Grovel has been publishing reviews of graphic novels since 2002. Although based in the UK, we aren’t restricted to British books, offering honest book reviews intended to inform any comic buyer who reads in English. Grovel doesn’t discriminate against graphic novels because of genre, publisher, writer or artist – we aim to provide a balanced spread of reviews for all types of reader, whether they’re looking for fantastic superhero fiction or thoughtful true-life biography. If we think a book is good, we’ll say so. And if we think it’s bad, we’ll tell you that too.
Why Grovel?
Well, we took the words ‘graphic’ and ‘novel’ and played about with them a bit. We thought it sounded better than Hicnov.
What is a graphic novel?
Ask any number of people with an interest in comics and you’ll hear a different answer each time. However, as a loose guideline we’ve taken it to mean any kind of comic or sequential art that comes in a book format, as opposed to a magazine format like the weekly or monthly comics currently available. It’s a fairly random line in the sand but it’s ours and we’re sticking to it. This means that we review collected editions of comics that have previously been published in a different way (such as monthlies) and comics that aren’t fiction (like historical or biographical works), as well as the original graphic novels that some might argue are the only true ‘graphic novels’. We think most readers probably don’t give a stuff about the deeper semantics of the argument and just want something they can sit down and read, that’ll last longer than 20 minutes.
How can I get my graphic novel reviewed?
Request our postal address through our Contact page and send it to us. We can’t guarantee that everything that’s sent to us will be reviewed but we’ll try our best.
What’s with all these adverts all over the place?
Unfortunately, creating, maintaining and hosting a website costs money. In an attempt to cover these costs, we’ve set up an affiliate deal with Amazon in the US and the UK, and we display adverts via Google’s Adsense service. When you click on an Amazon link anywhere on Grovel, Amazon registers that you’ve come from our site. Any purchases you go on to make during that session, earn us a small commission. The Google adverts work differently. These advertisers have successfully bid for keywords that appear on our site. If you click on one of these adverts, Google charges the advertiser and pays Grovel a percentage. While this doesn’t bring in enough money to let us give up our day jobs or pay our writers (sorry guys), it does leave us with enough to keep the site alive. It’s a labour of love, but we do it because we have a passion for graphic novels.
You’ve got a great picture of such and such a character on your site – can I use it on my website/as a forum avatar?
The only images on the site that we own copyright of are things like the logos that we created ourselves. All the images from published comics are copyright their original owners and are used by Grovel for review purposes. So we can’t give you permission to take images from the site, but nor are we going to employ an army of lawyers to track you down if you do. However, we request that if you were to use an image, that you copy it and save it on your own server. Linking directly to the images on our server has a big impact on our bandwidth and that’s something that we care a lot about. If you happen to end up being one of the top two or three bandwidth bandits we come across in any given month, you’re likely to end up hosting an advert for our site rather than your favourite comic character, which cuts down the load on our servers and makes you look like a bit of a tool to the hundreds of people who notice before you do because the image is cached on your hard disk. Don’t say we didn’t warn you.
I think your reviews suck
You’re not the first and you won’t be the last. We positively encourage lively debate with our readers, so if you don’t like something we’ve written, leave us a comment under the review or send us an email and let us know. Your opinion might even make us look at a review differently and commission a re-write.