The conclusion recaps the various chapters by considering what the backward look of contemporary graphic novelists can mean for comics studies today. This archival impulse in the graphic novel inevitably confronts us with our own practices as comics scholars and the extent to which we are also indebted to a range of vernacular archivists and historians of the form. It highlights both the possible blinkers that we repeat from that heritage and how these various gestures of transmission can make comics scholars more cognizant about the materiality of their own engagement with historical archives, possibly paving the way for different forms of academic research.

The introduction starts with a concise discussion of three capsule examples (Chris Ware’s McSweeney’s anthology, Art Spiegelman’s In the Shadow of No Towers, and Seth’s design for The Complete Peanuts, all published in 2004) as different markers of the archival impulse in the graphic novel. From there, and relying on these examples, the chapter sets out the methodological problems that come with historicizing the graphic novel by analyzing the backward look of contemporary cartoonists. It tackles three core issues: definitional and media-historical questions around the graphic novel, canonization and what gets forgotten in today’s cartoonists’ limited embrace of the past, and the archival turn in comics studies. It finishes by introducing the notion of gestures of transmission as a way of approaching comics memory as a visual material culture that is variously reframed, reshaped, and redrawn into the present.