Soccer Dad

Murder he wrote

Graphic novels are starting to gain popularity in England.

“On the Continent graphic novels have been as accepted as films or books for many years,” said the author Raymond Briggs in a 2005 interview with the newspaper The Observer, “but England has had a snobby attitude towards them. They’ve always been seen as something just for children.”

But things have started to change.

First came the surprise successes of “Ethel and Ernest,” Mr. Briggs’s 1998 word-and-image biography of his parents, which sold more than 200,000 copies, and “Jimmy Corrigan: The Smartest Kid on Earth,” the American artist Chris Ware’s graphic novel, which controversially won The Guardian’s first-novel award in 2001. Since then, the graphic novel — loosely defined as a novel whose content is displayed in both images and text — has begun to break into the British mainstream.

Leading the pack, Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Random House UK and the British publisher of “Jimmy Corrigan” and “Ethel and Ernest,” has more than tripled its graphic novel output over the past year, publishing nine new titles since July 2006. Dan Franklin, Cape’s publishing director, said he hoped to increase this number.

Unfortunately in Poland they've discovered a graphic novelist.

A court in Wrocław has sentenced a novelist to 25 years in prison for murder, basing some of the evidence on descriptions in a crime story he published. The novelist was charged with the brutal killing of a local businessman, whom he suspected of having an affair with his ex-wife, in November 2000.

literature, murder.