| Current Top 10 New York Times® Fiction Bestsellers: Print & E-Books Combined | |
1. Dead Ever After (Sookie Stackhouse) ~ Charlaine Harris 2. Silken Prey ~ John Sandford  3. The Hit ~ David Baldacci  4. 12th of Never ~ James Patterson and Maxine Paetro  5. Whiskey Beach ~ Nora Roberts 
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6. The Bet ~ Rachel Van Dyken 7. A Step of Faith ~ Richard Paul Evans  8. The Oracle Glass ~ Judith Merkle Riley (ebook)  9. A Delicate Truth ~ John le Carré  10. Gone Girl: A Novel ~ Gillian Flynn 
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The First Graphic Novel?
Gil Kane and Archie Goodwin's Blackmark (1971), a science fiction/sword-and-sorcery paperback published by Bantam Books, did not use the term originally; the back-cover blurb of the 30th-anniversary edition calls it, retroactively, "the very first American graphic novel". The Academy of Comic Book Arts presented Kane with a special 1971 Shazam Award for what it called "his paperback comics novel". Whatever the nomenclature, Blackmark is a 119-page story of comic-book art, with captions and word balloons, published in a traditional book format. (It is also the first with an original heroic-adventure character conceived expressly for this form.)
The first six issues of writer-artist Jack Katz's 1974 Comics and Comix Co. series The First Kingdom were collected as a trade paperback (Pocket Books, March 1978, which described itself as "the first graphic novel". Issues of the comic had described themselves as "graphic prose", or simply as a novel.
European creators were also experimenting with the longer narrative in comics form. In the United Kingdom, Raymond Briggs was producing works such as Father Christmas (1972) and The Snowman (1978), which he himself described as being from the "bottomless abyss of strip cartooning", although they, along with such other Briggs works as the more mature When the Wind Blows (1982), have been re-marketed as graphic novels in the wake of the term's popularity. Briggs notes, however, "I don't know if I like that term too much."¹
Ace's Graphic Books Store
