''Graphic novels'' full-length novels in comic-strip form read like film
storyboards, making use of cinematic techniques. Frames close in and pan out,
they cut from the watcher to the watched, they dissolve, they flash back and
forward, they use montage, split screen, voice-overs. They cut from an image to
its echo: for example, in the landmark work Watchmen (1987), by Alan Moore and
Dave Gibbons, a shipwrecked eighteenth-century sailor eating raw seagull cuts to
a modern dude, in an identical attitude, eating Kentucky Fried Chicken.
Sometimes the filmic imitation goes so far as to present the credits after the
introductory sequence, credits which may include a musical ''soundtrack'' the
lyrics of popular songs suggest theme music to accompany the images. The
succession of still pictures even conveys a kind of movement; it is left to your
imagination to bump them up to the requisite 24 frames per second. And of course
the capacity for special effects is limitless.
 
   The profusion of images is in itself remarkable; an epic like Watchmen runs
to some 4,000 frames. The best are complex works of art, combining skilled and
imaginative draughtsmanship with skilful narratives. Some of the writers, such
as Clive Barker (author of the graphic novel horror series The Nightbreed
Chronicles and The Tapping Vein) and  Neil Gaiman  (whose latest, following the
inspired and ingenious graphic novella, Violent Cases, is a blockbusting
collection of stories taken from a DC comics series, The Sandman) were
established as orthodox novelists before they turned to the form. Many of the
most recent publications are surreal, experimental and ambiguous, inviting you
to decipher them like poems.
 
   Stories in pictures are of course as old as Egyptian hieroglyphics. Nick
Landau, publisher of Titan Books' graphic novels list, says he was once struck
by the splendour of the graphic novel in marble on the floor of Siena cathedral.
Frescos and church facades aside, more recent manifestations include Felix
Gluck's and Frans Masereel's novels in woodcuts, whose power the modern
cartoonists hint at.
 
   But the graphic novel is only remotely born of high art. Its immediate
forerunner is the comic-strip tradition that reached its heyday in America in
the 1940s, and the superhero strips that came over here with the GIs. Many new
publications the Batman books, for instance nod towards that golden age. Like
film itself, the graphic novel tends to be a nostalgic genre.
 
   British comics in the mid-1960s, often related to TV programmes (TV21,
Thunderbirds), kept the tradition alive and led to today's renaissance. Adult
comics such as 2000 AD, established in 1977 (it now has a circulation of 100,000
copies), catered to a cult taste for science fiction and fantasy, nurturing the
artists and storytellers who went on to produce full-length stories. (These
comics are themselves thriving: new or recently revamped titles include Black

Orchid, Crisis, Love and Rockets, and Revolver, and give a taste of what the
novels serve up.)
 
   The ever-increasing popularity of the comics was partly caused by the way
they became involved with pop music: the weirder fantasies and the macho
superheroes chimed with the image which punks, goths and heavy metallists wanted
to project. They began to sport T-shirts with the comic-strip heroes (the grim
heavy metal band Anthrax adopted 2000 AD's 21st-century cop, Judge Dredd, as
their symbol) and some even named themselves after the cartoons: Zodiac
Mindwarp, for instance, was both a band and an underground comic.
 
   The books are influenced both by such extreme and fantastical fads, and also
by more artistic developments. The term ''graphic novel'' was coined by American
cartoonist Will Eisner, who applied it to his own full-length work, a collection
of tales of a New York tenement, called A Contract With God. His book ''used the
comic medium but was not a comic book'', and was published to critical though
not commercial success in 1978. Achieving a commercial breakthrough for the
graphic novel is one of the lesser-known deeds of the Caped Crusader Frank
Miller's Batman: The Dark Knight (1986) is still selling. Watchmen followed soon
after, using the occasional chapter of straight prose that nevertheless
conformed to the rules of the game by being drawn as pages of typescript
paper-clipped to the story. By now the music and youth magazines were
declaring that comic novels had grown up.
 
   There have been other landmarks, including the fashion for Shakespeare and
opera libretti in comic-strip form. Art Spiegelman's harrowing book Maus also
demonstrated, amid much publicity, that an illustrated narrative did not need to
be comic; the mainstream publisher Deutsch brought out Spiegelman's
strip-cartoon story of his family's experience of Nazi anti-semitism.
 
