Reading the Pictures: Graphic Novels
For my generation, comic books received a bad rap. Parents were convinced comics were a contributing factor to a great epidemic of juvenile delinquency and a concomitant claim that the readers of comics were, by definition, stupid. It was not until the publication of Art Speigelman’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Maus: A Survivor’s Tale (Pantheon, 1986) that the cultural stature of comics, now called “graphic novels,” underwent revision. Though there was some of the usual grousing by interested parties about what defined the “new genre,” my sense of the distinction between the old-style superhero comics and their more recent cousins is something approximating the difference between cartoons featuring Mickey Mouse or Tom & Jerry and recent films like Toy Story and Shrek.
