I've recently become curious about how the graphic novel and its cousin the trade paper collection developed in mainstream comics, but I've been having trouble with the chronology, so I figured I could get some help here. Working from memory (because Googling wasn't terribly helpful), I'll list what I've got so far.
Sidestepping the argument about whether it was the "first graphic novel"--and if it wasn't, what was--Eisner's A Contract with God came out in 1978. Marvel's first, The Death of Captain Marvel, came out in 1982 and was followed the next year by DC's inaugural GN, Star Raiders. But how did reprint collections fit into all this? Dave Sim put out Swords of Cerebus, his first attempt to collect Cerebus, in the early '80s, but at some point he abandoned that and went to the phone-book collections in, what 1985, 1986, later? Somewhere around the same time, Love and Rockets collections started to come out from Fantagraphics. My sense is those were before the Cerebus phone books, but I'm not sure. And weren't there Elfquest collections?
Back to the majors again, Marvel started publishing its Masterworks in the mid-to-late '80s, and DC was a bit later to the party with DC Archives. Did the success of these inspire the trade paper collections, or was it the other way around? What was the first trade paper reprint from either of the majors that we'd recognize in a modern form today. Ronin was released as a mini-series in 1983, but when was it collected? If I recall, it wasn't a success at the time, so I'm thinking the collection didn't come until Miller had already proven his success with Dark Knight Returns. Speaking of which, how quickly was Dark Knight collected? All four parts of the mini appeared in 1986, but The Grand Comic Book Database lists contradictory publication dates of 1986 and 1988 for the trade. Dark Knight was finished before Watchmen, but did the Watchmen trade appear before Dark Knight?
So much of this happened so quickly that I'm not sure one can ferret out much of a cause-and-effect relationship, but I'm curious as to how much of one can be inferred.
Posted by Doug at November 20, 2005 2:04 PM