Drawing an Audience

__READING COMICS: How Graphic Novels Work and

What They ­Mean.__ _By Douglas Wolk.

Da Capo Press. 405 pp. $­22.95_

__AN ANTHOLOGY OF GRAPHIC FICTION, CARTOONS, AND

TRUE STORIES.__ _Edited by Ivan Brunetti.

Yale Univ. Press. 400 pp. $­28_

Comics lost most boyish readers to video games and MTV decades ago. Since then, the audience for comics has consisted primarily of ­college-­to-­middle-­aged males interested in tales about grown men punching each other. But that readership is broadening to include women, children, and other Johnny-come­lately fans, thanks to a wave of movie adaptations (_Sin City_, _Ghost World_) and award-winning books (_Persepolis_, _Fun Home_). These readers are less interested in Snoopy than in psycho­logically realistic stories, and are less captivated by episodic superhero yarns than by ­book-­length literary ­comics—­graphic ­novels.

To find its bearings, this new audience may seek a critic’s handholding and a greatest-hits anthology, available, respectively, in Douglas Wolk’s essays and Ivan Bru­netti’s collection of American alternative comics. Alternative comics, a comic-book genre roughly analogous to inde­pendent films, have been gaining popularity since Art Spiegel­man published the first volume of _Maus_ in 1986. A memoir about how Spiegelman’s father sur­vived Auschwitz, _Maus_ showed that comic books could handle weighty themes as well as literature ­could.

Great comics—such as _Maus_, which depicts the Jews as mice and the Germans as ­cats—­can wake us from the way we habitually see the world. This is because the artist’s style itself can suggest an entire worldview. Frank ­Miller, ­on whose work the movies _Sin City_ and _300_ are ­based, ­produces slats of rain that are, in Wolk’s description, “cruel, freezing splinters of ink and light.” Chester Brown, author of the blackly humorous series _Ed the Happy Clown_, draws with “a poker-faced, almost ascetic approach, with the tone of an eccentric but very patient explanation.”

While a work of literary fiction may succeed by executing certain conventions beautifully, the thrills comic books offer derive from their  curious imperfections. Wolk, a music writer, presents comics as kitsch pop-cultural prod­ucts. His book, part history and part commentary, sometimes reads less like a critical trea­tise than like anthropological field notes from a comic-book convention. He frequently comes off as a fan rather than a critic, but he does provide a kind of surrogate adolescence spent in dank shops stocked with trading cards of naked warrior-princesses and ­coffin-­like boxes of ­_X-­Men_ back ­issues.

To enjoy reading comics, Wolk suggests, you must appreciate the medium’s offensive surprises, flagrant silliness, bad exclamatory writing, and burps of onomatopoeia. His collection includes discussions of comic-book authors such as Grant Morrison, a psychedelic genius who has claimed that aliens abducted him in Kath­mandu. Similarly, cartoonist Bru­netti’s anthology includes many counter­cul­tural artists whose aesthetic resembles that of his own main work, a misanthropic comics series called _Schizo_ that depicts the author stabbing himself in the eye and beheading and raping the planet ­Earth.

The last half of Brunetti’s book, however, includes artists of a more literary bent, such as Daniel Clowes and Chris Ware. This gives the collection as a whole the feel of a bildungs­roman, gradually increasing in maturity and sophistication as it moves toward the ­end.

What if this sophistication represents a threat to the genre rather than a natural evolution? Because comics traditionally have been a pulp medium, they’ve been able to portray the world with a liberating strangeness, unconstrained by taste or codified literary standards. The effort to reach a mainstream audience may accomplish what no supervillain ever could: It may gentrify the comic ­book.

Take, as an example, Alison Bechdel’s _Fun Home_, a graphic ­novel-­memoir recounting the author’s relationship with her father, a closeted gay man. _The New York Times_ named it a notable book of 2006. The tale, which is not dissimilar from a ­heavy-­handed _New Yorker_ short story, caters to the taste of readers who wouldn’t otherwise like comics. While great comic artists, like great painters and filmmakers, enrich their medium with a paradigmatic visual style, Bech­del’s stiff illustrations merely reiterate the text. It’s a comic book with closed-captioning. Bru­netti’s anthology, in contrast, shows how visually sophisticated the strangest American comics can ­be.