Text - Rhodes University

coalesced into comics intended for consumption by an adult audience.
Ironically, adult cornics could not be sold alongside more traditional cornics; many
violated the still powerful cornics code and were not suitable for children. A new term,
graphic novels, was used to facilitate separation of the adult and child markets, and also
to combat resistance from consumers who were sceptical about these new cornics.
Graphic novels were sold in specialist cornic shops that proliferated as the market grew.
Printing was upgraded; large collections of complete stories were printed in colour on
good quality paper. The usual coarse dot matrix was refined to the quality of that used
in magazine photographs (which in turn meant that artwork could become more
sophisticated, no longer restricted to what was reproducible.)
Soon even the term graphic novels was felt by some to be slightly perjorative, as cornics
began dealing with subjects that had until now been the domain of serious literature, with
artwork of an equivalent standard. The dilemma was one that Pop Art had initiated and
Post-modernism still wrestled with. Roy Lichtenstein had said, "I'd always wanted to know
the difference between a mark that was art and one that wasn't." (Hendrikson, 1988, p.lO)
The new cornics demanded definition of these categories. 'Graphic novel' was still too
commercial a label. Sequential art became a preferred term; it seemed to emphasize that
cornics were no longer about making money. They had become equal to literature and
art. Cornics were not only respectable, they were fashionable.
The real value of reading cornics, that verbal and visual communication combined can
increase the clarity of a message as well as broaden and deepen it, was forgotten in the
rush to turn every form of communication into a cornic, just so that a higher price could
be put on it. Obscure, respectable, boring carnics appeared, beautifully painted and
written, and judged by the standards of art cinema or magazine journalism. Yet carnics
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