Bookplanet: Biff! Bang! Kapow! Intellectual graphic novels beat shit out of comic books

From Toronto Star: Battle of comics genres rages on: rusty superheroes vs. graphic novels -- by Patrick Evans
(But new craze is for titles from Japan)

Here it is, the confrontation YOU the reader demanded — a comic book FIGHT to the FINISH.

Graphic novels vs. superhero comics.

The International Festival of Authors has spotlighted graphic novels this year with acclaimed creators Chris Ware, Charles Burns and Seth stepping up to the readers' podium. These are comic-book bad boys who dare to tackle stories and themes that run deeper than death-rays.

But wait. Superheroes — who still dominate the comic industry — have been conspicuously absent from the festival readings. Have men in tights suffered a highbrow snub?

No way, says festival director Geoffrey Taylor. He says the creators he sought from the superhero genre just weren't available this year.

That said, the battle of comic book high-art vs. low-art is still raging after many years.

BAM : DC and Marvel superheroes dominate comics for almost seven decades. Creators of profound stories about the human condition have to hitch that profundity to a superhero. Their alternative is to say no to a Marvel or DC paycheque, and possibly starve for their art.

KA-POW : Art Spiegelman's graphic novel about the Holocaust, Maus , wins a Pulitzer Prize in 1992. Score one for the indie crowd, for grownup comics. Hey, Batman, where's your Pulitzer?

ZAP : Marvel and DC, in 2005, still dominate the comics industry. Alan Moore's DC superhero story Watchmen makes Time 's list of 100 best English-language novels since 1923.

Peter Birkemoe is owner of Toronto comics store The Beguiling that is stocked with Spiegelman, Ware, Burns, and the other independents.

The Beguiling confines superhero comics to a cramped wing of its second floor. It means Birkemoe has to make the rent with a smaller helping of Marvel and DC receipts.

He's no fan. Apart from some quick bursts of creative growth in the late 1930s and early 1960s, the superhero genre, he argues, got stuck catering to the arrested development crowd.

"(They're) not being written for the traditional 13-year-old boy any more, but for a 40-year-old who wants to read what he read when he was 13. He still wants the Legion of Super-Heroes , but he wants it to be more adult." Birkemoe smiles and shrugs. "But it's still the Legion of Super-Heroes .. .It's still all guys in tights pounding each other."

At another store, 1,000,000 Comix on Yonge St., Jenny Pierre is picking through the racks. She's the holy grail of the industry — a female comics fan. She also represents another force threatening the supremacy of Batman, Superman and Spider-Man — the craze for manga, comics from Japan. She even hopes to learn Japanese because she's reading new manga faster than they can translate it into English. She's given up on superhero comics. "I used to read X-Men. I got tired of it. I guess I was looking for more story behind the characters."

Manga stories are more relevant, she says. "There's a manga called Confidential Confessions and it deals with bullying, suicide, rape. Real-life things."

Birkemoe is expanding his store's manga section, happily. "Finally here are some comics that meet minimum standards of storytelling," he says.

Oh please, says Darwyn Cooke, a DC writer/penciller who has a new Superman title on his worklist. "There's a real understanding out there that `indie' means `more artistic,'" he says. "In fact, I think the indie scene is where most of the crap is found. The good stuff is very, very good, but the percentage is slim."

Robert Thompson, an often-quoted U.S. professor of popular culture, says "some comic art has been admitted to the canon, to museums, but the superhero genre is still squatting in the same old territory, escapist kid stuff." Thompson says while Batman and Spider-Man have some complex psychology going on, superhero comics don't delve into characters' inner state.

But so what, he says. "Not every manifestation of comic art has to adhere to the principles we judge the novel by. Ballet is not very good at character development, either." The indies, manga and Superman all have their place, he says. They show us the world in different ways. It's a happy ending worthy of a superhero.