Discourses about comics focus very often on their narrative dimension to the extent that they are frequently considered as narratives per se. Driven by the ambition to rethink established formulas, alternative publishers show examples of works that invite to move beyond this approach. This chapter looks at comics that do not tell a story (in the narrow sense of the word) or question familiar narratives. It focuses on abstract comics or comics made of series of unrelated images. Building on the works of creators that tend to remain under the radar such as Rosaire Appel, Renée French, Tim Gaze, or Bianca Stone, this chapter delineates possibilities for understanding these creations and the specific kinds of pleasure they generate. By highlighting their links with other media, in particular music and poetry, it emphasizes how the reader’s response is closely linked to their horizon of expectations. Finally, it shows that the study of comics that are at the limits of narration allow to reassess how we see comics in general, including those that privilege the story.

What makes a comic a graphic novel? Is it having a long, complete narrative? Being published as a book? Having a complex storytelling technique that leads to literary awards and critical acclaim? All these criteria have been deployed at some time or another to define the graphic novel, and they recur throughout this chapter as we follow a history of the ways in which comics have been hailed as novels since the mid-nineteenth century. With an emphasis on the United States, key moments are considered such as the woodcut novels of the 1920s and 1930s, the start of the direct market in the 1970s, the first graphic novel boom of the 1980s, and the popularity of graphic novels in the twenty-first century. Notable texts, creators, and publishers are discussed, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus and Raw Books & Graphics, and we see the changing economic contexts out of which graphic novels have emerged. This chapter ends by outlining how the Internet has transformed the production, distribution, and selling of graphic novels, with contemporary creators unshackled from the idea that a graphic novel has to be a book.