Comics are OK: A Grown-Up’s Guide to Getting into Comics

You’ve seen the movie, you’ve watched the TV show, you’ve bought the action figure for your kid. Hell, you might have even bought the t-shirt. But, for some reason, you just haven’t read the book yet. And by ‘book’ I mean ‘comic book’. Or ‘graphic novel’, if that seems a bit more grown up. Because, hey, comics are for kids! Or… they were when you were growing up. Or when your Dad was growing up, anyway…

But comics aren’t just for kids, and they haven’t been for 30-odd years. And ‘comics’ isn’t a genre consisting solely of superheroes and The Beano, either. It’s a medium, and like any medium you’ll find a huge great gamut of subject matter and quality, ranging from highly literate, beautifully cartooned tales about the holocaust to shit gag strips (and, for that matter, to excellent gag strips). You might just have been missing out.

But don’t worry, we’re here to help. Below are five recommendations to get you started, along with one honourable mention for a close contender. This isn’t meant to be a definitive ‘best-of’ list – just a useful whirlwind tour of a handful of books that show what comics can do in the right hands. And, yes, it’s a list aimed primarily at the literary reader, because we have at least a vague idea who reads The Culture Vulture. If you want some recommendations for action/adventure, or superhero, or crime, or horror, or humour, or any number of other genres, let me know in the comments! Anyway, without further ado…

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern No. 13

This is the cheat’s choice. I’m cheating a little by including it too, if I’m honest. It’s not a graphic novel as such, but ‘An Assorted Sampler of North American Comic Drawings, Strips, and Illustrated Stories etc.’ There’s a good chance you’ve heard of McSweeney’s, the semi-regular literary journal. This is the comics issue, complete with a selection of cartoonists that’s a veritable who’s who of the ‘alternative’ comics scene, put together by indie darling Chris Ware. Artists from Dan Clowes to Johnny Ryan to Joe Sacco cover genres from ‘literary’ to humour to journalism in a range of styles that’s just as diverse as their subject matter. As well as serving as a bluffer’s guide this tome also provides an excellent jumping in point to give you a feel of who and what are out there. It also happens to be a gorgeous book thanks to Ware’s flair for design, with even the cover folding out to release several mini-comics tucked within.

Maus

While I’m not trying to offer up a definitive ‘best-of’ list, it would feel wrong in all sorts of ways to not include Art Spielgelman’s Maus: A Survivor’s Tale. This was one of the first wave of books to throw up headlines like ‘Biff! Sock! Pow! Comics Aren’t Just for Kids Any More!’ and it was perhaps the book that showed the mainstream that comics could handle mature subjects with craft, subtlety and intelligence and do it in ways that weren’t open to other media. Playing with established comics tropes, Spiegelman plays out the story of his parents’ experience of the holocaust, casting Jews as mice and the Nazis as cats. The reader’s expectations are played off against the grim narrative to incredible, sometimes brutal effect. Spiegelman’s abstraction of his characters at once universalises their experiences and, odd as it might seem on the surface, humanises them in a very potent way.

Asterios Polyp

Coming from the artist of Batman: Year One, a story that had no small part in forging today’s big screen Dark Knight, Asterios Polyp couldn’t be much further from the exploits of masked vigilantes. It’s a wonderful example of the creativity on offer in comics and just how powerfully different one work can be from the next. Mazzuchelli’s pen seems to have danced from panel to panel, playing endlessly with the interaction between form and narrative as he tells the story of an intellectual’s fall from grace, and the life he bounces off on the way down.

Persepolis

Marjane Satrapi’s autobiograpical book might be familiar to you thanks to the animated film that got made of it a couple of years back. It’s a fascinating look into Iran and life there as a woman. Her simple, elegant lines belie the complexity of her subject matter. While there’s a slightly journalistic quality to Satrapi’s exploration of femininity in the Middle East, it remains a deeply personal piece and never ceases to be fascinating, playful and sardonic. As with Maus, Persepolis’s use of comics storytelling is powerfully humanising.

Honourable Mention: Watchmen

The elephant in the comic shop. Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen seems like an obvious choice for any ‘get into comics’ list. But, while it is a very good comic, it’s not a particularly good entry point to the medium. As (almost) any comics reader will tell you, Watchmen is a meditation on and deconstruction of the tropes and conventions embedded in superhero fiction. Why, then, would you want to make it your first foray into the superhero genre, let alone the comics medium as a whole? It’d be like criticism of Elizabethan theatre without having ever even seen a play, let alone read any Shakespeare. Also, while it’s an incredible piece of work, its pace is rather ponderous and while Dave Gibbons is a fine draftsman he’s not the most exciting artist in the world. If you go in expecting a swashbuckling adventure, you’ll get a shock.

I’m not, however, going to pretend that comics didn’t get seriously popularised by larger-than-life guardians of good. Which is why the final recommendation goes to…

All-Star Superman

Written by the Mad High Priest of Comics, Grant Morrison, to be the ultimate Superman story, All-Star Superman is by turns whimsical, apocalyptic, explosive, delightful, intelligent, tragic and barking mad. It tells the story of the Man of Tomorrow’s last days as he tries to get his and the world’s affairs in order ahead of a death he knows he can’t avoid. Rather than being a maudlin affair, however, All-Star Superman sparkles with a liveliness, tenderness and humour rarely seen in any medium. The scope and cinematic quality of the story is breathlessly exciting, while the people at the heart of it are very, very human. All this is stunningly rendered by Frank Quitely, whose ability to beautifully capture the insanity that pours from Morrison’s brain will most certainly see him remembered as one of the greatest comics artists of this generation.

Got any recommendations for first timers of your own? Let us know in the comments!