News : If it's not violent it's not for adults?

I think it's interesting to see that people in the western world are slowly adapting to graphic novels, as they are to manga. I do however, find it amusing that they believe it's new "cutting edge" stuff, as stated by one of my creative writing lecturers. People seem to think this nice marketing term 'graphic novel' is of somewhat a higher status than your average comic or manga, which is simply not true. It is just a comic or manga in it's book form, rather than in softcover magazines or papery flip books. Of course we never see manga in it's flippy book stage, but that is how they come out in Japan, in flippy magazines containing normally one chapter of several different manga, published monthly or even weekly.

Some will argue that graphic novels are aimed at an older audience and perhaps a majority written by western authors are, but Japan has always had manga aimed at an older audience, including hentai and erotic comics, which I'm not necessarily sure that we want.Alot of these manga actually bear a rating system when published in english, even titles such as Mushishi by Yuki Urushibara, which have no erotic content, drug use, or violence, still bear a rating of Older Teen 16+, which is just a suggestion that the actual content and stories are aimed at a more mature age group. This is entirely unlike the adult graphic novels written by western authors, such as Frank Miller for example, which seem to figure that it is extreme violence, gore, drug and sexual references which make graphic novels worthy of the older audience title, which isn't such a terrible thing, Eastern authors also have titles that fall into that same sort of ideaology, like Akira for example.
But the point I'm trying to make is that the Japanese authors and Japanese reading audience, accept the other kind of graphic novels as also being for an adult demographic, which sadly, a large part of the western audience don't. If you want to sell a 'graphic novel' to westerners it seems you just have to make something with as much violence as kill bill.