All too often, the term ‘graphic novel’ is inaccurately used to describe a collection of individual comic books bound together in a single volume – think Alan Moore’s The Watchmen (an episodic story in 12 parts) or Neil Gaiman’s collected volumes of Sandman (75 individual issues in its original run).
Such collections, usually trade paperbacks, are certainly epic in scope and remarkable acts of imagination, but they weren’t necessarily imagined as novels per se – they were written as monthly instalments, not as a sustained, focused and finite narrative.
