[dgellow]

> it allowed some people to say they don't read plebeian BDs, they read romans graphiques

I don't know, that's not the way I see it personally. I see roman graphiques as more experimental concerning the narration, art, even how the actual book is produced (experimenting with different type of paper, different format) where traditionnal bandes dessinées have more strict codes they follow. So yes it can feel a bit more serious in some way but you also find weird and funny things.

[klmr]

At least for the English term this is explicitly the reason it was created: to avoid the bad reputation “comic strips” (and the term has been criticised for precisely this, because it’s seen as pretentious).

[bunderbunder]

If the goal was distancing oneself from mainstream comic strips and books, that fell apart pretty quickly. I'm pretty sure the term was popularized by Marvel's Graphic Novels series of books.

[yesenadam]

"Fan historian Richard Kyle coined the term "graphic novel" in an essay in the November 1964 issue of the comics fanzine Capa-Alpha. The term gained popularity in the comics community after the publication of Will Eisner's A Contract with God (1978) and the start of Marvel's Graphic Novel line (1982) and became familiar to the public in the late 1980s after the commercial successes of the first volume of Art Spiegelman's Maus in 1986 and the collected editions of Frank Miller's The Dark Knight Returns in 1986 and Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen in 1987. The Book Industry Study Group began using "graphic novel" as a category in book stores in 2001."

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Graphic_novel

I read A Contract with God and some other of Eisner's stuff lately, e.g. The Plot: The Secret Story of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and the version of the "To be, or not to be" speech in Comics and Sequential Art - just awesome.