   This year, though, is a new landmark. Whole new departments of bookshops are
being given over to graphic novels; mainstream publishers are signing up new
graphic-novel lists. You used to have to go to specialist bookshops to buy the
books: Forbidden Planet (part of the Titan Books empire) has had much success
with its seven branches throughout the country. Somewhat improbably, Harrods'
bookshop was in the forefront of the cult trend; it was the first general
bookshop to have a graphic-novels section. Seventy branches of WH Smith open
their sections this summer; Dillons, Athena, Books Etc, Waterstone's and
Sherratt & Hughes all now stock graphic novels. Meanwhile, specialist publishers
like Titan Books are having to compete with the big guns like Penguin for new
works. Celebrities are turning to the genre: putting the comic back into the
comic book, Penguin publishes Lenny Henry's first graphic novel in September.
Gollancz, already a strong publisher of science fiction and fantasy, launches a
specialised list in autumn next year. And others, like the small publisher
Fourth Estate, have entered the genre.
 
   Publishers and booksellers have reason to believe that graphic novels could
be big sellers: in France the bandes dessinees, ranging from such children's
books for adults as the Asterix series, to absurdist oeuvres like Raymond
Queneau's Zazie dans le Metro, have long been popular. In Japan (where the
writing is itself artwork), one third of the books sold are narrated in strip
cartoons. (One of Japan's popular comic strip heroines, Mai: The Psychic Girl,
has just been brought to Britain by Titan Books.)
 
   So who do the publishers expect to be their readers? The proportion of men to
women at graphic-novel author signing sessions is now about five to one:
unquestionably the genre has long been dominated by male fantasy. The
traditional adult comic stories are violent, sexy adventures: the heroes
Schwarzeneggers in leather, the ''heroines'' pointy-breasted houris dressed like
go-go dancers. In Watchmen, for all its technical bravura, the ideology is
disturbingly unsound. When a roomful of superhero vigilantes meet to discuss
their strategy for saving America from crime, the troublespots they pore over on
the map are labelled ''promiscuity'', ''drugs'' and ''anti-war demos'' and
''black unrest''.
  But National Front attitudes no longer set the tone. Alan Moore, Steve
Bissette and John Totleben's Swamp Thing (1987) featured arguably the first
''green'' hero a human soul trapped in the body of a muck monster. Alan Moore
and David Lloyd's new V for Vendetta, set in post-Thatcherite Britain, is
described as ''an apocalyptic nightmare vision of life under the Tories''.
Against the Orwellian regime fights ''an anarchist dedicated to the joys of
liberty, collective action, and freedom of expression''. And Al Davidson's The
Spiral Cage is the graphic autobiography of a Buddhist who was born with spina
bifida.
 
   Faith Brookner, senior editor in the science fiction department of Gollancz,
says ''There's still a lot of machismo about, but we're aiming in our graphic
novels list to break that down.''  Neil Gaiman  (whose Signal To Noise, written
with Dave McKean, will be published by Gollancz in spring 1992) describes his
work as ''vaguely feminist and pacifist''. He claims that ''the adult comic
strip is coming out of its fetishistic period''. In his 1988 Violent Cases, for
instance, the genre is subverted: it's a gangster story but in a sensitive
setting. The narrator remembers, as a small boy with a dislocated arm, visiting
a doctor who, in his own youth, used to patch up Al Capone's gang. As the boy is
treated he hears dreadful stories of the gang's exploits. There's all the
tough-guy horror of the film noir but it's not entirely sanctioned it gives the
little boy nightmares.
 
   ''You can still toy with the conventions of the genre,'' says Gaiman, ''and
the joy is that it's a melting pot. It mixes media; you can play with the
rules.'' There's an air of excitement among the publishers and practitioners, a
feeling of being in at the beginning. ''It's like the early days of film,'' says
Faith Brookner, ''It hasn't been fully explored yet.'' Gaiman adds that ''unlike
novels or the TV, it's not under such scrutiny. You can go beyond the bounds
because nobody's looking.''
 
   Not, it seems, for long.