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Neil Gaiman’s Sandman as a Gateway from Comic Books to Graphic Novels

2015; University of North Texas Press; Volume: 47; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1353/sdn.2015.0038

1934-1512

Cyril Camus,

Digital Storytelling and Education

“Graphic novel” refers to a publication format and a storytelling approach that depart from comic books’. Jean-Paul Gabilliet deals with publishing practices, Andrés Romero-Jodár with chronotopes: both think the periodical nature of comic books is what sets them apart from graphic novels’ closed narratives. In Romero-Jodár’s aesthetic terms, the latter re-emphasize the passing of time, the former de-emphasize it. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman is considered a seminal work that helped the shift from comic books as norm to the rise of the graphic novel. A typically monthly comic-book project that progressively came to be designed and marketed as a cycle of graphic novels, it relates the story of an immortal deity who is obsessively determined to remain immutable, but is led to change despite itself. The narrative thus mimics the very victory of time that is, for Romero-Jodár, the one defining feature of graphic novels as opposed to comic books.