Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: WEDNESDAY, March 24, 1993 TAG: 9303240240
SECTION: EXTRA PAGE: 1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: JANET McCONNAUGHEY ASSOCIATED PRESS
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
COMICS AGE AS LITERATURE
To a lot of people, it's unthinkable as Archie graduating from college. But believe it or not, comic books have grown up into real literature.Some of them, at least.
Superheroes still account for the bulk of comic book store sales. But "Maus," which won a Pulitzer Prize for Art Spiegelman, isn't the isolated phenomenon that some may assume.
Indeed, comic books aimed at intelligent adults were widely featured at a recent New Orleans convention of comic book distributors called the International Association for Direct Distributors.
"Recently, several people have thoroughly demonstrated that they can write comic books - graphic novels - primarily for adults, works which a child cannot begin to understand and works which are in their own way as complex as James Joyce's and William Faulkner's novels," says M. Thomas Inge, a humanities professor at Randolph-Macon College and a Fulbright lecturer with doctorates in English and American literature.
For example, Inge points out that Spiegelman's work dealt with the Holocaust, "clearly the most disturbing event of the 20th century. If you can take an event of that kind and treat it in a comic book, it says a lot about what comic book is capable of expressing.
"There's little you can't express in comic-book form, if you move away from the idea that they're only supposed to be for children, or only supposed to be entertaining."
Thoughtful, intelligent, well-written comic books that - like "Maus" - sell for $15 or more as trade paperbacks and in hard cover, have been around for some time.
"V for Vendetta," written by Alan Moore, drawn by David Lloyd and originally published in 1983 as a British serial, is as serious and dark an exploration of that country's future as George Orwell's "1984."
Will Eisner, who created "The Spirit" in the 1940s and hired the young Jules Feiffer, now is writing, drawing and publishing a series of autobiographical books. His latest, "To The Heart of the Storm," looks at how America, even as it was getting ready to enter World War II, was infected with the prejudice exploited by Hitler.
In a magazine article about Sylvie Rancourt's autobiographical "Melody, the True Story of a Nude Dancer," Ann Diamond, a Canadian journalist and poet, wrote:
"Like strip-tease, comics are a medium of exposure. The medium is perfectly suited to social criticism. Words and images can be molded to a personal vision in which rhetoric and euphemisms have no place.
"Each episode explores various themes: the generation gap, loyalty versus competition between women, the difficulty of keeping sex alive in marriage, the effects of modern materialism on rural life, family breakdown, rural poverty, depression, alcoholism," Diamond wrote. "Rancourt's belief in openness is more than a call for physical nudity, but for greater honesty in all areas of life."
Even superhero books aren't necessarily mindless chase sequences. One of John Ostrander's "Batman" stories recently created a furor in Virginia by mentioning Virginia Beach as the source for illegal guns. Alan Moore's "Watchmen," which asks the old question about who will guard the guards themselves, and his "Swamp Thing" are frequently cited as books with character and depth.
"Comics is a horrendously under-exploited medium," says Neil Gaiman, who tosses casual allusions to Chaucer, Kit Marlowe, Milton, world mythology, verse forms and just about anything else into his DC Comics series, "The Sandman."
"It's a medium with a tremendous amount of potential, but most of that potential is wasted on power fantasy for adolescent boys, which is something that holds no interest to anybody except adolescent boys and people who haven't grown up yet."
But the comic book, he adds, is a medium that is "only as good as the work done in it.
"It is quite possible that there are media that have their limitations. But you don't find that out until you've actually had some major talents working in the field, and until people have tried to push things as far as they can go."
In one of Gaiman's stories, a character holds the muse Calliope hostage and, as retribution, is driven mad by idea overload: "A man who inherits a library card to the library in Alexandria. . . . A sestina [poem] about silence, using the key words dark, ragged, never, screaming, fire, kiss. . . . A biography of Keats, from the lamia's viewpoint."
"My approach to the school library was, I started at A, and continued," says Gaiman, a Briton who recently moved to a Wisconsin suburb to be near his wife's family.
"I read everything. I was never very good at assuming that anything, any medium or any genre was inherently more valid than any other. Which is probably one of the reasons why I'm perfectly happy to write comic books."
One issue beat out words-only short stories for a 1991 World Fantasy Award. In that story, Shakespeare's company performs "A Midsummer Night's Dream" for Auberon, Titania and all the other sprites, nixies, ogres and assorted creatures of faerie. It was illustrated by Charles Vess and Malcolm Jones III.
Gaiman is fully aware that, unless the writer is also an artist, a comic book is very much a collaboration. He sometimes uses other techniques for other books, but writes his "Sandman" scripts as letters to the artists, writing to their fortes as Shakespeare wrote to Will Kemp and Richard Burbage, his actor-contemporaries.
The popularity of his books has prompted DC to start a new adult line, with Sandman as its flagship.
Editor Karen Berger took largely neglected characters and found the talent to revise them with a more sophisticated approach, says Patricia Jerez, manager of marketing and communications for DC.
And, while comics' long tradition of adapting print classics is expanding into adaptations of such modern best-sellers as "The Hobbit" and Anne Rice's vampire novels, writers other than Pollack are crossing over into original comics.
Doris Lessing and Clive Barker have written scripts for a new 24-book series being published jointly by Eclipse Comics and Harper-Collins, Eclipse publisher Dean Mullaney says.
"It's the first major attempt by a mainstream New York book publisher to publish graphic novels," Mullaney says. Other publishers have printed one here and another there, but not a series, he says.
Teen-age boys still buy most of the comics published every year. The median age of comics buyers has been 18 1/2 for some time, says Martin Stever, also of DC Comics.
"The bell curve used to be like two walls - a bell peak," he said. Now, he said, the curve is longer at each end and still expanding.