The Legend of Sally Jones When discussing the nature of the graphic novel in relation picturebooks and/or comic books, critics tend to focus on the visual content. Picturebook scholars refer to picturebook codes and make use of the concept of the iconotext (Hallberg; Nikolajeva & Scott), in which the relationship between verbal and visual text on single pages or spreads is explored. In practice, if not in theory, such iconotext analyses often overlook the dynamic interplay between pictures. Research into comics (or the bande dessinée, to use the more solidly critical French term), on the other hand, is more concerned with the idea of seriality, that is, the spatial organization of panels and strips, as well as the arrangement and repetition of visual motifs over and across pages. What is regularly missed in research into comic books, however, is the verbal aspect of the narrative, and how it relates to the visual representation. But in any case, and through association with the picturebook and the comic book genres, the “graphic novel” is caught up in a discourse of the visual, whether “iconic” or “serial.” Obviously, “graphic,” refers to the visual domain, but as I see it, and just as importantly, it is also a novel. The reason why this matters is that it takes somewhat different skills to read a graphic novel than a picturebook, or a comic book. It is in this context that it becomes interesting to consider Legenden om Sally Jones [“The Legend of Sally Jones” – not translated into English] by Jakob Wegelius. The Swedish publication was in 2008, and it won the most prestigious children’s book prize in Sweden that year, the August Prize. The sequel, Mördarens apa [“The Murderer’s Ape” – not translated into English] was also awarded the August Prize (2014), and also received the Nordic Council Prize in the same year. In this presentation I will focus on the qualities and properties that make The Legend of Sally Jones a (graphic) novel. Methodologically I seek inspiration in Ian Watt’s historical and critical account of the genre in his seminal The Rise of the Novel (1957). The underlying educational assumption I make is that by engaging with graphic novel, children (the novel is aimed at 10-12 year olds) are not only given the tools to handle complex visual-verbal narratives, but also serve as an introduction to the rich tradition of novel writing in prose. Björn Sundmark