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| Image from Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis |
The other day I took a friend's 14 year-old daughter, who I was looking after for the day, to a book shop. She was an exceptionally smart kid from DC, adopted from India at a young age. She was looking for origami paper for her newest obsession, while I was looking for new graphic novels. I managed to drag her over to the section and ask, "So, do you like comics?" She scoffed, rolled her eyes with an expression of theatrical disgust only a teenager can pull off. "No," she said.
"But they're great," I said, suddenly feeling the urgency of reeling her back in. "I don't mean, like, superhero stuff...have you seen this?" I reached for Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis. "They made this one into a movie. It's about a girl about your age living in Iran during the Islamic Revolution." I flipped through the stark black and white illustrations, all lined up in their artfully codified panels. "The girl wants to be a punk rocker, but around that time, you could be thrown in prison for acting too Western--like buying a Michael Jackson album." She was intrigued, but not enough. She beelined it to the arts and crafts section. I had failed.
Comic books, or, their more mature, highfalutin label, "graphic novels," or, their more alt/indie title, "comix," seem to have become more rich; more emotionally complex and fascinating over the years, giving rise to a number of stories grounded in drama and gritty realism. Yet somehow, the world of Marvel and DC Comics still eclipses their very existence, with major blockbuster films reaffirming the notion that comic books are a medium for larger than life superheros and action sequences jammed with omonomopoeias. Still meant for teenaged boys who stay up late with a flashlight in bed to devour them at night, or slip them into their English lit books at school during study hall.
But a markedly different type of comic book began to surge in popularity as far back as 1991, with Art Spiegleman's Pulitzer Prize-winning book Maus, a gripping re-imagining of the Holocaust with Jews drawn as mice and Germans drawn as cats. And somewhere along the way, female-driven narratives began to open the genre up to an emotionally complex world that no words could describe.
