Comic books are what novels used to be — an accessible, vernacular form with mass appeal — and if the highbrows are right, they’re a form perfectly suited to our dumbed-down culture and collective attention deficit.
When I mentioned to a friend that I was working on an article about graphic novels, he said, hopefully, ”You mean porn?”.
The comic-book form until recently has been unable to shed a certain aura of pulpiness, cheesiness and semi-literacy.