Hillary L. Chute - Why Comics?: From Underground to Everywhere

Supermans debut in the comic book Action Comics #1, by Jerry Siegel and Joe Shuster, cover by Shuster, June 1938, published by Detective Comics, Inc. (later DC Comics). A mint copy sold on eBay in 2014 for $3,207,852, the most ever paid for a single comic book.

June 1938 DC Comics. All Rights Reserved.

Comics has branched out from the realm of the specialized and the cult into countless corners of culture in the twenty-first century. Comics today seizes the public imagination in books and periodicals, in museums and galleries, at massively populated comics conventions like San Diegos Comic-Con, and even on Broadway, with the multiple Tony Awardwinning 2015 musical adaptation of cartoonist Alison Bechdels graphic memoir Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic , the story of a lesbian cartoonist and her closeted, suicidal father. Speaking of Broadway: Lin-Manuel Miranda, the megastar creator of the rap musical Hamilton , told the New York Timess By the Book column in 2016 that the last great book he read was Saga , the galactic warlove story graphic novel series by Brian K. Vaughan and Fiona Staples. Miranda had also tweeted about the series, and a new interest and audience was born. (Online mash-up: Saga4Ham.) In 2015, the North American comic-book industry raked in an estimated $1.03 billion from print and digital comic-book and graphic novel sales, a new twenty-year high. And graphic novel sales in bookstores rose 22 percent in 2015, according to comics industry site The Beat (the article ran with a big image of Saga volume 4). In a time when many lament the decline of the print book, comics maintains crucial attention to the book as object (not that it neglects online platforms, where it is also flourishing). In 2016, even as sales of adult fiction in bookstores fell, sales of graphic novels continued to rise.

Comics is a feature not only of mainstream popular culture, but also of university culture, the art world, and even global politics. While there were actually comic-book burnings in the late 1940s and 1950s, when many adults saw comics as a loose and dangerous form of youth culturea role later absorbed by rock n roll, and then video gameslibrarians and professors are now outspoken champions of the form. A Columbia University librarian, Karen Green, recently stated that graphic novels are the most frequently requested material in our Ivy League request system. One can now get an accredited undergraduate or graduate degree in comic artand today cartoonists like Spiegelman are sought-after public intellectuals. Comics is unprecedentedly popular in the art world, a fact marked by a special issue of the worlds most influential art magazine, Artforum , on comics and fine art in 2014. There have been numerous high-profile gallery and museum exhibits featuring comics around the world. And comics has persistently been in the news since January 2015, in controversial contexts. The debate provoked by the Charlie Hebdo massacre in Paris brought the practice of cartooning and what it means into the global spotlight, with dozens and dozens of demonstrations around the world featuring pens held up into the air, making the drawing pen a potent symbol of freedom. People may not have agreed with the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists satirical aims, but everyone had to acknowledge that hand-drawn lines on paper, even in the age of the Internet, have enormous power.

Comics also has substantial resonance in cultural debates in America. This is particularly the case in education, because of the affective force of its visuals, a feature of especial concern in the age of trigger warnings and censorship dustups. Comics made national headlines in the summer of 2015 when a group of freshmen at Duke University refused to read Bechdels Fun Home , which was the suggested common first-year read for incoming students, because of its explicitand gaycontent. One of those students even published an op-ed in the Washington Post online titled, Im a Duke Freshman. Heres Why I Refused to Read Fun Home. The idea of comics as common readingwhich is to say, the idea of literature that shows something, for instance, sex, in addition to describing it verballysparked numerous conversations in print and online about the goals of college education and the differences between looking and reading, activities the medium of comics productively intertwines.