Comic Books and The New Literature
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creations but not necessarily representative of either the genre or the medium
and prove more exceptional than normative, which is all the more puzzling
when we consider their commercial success.
The ruling conception of comic books imposed by the industry therefore
implies a reduction on two different levels: aesthetically, by pigeonholing the
norm within the specific genre of traditional superheroes adventures; and
politically, by discouraging any type of trangressive move, even within the
dominant genre itself. It cannot be denied that the comic book medium has not
demonstrated its capacity to produce a politically conscious and subversive
message: Robert Crumb’s Fritz the Cat or Gilbert Shelton’s The Fabulous Furry
Freak Brothers are indeed two great examples of the subversive power of comic
books; however, their presence was far from being influential in the
development of the medium and although Robert Crumb and Gilbert Shelton are
likely to be household names for any comic book aficionado, their work remains
confined to the “underground” when compare to the planetary success of, say,
one Spiderman.*"^
The task of structuring a possible canon of comic books is therefore a
difficult one on this side of the Atlantic for it implies sorting through a virtually
endless corpus of very inconsistent quality, determined by very pragmatic
financial imperatives and vastly dominated by a morally viable genre. The
concept of the graphic novel, which could seem a convenient notion to
recognize “literary” comic books, i.e., comic books susceptible to elicit the same
type of cultural interest as “true” literary works, and to distinguish them from
culturally non-significant escapist products turns out to be a very approximate
classifying tool since many trade paperbacks, which can be considered as
graphic novels in their own right, are first published in a serialized format,
following the pattern of most commercial comic books. Just as there are “good”
and “bad” comic books, there are indeed “good” and “bad” graphic novels, for
the concept was created to describe a particular cultural object as much as to
help promote its commercialization. The notion of authorship, on the other hand,
seems more useful for its very existence within the medium of comic books is
already highly significant, since the assembly line type of production which
characterizes the U.S. comic book industry tends to imply the dissolution of the
authorial entity: rather than an independent work created by one or two specific
individuals, the typical comic book, if successful, becomes part of what could be
perceived as a narrative franchise, which leaves very little creative freedom, if
any, to its authors. A strong presence of actual authorship in an environment
that, by definition, denies individual creativity must be considered as a sure sign
of cultural significance, and it is worth observing that over the years, in what
seems to represent an accelerating trend, some individual authors such as Alan
Moore, Frank Miller, Garth Ennis, or Warren Ellis have transcended the
narrative, commercial, and moral limitations imposed upon the comic book
medium and have fought, whether directly or indirectly, the assimilation of
comic books with the superhero genre. For instance, Warren Ellis’s monumental