Apart from The Oxford Companion to the Book (2010), there are few works on book history that even mention the history of comic books. This is perhaps due to the fact that comic books are generally dismissed by critics as a para- or subliterary field that is far removed from the realm of mainstream publishing. As Jan Baetens points out, comic books are perceived as a form of mass media entertainment not only because of their lowbrow content but also because of their industrial mode of production: “The internal excesses of the genre […] and […] the external constraints of the comics industry, which imposed a crudely capitalistic, fully Taylorized production system, are both responsible for a lowbrow image that still prevails in many well-educated circles.” In the late twentieth century, comic books were also eclipsed by the rise of the “graphic novel”—a new publishing format that was often praised for transforming graphic narratives into a legitimate literary genre. Stephen Tabachnick argues, for example, that “the graphic novel has little in common with traditional comic books” because it is “much more like full-length prose novels.” The term “graphic novel” thus conveys a sense of cultural prestige that was often seen as lacking in comic books, and this newfound prestige was inextricably linked to its material form, as “graphic novels are as thick as regular prose books, and they are printed on better paper and with better ink than usual comic books.”

There are several problems with this distinction, however, as the graphic novel format has proven to be difficult to define. For example, Roger Sabin defines graphic novels as “lengthy comics in book form,” and Tabachnick describes this format as “an extended comic book”—definitions that appear to be based on length, although extended narratives are common in comic books, and many of them have the same number of pages. In contrast, Edward T. Sullivan emphasizes the brevity of graphic novels by noting that they often contain “a single story”—a definition that would also apply to comic books featuring self-contained narratives. Jan Baetens and Hugo Frey similarly argue that graphic novels reject the logic of serialization, which “functions as a symptom of a craving for prestige that aimed at definitively cutting through the possible ties to comics,” yet this definition ignores the countless graphic novels that are published in character-based series.