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Comics bulking up, demanding respect LOCAL COMICS STORES
Comics: Encouraging a love of reading or just dumbing kids down?
Date published: 1/3/2008
By MICHAEL ZITZ
Most of the business at comic book stores isn't in comic books anymore. According to pop culture trend tracker ICv2, graphic novels have begun to outsell comic books. Graphic novels are essentially comic books on steroids, with longer, more complex, darker stories. The term can also include putting together a long story arc initially published in half a dozen regular comic book issues, but purists tend to refer to those as trade paperbacks. Statistics aren't available yet for 2007, but 330 million graphic novels were sold in North America in 2006--a 12 percent increase. That wasn't bad news for comic book publishers like DC and Marvel. There was an even bigger jump in sales of traditional monthly periodical comic books like "Batman" and "Spider-Man." They were up 15 percent to 310 million in 2006. And comic book publishers like DC are doing quite well with graphic novels. Where they once appealed almost exclusively to teenage boys, they now sell to people of all ages, male and female. But is this because comic books and graphic novels are getting better or because our culture in general is dumbing down? Tom De Haven, a Richmond novelist who teaches creative writing and pop culture at Virginia Commonwealth University, says it's the former. "There's been so much good stuff in the long form over the last 20 years I can do a whole literature course now just with serious comics," he says of graphic novels. "I've gotten myself in trouble [in the academic world] sometimes by saying I think it's going to be one of the most important literatures in years to come." But he says some critics might consider actually visiting a comic book store before dismissing graphic novels. De Haven insists it's not a question of the work "being good 'despite being comics.' They're good because they're comics."The literary form, he says, "is on its way now. It's not going to be held in the kind of contempt it has been for so long." De Haven is the author of several novels, including "Derby Dugan's Depression Funnies," which won a 1997 American Book Award.
Date published: 1/3/2008
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