Notes From the Book Review Archives

This week’s cover stories are all about comics. In May 1998, Tom De Haven took to the Book Review pages to meditate on the medium’s literary and artistic value. Read an excerpt below.

Whatever happened to the legitimacy — to the hip cachet, even — that serious comics enjoyed only a few years ago? Following the great success of Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” major book publishers actively sought out narrative cartoonists, and bookstores promised to make room for “graphic novels.” The art form seemed primed for unfeigned respect, if not wholesale acceptance.

Despite, and partly because of, the apparent simplicity of comics — paper, pen, brush and ink; panel, panel, panel — their allure and certainly their potential have never been easy things to describe. I recall a (fairly) friendly argument that I had with a poet in New York City. He had just read several reviews of “Maus” and he seemed bewildered by the positive notices it had received. A comic book about the Holocaust? Oh, please. I asked him if he intended to read it, and he frowned. When I used the word “literature,” his back teeth actually clicked. At last, exasperated, I asked him: “What’s the problem? So it’s comics, so what? If something is good, it’s good — right?”

“No.” His reply was instant. “If this Spiegelman is so talented, then all he needs is language. He doesn’t need pictures.”

And there it was again, the educated American’s 200-year-old ingrained prejudice against — pictures. Pictures are easy, pictures are cheap, pictures are for children; but ah, the written language!

“Come on,” I said, refusing to let this guy off the hook. “You go to museums all the time. You look at pictures. You look at drawings.”

“Yes, all right,” he said, “and they don’t have those stupid balloons!”

But it’s those stupid balloons tethered inside proximate pictures that make comics so distinctive. (The underground cartoonists of the 60s used to call their work “comix” — a co-mix, or blend, of image and words.) Language and pictures, pictures in sequence, with time indicated and manipulated spatially. That’s comics, period.