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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.

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.

Good post.

I have to agree with the above point completely. I loved comics as a kid, but one of the things that made me kick them cold turkey was when I started reading more novels. I started reading adult books when I was in second grade, but really concnetrated on certain science fiction books by a handful of authors who had very potent styles. By the time I hit high school, comics and SF novels made up almost all of my reading.

But when I hit high school and started reading a much wider variety of SF and mainstream novels because I was able to travel to the city and its many bookstores, I saw comics as being very insulated from real life, and the varieties of expression available. They all seemed to be written by the same person, with the same point of view. They bored me.

I agree that there is hugh potential in comics, and when you can look at mere entertainment books like X-Men, The Spirit and Cerberus the Aardvark and those that shoot a little higher like Watchmen (the go-to comic for those trying to prove comics are "adult"--20 years old, is it?), you see that it's not a limitation of the medium itself--comics CAN be individual works. But there's something basically juvenile about them, always retreating to either superheroics or high school-level cynicism or serial killers or whatever.