Holding out for a hero

Comic books have commandeered pop culture.

You can find their imprints on every medium. Marvel superheroes like Spider-Man, The Hulk and the X-Men have taken the cineplex by storm, while DC heroes patrol the television's airwaves in shows like the WB's "Smallville" and the Cartoon Network's "Teen Titans."

Men in tights aren't the only ones flexing their muscles. At the art-house, Daniel Clowes' graphic novel Ghost World led to 2001's acclaimed indie film of the same name. This year, American Splendor, based on Harvey Pekar's autobiographical comic book, received awards at Sundance and Cannes. (It opens Aug. 29 at Tara Cinema. See review in this week's Flicks.)

Look at other artistic disciplines and you'll see signs of the comic book influence. Visual arts? The Whitney Museum of American Art's prestigious 2002 Biennial exhibition devoted two full walls to excerpts from Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan graphic novel. Fiction? Michael Chabon won the 2001 Pulitzer for The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, a novel about the dawn of the comic book industry. Theater? Last April, Atlanta's Dad's Garage staged the world premiere of Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa Weird Comic Book Adventure, a fantasia on Archie comics.

So what's wrong with this picture? Whether called comic books, graphic novels or sequential art, the form has been all but shut out of its own party. Comic books have won the attention of the intelligentsia and inspired a new generation of artists and creators. As a commercial force in their own right, however, they remain on the margins.

In the past two years, two publishers of literary graphic novels -- Marietta's Top Shelf Comics and Seattle's Fantagraphics Books -- nearly went out of business and were rescued by desperate Internet appeals to their buyers. Comics struggle to attract the attention of an oblivious public that gravitates to better-established art forms like movies or books -- even when they're based on comics.

For nearly 20 years, comic books have been "the next big thing" without ever actually becoming a big thing. As comic book specialty shops became popular in the 1980s, underground cartoonists like Robert Crumb found a wider readership, while technically sophisticated superhero books -- beginning with Frank Miller's revisionist Batman graphic novel The Dark Knight Returns -- made older, mainstream audiences take notice.

The comics boom saw its crowning achievement in 1992 when Art Spiegelman's cat-and-mouse Holocaust narrative Maus won the Pulitzer Prize. Yet instead of ushering in the medium's golden age, Maus represented its peak. Since then, the graphic novel has grappled with the following nefarious forces:

Economic Evils
Since the early 1990s, comics have been hit by a one-two punch of softer sales and harder competition from other forms of entertainment. Chris Staros, publisher of Top Shelf Comics, says the boom in comics speculation went bust in 1993, and the industry has yet to fully recover. Video games and the Internet has siphoned attention from the comics industry, while the current economic slump means readers have less disposable income.

The Burnout Factor
Comics have seen some of its superstars step back from their own success. Spiegelman has yet to attempt another big book like Maus, so far being content with painting New Yorker covers and editing Little Lit, a quirky project of kid comics. Frank Miller's output dropped dramatically since the 1980s, and his recent sequel, The Dark Knight Strikes Back, fell far short of his earlier book. Neil Gaiman retired from Sandman to write prose books like American Gods, although he still dabbles in the form.

There are as many reasons why artists turn away from comics as there are artists themselves. "Not to sound mercenary, there's not much money in it," says local illustrator Stephanie Gladden, who works full time for the Cartoon Network. "That's why some of the brilliant ones don't do their own thing, but instead write or draw superhero books. They want to make a living wage."

Even well-paid graphic novelists can succumb to sheer exhaustion. "It takes a superhuman effort to do a book like Maus. You can do one New Yorker cover a week, but you don't have another book like Maus in you," says Eddie Campbell, who collaborated with Alan Moore on From Hell, a 500-plus page Jack the Ripper graphic novel that inspired the Johnny Depp/Heather Graham film adaptation.

Creative Growing Pains
While graphic novels garner artistic respect in Europe and manga comic books enjoy mass popularity among adults in Japan, the American readership considers comic books a novelty. Because literary comics are still such a young medium in the United States, it may be that they're suffering the awkwardness of adolescence. While cartoonists have more freedom now to create something other than superheroes, their more personal graphic novels can be a bit, well, weird.

Autobiographical comics like American Splendor often focus so sharply on the grungy details of everyday life or the struggles of making comic books that they can feel as narrowly specialized as superhero stories.

While comics are every bit a valid art form as children's books, cable television or computer animation, the medium still hasn't had its break-out, crossover book. We haven't seen the comic book equivalent to Harry Potter, "The Sopranos" or Pixar's cartoon features like Toy Story -- something that combines the splashy energy of genre stories with the personal visions of literary comics. Brilliant graphic novels are out there, but it helps if readers are already grounded in comics to appreciate them.

Graphic novels seem tailor-made for the 21st century. In a fast-forward society, they're more portable than movies, can be read more quickly than novels and prove more permanent than anything found on a computer. Besides, "you need graphic novels for graphic ideas," says Campbell. "It says something about the potential of comic books that the From Hell comic is extraordinarily more complex than the film made from it, and probably more than a prose book would have been. Its ideas demand an illustrated medium to be fully exposed."

Comic books, as ever, may be on the verge of a renaissance, but will anyone notice? Or will the American pop audience be too distracted by the latest film adaptation or superhero TV series? "Look, up in the sky!" No, look over your shoulder. Comic books have been close at hand all along.

curt.holman@creativeloafing.com