Comic Books
Every ten years or so, critics suddenly discover that mainstream comics have grown up. ___ 31 ___ as 'graphic novels' or 'sequential art', it's now okay for the literati to be seen reading such puerile material - once they've learned how.
Of course, stories for adult readers have been around since the inception of strips and comics in the 1800s, but for the ___ 32 ___ crop of graphic classics we have to thank the cartoonists who cut their teeth churning out the 'trash mags' of the 1950s and underground comix of the 1960s.
Then, in the 1970s, the underground met the overground when Art Spiegelman sat down with Will Eisner to talk futures. Out of these conversations came Maus and A Contract with God, two masterpieces which rank beside the works of Günter Grass and Charles Dickens, respectively. ___ 33 ___ books of strips or compilations of magazines, the self-contained single-story comic book had arrived.
Spiegelman and Eisner crossed over into book shops. They edged the door open and in sneaked young guns like Joe Sacco (Palestine), the Hernandez Brothers (Love & Rockets), Alan Moore (From Hell) and Marjane Satrapi (Persepolis), writer-artists who have taken the graphic ___ 34 ___ into areas which would astonish those who still believe comics mean testosterone in tights. Trash mags now run the length of War and Peace and win Pulitzers.
But the medium is a labour of love. The work involved in filling a page is staggering by comparison with a page of text. The remuneration rarely matches all the writing and designing, drawing and inking, but the reward is a work of art which readers treat differently to a book with only a cover plate. Many keep their objects of beauty in plastic envelopes and repeatedly return to them, maybe just one page, for it is the visceral quality of the ___ 35 ___ that compels.
IAN GORDON, NEW INTERNATIONALIST