms and concepts. https://www.readwritethink.org/sites/default/files/resources/lesson_images/lesson1102/terms.pdf

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