The graphic novel Cannon by Lee Lai was awarded this year’s A$60,000 Stella Prize, establishing historic firsts in more than one area. Cannon is the first graphic novel, and Lai the first non-binary author, to win this major literary prize. The same weekend, Lai was named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist, the prize’s first awarding to a comics maker in its 30-year history.

Does that make Cannon Australia’s great graphic novel? Is there such a thing?

Australia’s tight-knit community of unreasonably obsessed comics creators are celebrating Lai’s honours as a watershed moment. Cannon both enters and meaningfully expands conversations around the graphic novel and its place on the bookshelf – the idea of a comic that can meet traditional benchmarks of literary excellence, and appears on the recommendation lists of readers who “don’t usually read comics”.

Since the graphic novel first appeared as a genre, creators and readers have been searching, finding and searching again for the “great” graphic novel – mirroring the ongoing search, since at least the 1880s, for “great” novels of various stripes. (Most famously, the “great American novel”.)

The American “graphic novel” first appeared in the 1980s, with the publication of several important books. They included Art Spiegelman’s Holocaust memoir (casting Jews as mice and Germans as cats), Maus, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s morally complex superhero story, Watchmen, and Frank Miller’s pitch-dark Batman and Joker book, The Dark Knight Returns. The decades following their release saw a rising uptake of the graphic novel.

This new kind of comic book created a “big stage” for the language of comics, creating new readerships and new opportunities for comics creators. For some, the graphic novel – as opposed to the comic, the comic book, the cartoon or just comics – was a signal of literary value; a call to arms for creators with sophisticated ambitions. For others, the term graphic novel was more practical: a convenient container for comics that became a useful bookselling category.

Graphic novels can use playful and experimental visual language to explore weighty themes like the Holocaust, the Iranian revolution or life in detention. Ideally, perhaps, they have something to offer that can only be accessed through the juxtaposition of words and images.

Our research team, Folio, has been collecting stories of Australian comics from 1980 to now, spending five years talking in depth with more than 30 creators, including Lai.

We have tracked the appearance of the graphic novel, its rise as a literary form, and the way Australian comics creators have responded to its call. We learned that comics are not always thought of as literature: just as often, artists speak of comics as a kind of art, a cousin of film and animation, or a branch of visual communication.

The search for literary greatness

Comic artists in Australia still operate like a subculture, tucked away in the literary underground.

A member of our team, Pat Grant, published his first graphic novel, Blue, in 2012. Like Lai’s Cannon, it was published overseas by a comics publisher, and in Australia by Giramondo – a publisher mainly known for poetry and experimental literature.

Pat remembers the early 2000s as a time when creating a graphic novel that broke through to the literary market was a major motivator for artists.

A boom of single-authored comics pitched at literary markets by creators like Nicki Greenberg (The Great Gatsby), Bruce Mutard (The........

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