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a solid high fantasy tale of Elves, Humans and good and evil. Soon we will see comic works by renown writers such as Laurell Hamilton

You almost had me upp to this point.

Comics about elves, and considering a hack Anne Rice wannabe as "renowned" writers pretty much says it all about comic books. The pretentions to some kind of relevence are just that.

Comic books are just comic books, simplistic stories for arrested adolescents who can't handle real books. No offense, just my opinion as one who read them as a kid and has looked at them over the years due to my work with kids.

I was a literature/creative writing major in college--okay, so maybe that doesn't carry the weight it once did--but there are some comics that cross into the country of literature. My personal favorite is George Pratt's 'Enemy Ace' graphic novel. It is a powerful integration of beautiful art and compelling narrative, dealing with--among other things--the nature of war and warriors. Part of the problem of comic books, as I see it, is the insularity of the comic book world, with both its creators and its audience. James O'Barr, the creator of 'The Crow' complained once in an interview that most comic book artists never draw from life; they draw essentially from each other, and as a result, their figurative work becomes even more exaggerated--like the very worst of the rococo artists of the eighteenth century. The quality of the writing is substandard for similar reasons. There's a kind of creative incest at work. Occasionally, a comic book creator will venture into, say, film, and you get something as wretched as 'Spawn' or 'Sin City'.

Sorry, I'm rambling. It's just that sometimes I get a sense of the enormous potential offered by the 'picture story' medium, and then come up against the rampant mediocrity that passes for 'renowned' in those circles. It could be so much better, but it isn't. Sort of like television. Or cinema. Or contemporary music.

Ah, Dark oh so cynical.

LOTR is nothing more than fantasy, yet Tolkien was truly a masterful storyteller. Elves, Wizards,.. fantasy. I suppose you consider LOTR, Silmarillion, Hobbit just childs play or for that matter C.S. Lewis's Perelandra series that was based in a sci fi / fantasy format.

As far as Laurell Hamilton, hell I haven't read her work and probably never will, but that hack is going to be signing her book Danse Macarbre all over the dang country, and that hack is getting the "Borders" crowd into the direct market comic store looking for her Anita Blake title. That hack sells books.

But lets look at a book like Deogratias by Jean Philip Stassen. It is a story set during the Hutu, Tutsi genocide. The main character, Deogratias, is a young Hutu who is cynical and thinks everyone is out to poison him in his food and drink, and the ethnic strife has turned him insane and dependent. He desires banana beer each night for without he thinks he turns into a dog.

The metaphor and allegory is striking and is a thought provoking exploration of the insanity of those times.

Or lets take a look at Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi. This title is her autobiography of growing up as a young Iranian girl shortly after the Mullahs took over in Iran through the mid 90's.
Very fascinating and very relevant.

I tell you Darkwolf, the comic industry is so much different all over the world except in the United States , where so many people here still hold up their noses and think oh what a childish things these comic books when in reality so many people don't know a dang thing they talk about.