I didn’t understand comic books for the longest time. They weren’t present in my childhood. I never went down to the local comic store or followed new issues. I don’t even know that I was ever given comics that I can recall. Sure I was aware of the genre but as with many things I didn’t experience as a child (Power-Rangers, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles, Elvis) I thought of them as childish, artless expressions of simple ideas that must not be worth engaging with simply because they weren’t part of my world. Around the time that I went to college I started to think more deeply about art and story and in the process came to realize that if I wanted people to set aside their prejudices about genres and media that I enjoyed I should make an effort to explore and understand the value of media that I thought of as ‘beneath me’. So I did some research on what works were considered the best works in comics and came up with Watchmen by Alan Moore and the Sandman series by Neil Gaiman. I got my hands on them and read them. In short order I was blown away. Those works caused me to rethink my position on comics entirely. Thankfully my distrust of the value of power-rangers and ninja turtles was not similarly affected by the experience.
Watchmen was a brutally adult take on the super-hero concept. Wrapped in layers of depth in storytelling, steeped in awareness of genre tropes and the realities of humanity and the ethos of the cold war it masterfully told a story like nothing I had experienced before. The short chapter-sized issue chunks of story were tightly wound with personal arcs interwoven with text notes that laid groundwork for the past of the world and a whole parallel story of a boy sitting in a city street reading a comic that seems to be completely unrelated until everything is pulled together at the end. It was amazing. The characters felt real, the struggles were harsh, and the art was used to tell this story in a way that other media would struggle with. If you have seen the movie based on this graphic novel it fails to capture the depth of the impact by losing the Black Freighter mini story and the interstitial in-world notes between chapters which couldn’t be incorporated due to length as well as by losing the humanity of the characters by ignoring the fact that none of the characters other than Doctor Manhattan have any sort of superpowers and choosing to show the characters as hyper-competent fighters able to take super-human abuse which detracts from how frail they are as people.
Sandman was my introduction to Neil Gaiman, and to the DC comics universe, both of which I thank it for completely. It is a fantastically mythic journey through the world of Dream. It starts out presenting itself as a serial collection of horror comics with the immortal personification of Dream as the connection linking the stories together but as it comes together it becomes a timeless tale of humanity through myth and story. The first volume of stories collected in Sandman Vol 1: Fables & Nocturnes bring in other DC heroes like Constantine and Martian Manhunter as well as Cain and Abel who were hosts of pulp era DC Horror variety comics, but as the story evolves it leaves the DC universe and involves itself in much deeper mythologies. In full attendance are gods and myths from all around the world, presented side by side in wonderfully imaginative, disturbing and human stories. We have ancient deities, DC comic heros, Mark Twain, Shakespeare and G.K. Chesterton all entering stories involving Dream and the rest of his Endless family of personified concepts. It is expansive and mythic in scope encompassing a wide variety of experiences. I was completely hooked on comics as a genre and Neil Gaiman as a fantasist in one fell swoop.
After these experiences I sat in the metaphoric room of my mind feeling my perception of the world fall apart around me. The form was definitely valid as art and a means of storytelling. I would later go on to perform the same feat of prejudice smashing with superhero comics, anime, manga, tabletop roleplaying games and did similar analysis of horror which I still fail to see the value in and rap which I find quite amazing as a form, but have had a much more difficult time of finding examples that I could enjoy due to either content or personal taste.
Since my initial foray into comics I have read a variety of other comics of varying degrees of quality. There are always examples of a genre done poorly that can be confused with the quality of the genre or form that it is presented in by those outside the genre. I would like to explain some of the ways that I think comic content has value. What it does well can be described with the trite cliche that “a picture is worth a thousand words” even if you may not appreciate the comic book aesthetic, but there is a wide variety of art styles available to the genre though the need to draw so many pictures to tell a story will always lend to a more simple and “cartoonish” style. But the ability to use character posture and expressions combined with the background, lighting and color scheme to portray meaning and emotion even without any text is powerful. When combined skillfully with dialog and narrative description it can become an impressive synthesis. Giving a very flexible and inexpensive framework to present imaginative scenarios that would be costly, inefficient, or impossible to present in other media.
The same value proposition that makes it cheaper to produce than a film and easier to consume than a novel allows for rapid iteration and consumption of ideas. Though it does also lend itself to formula. It combines the power of exploring new ideas of a short story with the ability to string shorter stories together into longer arcs that can be followed throughout. Comics experiment a lot, the storytelling style has changed a lot from the early days of the golden age of comics just as popular fiction has changed since the days of pulp. There certainly are awful comics that don’t leverage their strengths or childish stories meant to drive sales to people who have less desire for quality or consistency in their consumption but there are also awful and childish novels and movies or whatever your favorite genre of storytelling is.
One last point that I would like to make about the genre is the distinction between comics and graphic novels. Comics are a serial format consisting of issues of generally 20-40 page each issue telling a single story, frequently these individual issues have come to be part of larger stories told in sequence progressing in larger collections of 5-12 issues analogous to a single novel in a series which could then be part of a larger continuing arc of connected stories. Graphic novel was a term specifically referring to a longer whole work intended to be self-contained and not serialized, but it has come to also refer to the collected volumes published containing a single storyline or part of a storyline from a serially released comic as well.
Comics are a valuable genre and there are many different kinds of stories being told in the form. Don’t let prejudice or a narrow experience of a small part of the medium turn you off. There is definitely worthy art to be found in the comic form.