Mendalla, despite my love of Gaiman, I still don't really know how to approach graphic novels. Tips?
In what way? How to decide what to read? In how to approach reading them?
I generally just look for ones that align with my general taste in literature. So I found Kieron Gillen because Once & Future deals with Arthurian themes and urban fantasy, both genres I am into. Fact is, I am not really into superheroes so I tend towards fantasy, s-f, etc. comics and graphic novels. There's a few specialized superhero titles I might take a boo at sometime (Gaiman did a cool concept called Marvel 1602, which reimagines Dr. Strange, Nick Fury, the X-men, etc. in the Elizabethan era) but I generally don't bother with the mainstream superhero titles.
Also, I look for writers, like Neil and Kieron, that I have liked in the past. So once I knew I liked Kieron's writing, it was a no-brainer to go for Phonogram (his first comics). Ditto Gaiman and Sandman. Finding artists I like helps, too (see below for some comments on the visual aspect). Dave McKeon, who has worked with Gaiman a lot among others, is one I really like.
One thing to remember is that many graphic novels are compiled comic books, so it is sometimes important to keep in mind that the "chapters" were, at one time, issues of a comic book and that the original readers wouldn't have seen the next "chapter" for a week or a month or whatever. Thus you may get multiple cliffhangers or climaxes in a volume. Not always, but it happens. For instance, in Sandman : Preludes and Nocturnes (the first volume), each issue was basically a separate story about Morpheus trying to recover his artifacts and with them, his power. In one he teams up with John Constantine for an horrific tale of addiction, in another he goes to hell and confronts Lucifer (the same Lucifer who later became the star of the TV series of that name), in another, a madman uses Morpheus' magical gem to unleash horrors on an all-night diner (one of the best, most harrowing horror stories I have ever read).
Another thing to keep in mind is that comics and graphic novels are a visual medium as much as they are a literary one, so the visuals really matter. These aren't just illustrated books where the pictures accent or add some visual colour to the text and can be glossed over. Some, sometimes much, of the storytelling actually happens in the pictures. In Sandman, for instance, there are whole pages, even multiple pages, with no text at times. The story happens entirely in the pictures. Gillen does that, too, in Phonogram. So it is important that the artist and writer be in some kind of sync, not just an artist drawing pictures of the writer's words. Kieron Gillen works a lot with a fellow Brit named Jamie McKelvie and the two mesh beautifully, with McKelvie's visuals integrating perfectly with Gillen's words to tell the story. Gaiman has a history with several artists, including the aforementioned McKeon.
Not sure if that's what you're after. I do think it helps that I have been reading comics since childhood so visual storytelling is very much a thing I have grown up with. My love of vampire fiction, for instance, can probably be traced (at least partially) to reading Marvel's Tomb of Dracula back when I was really probably a bit young to be reading it. It was about as intense a horror series as the Comics Code allowed in the Seventies. I also read Marvel's WWII titles (which, among things, gave Nick Fury's original backstory) and some of their superhero titles, mostly Captain America. Then in the eighties, a friend got me into the X-Men for a time (some of those story arcs later became part of the Fox X-Men movies). And I have been a Batman fan seemingly forever, though I have rarely read the comics beyond some of the classics, like The Dark Knight Returns and Killing Joke.
