Last week, Chris Ware's JIMMY CORRIGAN: THE SMARTEST KID ON EARTH won the Guardian First Book Award 2001. Good for him - it's a great piece of work which deserves the recognition. Not to say the £10,000 prize money.

Naturally, we always get a nice warm glow from seeing good comics getting some kind of response from the outside world. It's at this point that I'm meant to say the catchphrases "respect for comics as an artform" and "bringing in new readers", so that you can chant along and cheer wildly. Comics are rarely even allowed to make the shortlist for literary awards, which has caused some grumbling from time to time in the past. I seem to remember some short story award or other changing their rules to expressly exclude comics after a Neil Gaiman story made it onto their shortlist one year.

In fact, I generally have a lot of sympathy for the literary purists who argue that comics shouldn't be allowed onto their shortlists. A prize for novels should be given to novels. Graphic novels are not novels. They're a different medium entirely which happen to have co-opted the word "novel" in an attempt to sound grown-up and important.

To my mind, if somebody has gone to the trouble of setting up a prize for novels or short stories then unless they went out of their way to stress otherwise, it's pretty much to be taken as read that they meant prose. You don't have to look down on comics as an artform to recognise that they aren't prose.

Anyone who thinks Ware's book will be a commercial hit needs their head examined. If "short story" just refers to the length of the piece then you're on a slippery slope. Why confine yourself to print? Why not include drama, films or any other narrative artform? The argument for including comics in conventional literary awards really boils down to trying to squeeze comics into the definition on the unconvincing technicality that comics and prose are both published in bound volumes of paper. (Which, these days, is an inaccurate generalisation anyway.)

So, no, comics generally don't belong in literary awards intended for prose. The Guardian First Book Award is a slightly different matter, however, because when they say "book", they really do mean "book." You might question the point of an arts award where there are only two criteria for eligibility, one of which is the involvement of a bookbinder somewhere along the line, but let's not. It's an oddly-defined award, but hell, it's their money.

Besides, maybe this award will translate into (altogether now) more respect for comics as an artform and will bring in new readers. Of course, anyone who thinks that JIMMY CORRIGAN is ever going to be a mainstream commercial hit needs their head examined. But it's the kind of book that could and should find a much more receptive audience in the bookstores than it will in the comic stores.

In my view, comic stores tend to be rather unfairly criticised for their lack of interest in this sort of material. Most comic stores aren't really general comic stores at all, and never meant to be. They are intended to be primarily hobby stores for superhero enthusiasts, which is why so many of them see their most natural avenue of expansion as pushing fantasy novels, sci-fi videos and trading cards, not comics of little interest to their customer base. The comic stores were never very fertile ground for people like Chris Ware; the bookstores are where they always needed to be.

My local branch of Waterstones has had JIMMY CORRIGAN in stock for months, and displayed it fairly prominently along with the other new novels. Presumably it'll get another run there following the award. They emphatically did not rack it in their graphic novels section, a hellish pile-up of trade paperbacks which takes up roughly half the space of the DR WHO and STAR TREK novels immediately to the right. Ware's audience is never going within a mile of that shelf. They can see the Klingons and elves all around, and they know to steer clear. These are obviously the shelves for the desperately sad.

Comic stores were never very fertile ground for people like Chris Ware. There's been some talk lately about a glut of graphic novels, now that Marvel and DC are seemingly prepared to collect almost anything. At first glance this is absurd, since surely the more graphic novels there are, the better.

But then, the graphic novels shelves probably wouldn't be marooned in the sci-fi and fantasy section if they weren't dominated by cheap reprints of mid-nineties crossover trash which in many cases are an indefensible waste of trees, let alone shelf space. Because this sort of material is dominating the graphic novels in the bookstore market - where I find it hard to believe it's gaining many new readers - the bookstore graphic novels are in danger of getting trapped in the same demographic ghetto as they were in before, next to the sci-fi and fantasy.

As a nice respectable literary prize-winner, however, Ware will presumably get to hang onto that nice, respectable slot with the Real Books. The book's been out a few months now and seems to be clinging on to that foothold. And with the Guardian First Book Award sticker on it, the browsing audience may be a little more disposed to give it a shot, secure in the knowledge that somebody they have heard of liked the book.

Now, admittedly this particular award is not perhaps the most reliable seal of approval you could find. It's not like it's the Booker Prize. It's only been around for three years, and it hasn't yet built up a track record that sends readers scurrying to explore its winners. One of the two previous winners was WHITE TEETH by Zadie Smith, which seemed to be prominently displayed for ages. Still is, come to think of it.

The other one was WE WISH TO INFORM YOU THAT TOMORROW WE WILL BE KILLED WITH OUR FAMILIES by Philip Gourevitch, which I don't remember seeing a great deal of. It certainly sounds like a bundle of laughs. This year's shortlist also included WITTGENSTEIN'S POKER, which is described by the Guardian as "David Edmonds and John Eidinow's examination of the 1946 argument between Ludwig Wittgenstein and Karl Popper." I'll have to find a copy of that, to see if it can possibly be as dull as the Guardian makes it sound.

Finding books to build on JIMMY CORRIGAN's success isn't easy. Nonetheless, this is still a reputable sounding award. It's got the Guardian newspaper behind it, which is a credible enough name. The judges were a mix of impressive-sounding literary figures and, for that all-important populist tinge, Charlie Higson from THE FAST SHOW, giving the impression that the winner must be both clever and readable.

All of this helps to position JIMMY CORRIGAN as something entirely reputable and different from the usual crap in the graphic novels section, and gives it a seal of approval that might well bring in some new readers. Ware's natural audience is the sort of people who really are more likely to buy a book because it has won a literary award.

Of course, the catch is that the marketing pitch is now inevitably that JIMMY CORRIGAN is, "The graphic novel that won a real award". It's a novelty item, albeit one with impeccable artistic credentials, and that's the handicap to capitalising on it. People will buy it, but not with the faintest intention of buying any other graphic novels afterwards. Because this is (as they see it) a freak exception to the rule, and no matter how good it may be, it's not going to shake their view that everything else is still crap.

Certainly it's a one-of-a-kind piece of work, and finding appropriate books to build on this - and help to build a graphic novel section outside the fantasy ghetto - isn't all that easy. Something like Jason Lutes' BERLIN might be along the right lines, but it doesn't have JIMMY CORRIGAN's advantage of being so immediately and obviously unlike any comic you've seen before - which helps immunise it against audience preconceptions.

JIMMY CORRIGAN should sell a few copies off the back of this. Chris Ware will have that to point to when he releases his next book. As for the rest of the comics industry, chances are they will fail to capitalise just as spectacularly as they did with MAUS. ("Er... would you like another copy of WATCHMEN?") But then, capitalising on books like this isn't easy if you don't have anything similar to sell, and these breakthrough titles seem to come along once a decade or so. That's not enough to make any sustained progress, so we're back to square one after each one. I won't hold my breath to see if it's any different this time around.

Still, anything's better than nothing. And at least Chris Ware is getting rewarded. One down, rest of the medium to go.

Paul O'Brien is the author of the weekly X-AXIS comics review.

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