Not Funnies suggests that the comic book may be the new novel:
You can’t pinpoint it exactly, but there was a moment when people more or less stopped reading poetry and turned instead to novels, which just a few generations earlier had been considered entertainment suitable only for idle ladies of uncertain morals. The change had surely taken hold by the heyday of Dickens and Tennyson, which was the last time a poet and a novelist went head to head on the best-seller list. Someday the novel, too, will go into decline — if it hasn’t already — and will become, like poetry, a genre treasured and created by just a relative few. This won’t happen in our lifetime, but it’s not too soon to wonder what the next new thing, the new literary form, might be.It might be comic books. Seriously.
The article dwells on literary, underground “comix” by obsessed outcasts before moving on to “smart” but (more) mainstream comics:
One solution to the drudgery of cartooning is to get others to do it for you. Companies like Marvel and D.C. essentially produce comics on an assembly line: one person thinks up the story, someone else draws it, another inks it, yet another colors it and so on. Most graphic novelists tend to be dismissive of such products, but a couple of people have emerged from the factory system and attained something like auteur status — as writers whose comics are worth paying attention to no matter who draws them. Neil Gaiman, creator of the enormously successful ”Sandman” series, is one such figure; another is Alan Moore, creator of ”Watchmen,” ”From Hell” (a story about Jack the Ripper) and ”The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen.”
Moore is an extraordinary gentleman:
Moore, who is 50, looks like a comic-book character. He has a long beard, shoulder-length hair and likes to dress in black. He also dabbles a little in the occult. Moore lives alone in Northampton, England, where he was born and grew up, and is a famous recluse. ”I’m a stranger to the other end of the living room,” he likes to say. Moore actually draws perfectly well. (His early strips, like ”Roscoe Moscow,” a detective parody, are more than passable Crumb knockoffs.) But in the early 80′s, when he was a young man struggling to support himself, a wife and a baby, he realized that he couldn’t draw fast enough to keep up with his deadlines. He decided to become a writer instead and began sending out scripts on spec.
Moore doesn’t just write; he researches:
Moore is a tireless researcher; when he took over the moribund ”Swamp Thing” series from D.C. in the early 80′s, he read botany books, listened to Cajun music and studied the geography and ecology of the Louisiana bayous. Of all the graphic novelists, in fact, Moore may have the purest and most inventive literary imagination. He also writes poetry and has published a novel (the old-fashioned kind, without pictures). His ”League of Extraordinary Gentlemen,” which is far more interesting than you would ever guess from the movie, is an extremely clever literary pastiche of Victorian England in which all the characters (even the prime minister, Plantagenet Palliser) are taken from other Victorian novels — Bram Stoker’s ”Dracula,” H.G. Wells’s ”Invisible Man,” Stevenson’s ”Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde” and Jules Verne’s ”20,000 Leagues Under the Sea,” to name just the most obvious. Right now, he is working on a pornographic graphic novel, ”Lost Girls,” in which the main characters are the Alice of ”Through the Looking Glass,” now known as Lady Fairchild and a laudanum-addicted lesbian; the slightly repressed Mrs. Harold Potter, nee Wendy Darling, from ”Peter Pan”; and the randy Dorothy Gale, from ”The Wizard of Oz.”
I’m not at all surprised by this:
Moore was kicked out of school at 17 for using and selling LSD. ”It was a fair cop,” he says now, meaning that he deserved to be expelled. ”The headmaster called me a moral health hazard, and he was probably right.” But the headmaster also took steps to make sure he couldn’t get into any other school, and Moore, who says he is still ”embittered by the entire educational system,” became a fierce and ambitious autodidact.Part of his education was comic books, at first black-and-white English ones (which he says ”were just something we had, like rickets”) until, in the early 60′s, at an open-air market, he came across full-color American comics. ”I related to them very strongly,” he says. ”They were about America, which seemed to me to be like the future, like science fiction. Even without those fantastic characters, the whole country seemed to me an exotic landscape, like the Emerald City, and those comics lifted me right out of the streets I grew up in.”
He added: ”We all live, you know, on a kind of fictional planet — the place we have with us ever since we started listening to stories. We spend a lot of time in these imaginary worlds, and we get to know them better than the real locations we pass on the street every day. I think they play a more important part in our shaping of the world than we realize. Hitler, for example — we know he read a lot of Bulwer-Lytton. Osama bin Laden used to read quite a lot of Western science fiction. That’s why comics feel important to me. They’re immense fun as a game, but there’s also something more serious going on.”