Love This!

As reader of this blog is well aware, I love comics. Alternet ran a great piece today called "The Case for Comics." Here's an excerpt. Do check it out for the rest of the story and some snippets from the comics themselves. peace!

The Case for Comics
By Kristian Williams, Columbia Journalism ReviewPosted on March 17, 2005, Printed on March 17, 2005
http://www.alternet.org/story/21520/

It has been nearly 20 years since comics could safely be dismissed as kids’ stuff. In 1986 three books changed the way Americans saw the medium. Two of them — Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Frank Miller’s The Dark Knight Returns — brought a sense of gloomy realism to the superhero genre. The third, Art Spiegelman’s Maus, used cartoon conventions to tell of his father’s experience in the Holocaust, depicting Jews as mice and Nazis as cats. Magazines were suddenly full of stories about comics “growing up,” and the term “graphic novel” entered the literary lexicon.
Somehow “graphic journalism” didn’t make the headlines. But since the renaissance of the mid-'80s, more and more writers and artists have been producing serious nonfiction comics about current events, from war crimes to hip hop. In the mid-1990s, Joe Sacco’s two books on Palestine were hailed as groundbreaking works and made Sacco the best known of the new graphic journalists. Now comics, or graphic, journalism is turning up in daily newspapers, where its inherent subjectivity contrasts sharply with the newsroom’s dispassionate prose — another round in the debate over what journalism should be in the 21st century.