Friday essay: is there a great Australian graphic novel?
Comic-art makers and avid readers agree: if the great Australian graphic novel exists, what makes it great just might surprise you.
The graphic novel "Cannon" by Lee Lai received this year's A$60,000 Stella Prize, making history by being the first graphic novel and the first non-binary author to win the prestigious literary award. Lai was also named a Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Australian Novelist during the same weekend, the first such award for a comics maker in the prize's 30-year history.
Does this make "Cannon" Australia's greatest graphic novel? Is there such a thing? Committed comics enthusiasts in Australia are viewing Lai's accolades as a watershed moment, celebrating the first graphic novel to enter and meaningfully expand conversations around the graphic novel's place on bookshelves. Since the genre's inception, creators and readers have been on a quest to discover and redefine the "great" graphic novel, paralleling the ongoing pursuit since at least the 1880s for "great" novels.
The American "graphic novel" emerged in the 1980s with landmark works like Art Spiegelman's Holocaust memoir "Maus," Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' morally complex superhero story "Watchmen," and Frank Miller's dark Batman and Joker book "The Dark Knight Returns." These publications sparked a surge in graphic novel uptake, creating a "big stage" for the language of comics and opening up new readerships and opportunities for creators.
However, the term "graphic novel" has both literary and practical connotations, sometimes signifying literary value and other times serving as a convenient container for comics that become a useful bookselling category. Folio's research team has been gathering stories of Australian comics from 1980 to the present, interviewing over 30 creators, including Lai.
They discovered that comics are often perceived as literature or art rather than solely as comics. Lai's interview by Pat Grant for Folio in 2026 sheds light on the search for literary greatness in Australian comics. Early Australian graphic novelists like Pat Grant, Nicki Greenberg, Bruce Mutard, and Mandy Ord aimed to break through to the literary market by creating single-authored works, with some published by mainstream publishers like Allen & Unwin.
Shaun Tan's "The Arrival," published in 2006, won the Children’s Book Council of Australia book of the year and subsequently, Tan won an Oscar for best animated short and the 2011 Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award. The arrival of "Maus" in 1992 cemented the idea that graphic novels could win prestigious literary awards, with Tess Hulls' "Feeding Ghosts" winning the general Pulitzer Prize for memoir or autobiography in 2023.
Meanwhile, Australian graphic novels like Mandy Ord's "When One Person Dies the Whole World Is Over" and Safdar Ahmed's "Still Alive: Notes from Australia's Immigration Detention System" have made strides in the literary world, with the latter winning a Children’s Book Council of Australia Award.
Written by urgent.news from The Conversation AU's reporting — not their text. Machine-written — it may contain errors, so check the original before relying on it.
