Comics as Literature

On Wired, Geek Dad highlights those comic books that have transcended mere comic books into high art.

From the piece...

So I started compiling my lists and thinking about which titles I’d want to include in a list of “serious comics,” and … time got away from me. I found myself devouring some really great comics, some serious and some less so, and I didn’t feel like slowing down to write about them.

When I was in high school and our English teacher was always talking about “literary merit,” my friends and I decided that the two main indicators of literary merit (based on the books we were assigned) were length and death. The longer the book, and the more people died, the more literary merit. Old Man and the Sea? Kind of short, relatively speaking, and not much death (unless you count the marlin and some sharks): questionable literary merit. The Great Gatsby? Not so long, but a good amount of death: yep, that’s got literary merit. Tess of the d’Urbervilles? Really long, important people die: loads of literary merit. Oh, right — and of course it ranks higher if it’s dreadfully boring, too.

Granted, that was a high schooler’s point of view and I’ve certainly grown to appreciate reading works of great literary merit in addition to the pulpier selections on my bookshelf. In the world of comics, just as with novels or kids’ books, there are some stories that transcend the realm of “hey, it’s just entertainment” and become Serious Literature. I’m not saying that they can’t include a few laughs (though some are solemn), but that you can tell there’s something under the surface, whether through the subject matter or the language or the artwork.

And here’s the best part: there’s a lot of them. I’ll share some of my old favorites and recent discoveries with you over the course of a few posts, but I guarantee you that there are so many more that I haven’t read (or even heard of) yet, and I’m counting on you readers to fill in the gaps on my own shelves.