Since the term «Graphic novel» was coined by the graphic artist Will Eisner in 1978, the notion has helped critics to characterize a more complex adult and literate form of graphic sequential narrative. Does it mean that graphic novel is deeply different in quality from the more common corpus of comics or that graphic novel is the evolution towards graphic literature of a popular form known as «comics»? Or could we declare that, far from being the evolution of the popular form, graphic novel could be found at the very origin of that form of graphic expression since the 19th century?