What I still think of as comics has been going through a time of great change and growth.

When I decided to dedicate most of my time to making them in high school, it was in part because I was being kicked out, and comics were something you didn’t need a degree in. In truth, there were no degrees to be had in comics. If you wanted to learn more about the medium, you studied art, writing, and film, and extrapolated from these different media. If you achieved a professional level of skill there was little worry about competition; I landed my first paying jobs at Marvel after just one serious attempt to get work in the early 1990s.

While I was developing my own skills out on the edges of the scene in the late 1980s, the then lone journal of comics, inventively titled The Comics Journal, called for our bastard medium to be taken seriously by critics, and urged creators to take what they did seriously in order to bring the standards of their work up to where they might merit that attention.

Creators like Will Eisner and Art Spiegelman presented long-form books called “graphic novels.” Spiegelman went on to win a Pulitzer for Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. The move to find new names for the work other than cartoons, funnies, and comics became a great quest. This gave rise to Scott McCloud’s groundbreaking 1993 book Understanding Comics, which presented a taxonomy elaborating on the term “sequential art” coined by Eisner, and framed comics in a historical context by presenting it as the latest evolution of a long tradition of visual narrative media. Much ado followed. I’ll write about that on another occasion.

Skip ahead to 2010: graphic novels are a fast growing segment of the book publishing market (not hard when you start so small) and are now widely embraced by critics and doyens of pop culture alike. They’ve even become a new favorite of Hollywood. A sign of legitimacy in mainstream Western culture?

When I left school twenty years ago, there were no degrees in comics. Today, McCloud’s book is on the reading lists for numerous English programs. Lectures and programs are widely offered on sequential art and entire schools have been founded dedicated exclusively to our once disrespected and rarefied pursuit. Cannons are being established, and now it seems like you can’t toss an Ames Lettering Guide without hitting a young cartoonist.

With all this newfound credibility, in a world where comics are finally taken seriously, The Comics Journal seemed to lose its editorial focus for a while. Having had their soapboax taken away, The Comics Journal ultimately required an editorial transplant for its web-based publishing ventures from the post-millennial site Comics Comics, which was born in a world where comics were already mainstream, in order to become relevant again. Many older comic creators and critics appear a bit lost in a world were they are now seen as cool and even potentially literary, rather than deviant unsavory practitioners of an underground art. Some almost seem to resent the change in status, and many feel unsure about what it means for the future of the medium.

Last year, upon receiving his second Doug Wright Award for best book (an award reserved for recognizing Canadian cartoonists to help raise their profiles in the mainstream book publishing world), Canadian comics laureate Seth advised young creators not to forget their roots as outsiders.

He told the audience that the medium has changed since he started out. Comics used to be mainly underground; there were no restrictions and Seth didn’t feel he had to appeal to an audience. He thought there was no audience, so no compromise was required. But the industry is changing and there might actually be a carrot out there to reach for. Wary of this, Seth suggested that creators have to hang onto the spirit comics had in the old days, that is, to do the work for themselves. He concluded: “Don’t try to be comic book professionals. You’re not professionals. Remember to be artists.”

With this flowering and new legitimacy, and even trendiness, comics have many pretenders attempting to jump on the bandwagon with publishers releasing monographs of unassociated or thematic illustrations marketed as graphic novels. You find conceptual artists presenting PowerPoint presentations as graphic fiction. Now that there are carrots, everyone wants a piece of comics.

So what is sequential art, a graphic novel, graphic fiction?

The latter is not well defined. It’s fiction, it’s graphic. What else can you say? Seems that’s up to the reader and the publisher. I tend to infer from fiction the presence of a narrative. In my short time as the editor of graphic fiction here at carte blanche, the strongest submissions I’ve seen all have a narrative. With or with out words they tell us a story.

“Homunculus” by Francis Raven does it with abstract photos and text, “Entropy” by Aaron Costain with surrealism. But the narrative prevails, lives strong. Graphic fiction can play with memoir, like Dustin Harbin’s “Fun with Autobiography,” or reveal the deeply personal, like “Hush” by Mara Sternberg. And it can be absurdest like “Waitin’ for Chip” by Nina Bunjevac.

Comics had clear parameters and a cultural load: a pulp pop-culture medium. The name came in part because many used humour, but their low brow status was a by-product of 1950s bigotry. The graphic novel is, I think, simply marketing nomenclature. It’s a long-form comic. Comics with a spine, some say. The term “sequential art” was an effort to define the working parts academically. It has room for evolution and growth but it is specific. It attempts, like a university student seeking an adult identity, to be exacting.

I still waffle on “graphic fiction.” But maybe this is just what is called for. A move from identifying yourself by a fixed and self-limiting identity, e.g. punk, hipster, geek, jock, to something that shifts with the aging and changing body of the medium with an accommodating grace and vagueness.

Allowing it to be whatever it needs to be.

Update: I was unaware when I first wrote this post that TVO’s Big Ideas had presented University of Toronto English professor Nick Mount giving a great talk on graphic novels, specifically Seth’s It’s a Good Life, If You Don’t Weaken. Many things I touched on are talked about and more. Watch or listen to it here.