An argument in favour of comic book fiction as a literary art form
Look, I’ve read a lot of ‘important’ books in my time. During my twenties, I made a point of shoving as many influential, significant novels into my eyeballs as possible in the mistaken belief they’d somehow, as though through literary osmosis, seep character, plot and wit into the membrane of my own dilettante scribblings. Clearly, that didn’t happen, but I tried to serve my apprenticeship with the big boys and I think - after a day job that requires the teaching of Macbeth, A View from the Bridge and the war poets, among other gnarly, unabridged classics - I've earned the right to return home and plug myself into a genre many would consider unliterary or even downright childish.
I read a lot of comics in my teens, mainly DC and Dark Horse, with a fair smattering of Harris’ Vampirella output, because, hey, did I mention I was in my teens? But I slipped out of the habit as ‘literary’ pretensions took hold, and it was only two years ago when I deigned to climb back on the comic wagon, when DC starting putting out a fortnightly partwork covering deep cuts from their collection from the last thirty years. I bought the first one, curious as to what I might have missed since the nineties.
Turns out, I’d missed a golden age.
Not that you’d have realised from the partworks - a fair few of them are ‘meh’, with occasional beauties amongst the Green Lantern and Flash yawnfests, but I’m persevering - yet they’ve been just good enough to encourage me to seek out the top tier works from the period, those tomes I should have read, that everyone should have read, the classics of the genre by Gaiman, Miller, Moore and more. And it turns out, most of them are even darker than Macbeth, A View from the Bridge and the war poets combined.
I’m drawn towards the Gotham characters in particular, far more than damp Atlantis or Themyscira. Something about that grimy, corrupt world really appeals - the best Batman tales are Godfather-esque in their portrayal of crime syndicates and mafioso infighting. The characters are broken and desperate, full of vengeance and tortured pasts. Except for the Joker: he’s a psychopath, a terrifying creation that his big screen outings have failed to remotely capture.
Having said that, Superman is a blast. A man from Krypton whose alter ego is a journalist for a local paper. A superhuman who could literally be anything but chooses anonymous normality. There’s something so human and relatable about DC at its best, while being darker and more twisted than Marvel, whose films I’ve enjoyed but whose comics I must admit I've never been wholly smitten by, perhaps due to DC’s objectively deeper and more rounded villains, the noirish plots and the early influence of Tim Burton’s seminal Batman.
The masterworks of DC are, frankly, disturbing. The Killing Joke is a ferocious, exploitative, intense read that psychologically breaks its characters. The Dark Knight Returns is bitter and vengeful, ending with a middle-aged, patched-together Batman spitting on the Joker’s corpse. And Watchmen is a sprawling, complex, apocalyptic epic that references Shelley’s Ozymandias, Brecht’s Threepenny Opera, Jung, Blake, the bible, Bob Dylan, Kandinsky and Ptolemy (to name only a few) and is one of the best books, in any format, I’ve ever read. Just look how much uplifting, life-affirming joy it offers:
And things haven’t gone PG for DC in the years since.
Jeph Loeb’s Hush features a childhood friend who turns out to be so manipulative he coerces every main Batman villain to dump on the Caped Crusader from a great height; Tom King’s Heroes in Crisis concerns what happens when heroes suffer from PTSD; Scott Snyder’s New 52 series of Batman stories take Bruce Wayne to the brink of defeat time after time (scenes from Death of the Family will haunt my nightmares for many years to come, in particular the dinner party in which the Joker, who spends the entire story without a face, cheerfully douses the Dark Knight’s collaborators in gasoline); and DCEASED not only kills half the heroes but then has them eat each other.
So they’re dark. So what? Does that make them literature? Because they occasionally reference literature? Because their subject matter is adult in nature, dealing with acceptance of death (All Star Superman), police brutality (White Knight) or family grief (Year Zero)?
Not for those reasons alone, no. But they are a higher brow of artform than many realise, and a particularly unique discipline, with definite literary qualities.
Someone over on Quora made the point that comics used to be for kids, and the hangover from that is that they're still not taken seriously. So is it pure snobbery that won’t allow them to be defined as literature?
The counter argument would be that comic books (or graphic novels if one must make them sound grown up) are a visual medium, mere storied illustrations; films - once called moving pictures - could never be called photographs, could they? Let's not pretend comics aren't a mixture of different media forms too. However, plays or TV scripts, in bound form, are considered literature. Therefore, why shouldn't a comic script be perceived as similarly worthy? A completed comic has more in common with a performance than a screenplay, the execution of which is an individualised interpretation of the artists and colourists (the artform is a fusion of text and illustration; a comic book with a different penciller would be yet another such interpretation, just as multiple directors have tried their hand at Oliver Twist) but the core story, the writer’s blood, sweat and tears, is undoubtedly literary.
Which is why, according to Pulitzer, the prize-winning graphic novel Maus is, indeed, ‘literature’. And why, according to TIME, Watchmen is one of the best 100 novels of all time.
And why, according to the millions of fanboys and girls who regularly return to the genre, they’re such damn good escapism, which is, unarguably, the most important thing.
Comics are cool. And you should definitely read more of them.
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