Neil Gaiman's Journal

you said today in the blog (Tuesday the first) that Sam Delaney invented the Graphic Novel. I alwasy that that Will Eisner invented it, and the term Graphic Novel, when he wrote Contract With God. considering that i wrote an A- paper for college on the subject and used that as a premise, i am a bit horrified that i'm wrong and what will happen if my Proff. finds out, could you please explain?


I didn't mean that Chip Delany invented the graphic novel. Just that he's created some very cool ones in his day, more or less as an afterthought.

Will certainly came up with the term graphic novel, although I think he mentioned to me once that other people had come up with it independently before he did. (A Contract With God certainly wasn't the first graphic novel, I'm afraid, or even the first graphic short story collection -- which it is -- but I believe it was the first book to be marketed with the words A Graphic Novel on the book jacket. Does that help, or just make things more confusing?)