Hispania

Abstract:

Since the beginning of literary time, genre has been an issue for critics and scholars. Comics and graphic novels have stepped into the fray in recent decades causing even more confusion. This is even more evident in Spain where the publishers are foolhardy men and women simply out to make money and who are too deeply imbedded in their bourgeois understanding of literature to consider and properly promote sequential art narrative. Therefore, they are often advertised as graphic novels when even the authors themselves would label them as comics. No matter the terminology used to label the texts, the problem comes in how they are viewed. I propose that, as academics, we start viewing them as the authors do, as comics, assign these texts in our literature classes, and we start researching and investigating them just as we would any other text in the field of literature.