Graphic Novels Grow Up

The New Yorker's Peter Schjeldahl profiles the art of graphic novels in "Words and Pictures: Graphic Novels Come of Age." The lineup includes the likes of Chris Ware, Harvey Pekar, Marjane Satrapi, Will Eisner, and Joe Sacco. While Schjendahl asserts the work of graphic artists like Ware may be challenging, he suggests that the "colonizing of the territory" of graphic novels has only just begun. Graphic novels—pumped-up comics—are to many in their teens and twenties what poetry once was, before bare words lost their cachet. The nineteen-sixties decided that poet types would thenceforth wield guitars; the eighties imposed percussive rhythm and rhyme; the two-thousands favor drawing pens. Like life-changing poetry of yore, graphic novels are a young person’s art, demanding and rewarding mental flexibility and nervous stamina. Consuming them—toggling for hours between the incommensurable functions of reading and looking—is taxing. The difficulty of graphic novels limits their potential audience, in contrast to the blissfully easeful, still all-conquering movies, but that is not a debility; rather, it gives them the opalescent sheen of avant-gardism.

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