Cartoon, Comic or Graphic Novel - Difference anyone?

So next we're planning to watch Watchmen. The trailor is very promising and so are the reviews ("close to the oringal, violent, pornogaphic" ... sounds interesting). As with all of the previous movies which turned cartoons/comics/graphic novels into film, I haven't read the original. Should I? This time I thought I might.

As a friend passed over some electronic of the Watchmen material, we got into a brief discussion whether it was a graphic novel, a cartoon or a comic. "All the same", I thought. But no. "All different", he insisted. So how are they different? The most reliable source for an answer is wikipedia (actually, I wouldn't know where else to look. Just like I wouldn't know where to buy furniture other than at IKEA).

Cartoon. A cartoon can refer to "several very different forms of visual art and illustration". Mmmmh. Very different forms. This doesn't help, wikipedia! Reading on, it gets somewhat more specific and we can infer that it's something about singled page drawings as opposed to a series of pictures, mostly without speech bubbles, using captions instead.

Comic. Here wikipedia gets fancy with the definition: "graphic medium in which images are utilized in order to convey a sequential narrative". Sequential is key here. Not single paged. There is a story line. It seems that comics are always printed. So "Finding Nemo" is not a comic. I could have told you that.

Graphic Novel. "A graphic novel is a type of comic book, usually with a lengthy and complex storyline similar to those of novels." So a subcategory of comic. The only, somewhat blurry, difference seems to be in the complexity of the storyline. Also, in terms of their physical appearance, graphic novels are bound like books. In other words, it's like the comic and the novel having a baby. The baby is a novel with pictures. This doesn't imply that they are intelectually any less challenging than ordinary books with printed texts.

So what about Watchmen? Where to put it? The answer is clearly c) Graphic Novel. I can't wait to read the stuff and then go to find out if the movie is as complex, violent, pornographic as the grahic novel.


P.S. WIRED provides highly interesting background material on the Watchmen. It's an amazing example of how culture feeds on itself.