Comics. Not just kids' stuff

Here are five reasons why comics are more suited for adults.

1. They're damned hard to read and navigate through. Don't you think? When I was ten, the kid next door (Craig - whatever happened to you?) let me look at his Spiderman comics. Alternate sets of panels with talking heads and Wham! action I couldn't make sense of. I was a kid. I was supposed to enjoy reading comics. I was told this by my parents. Everybody told me this. What a treat I was supposed to be having. However, all I enjoyed was the glare and warmth of the intense summer sun bouncing off the flagstones as I crouched down with Craig perusing them laid out like they were holy books - I don't think I was actually allowed to touch them with my fingers. In fairness, I found reading difficult anyway, so the barrier to my entry into the comics club was set up way in advance of the hurdle of following panels.

2. On this score, you have to turn on one bit of your brain and suspend the other, then switcheroo. When reading comics, I feel like a shark trying to sleep at the bottom of the ocean - one half of the ole brain working on sleep, the other on maintaining life (breathing and the like), until it's swap time. With a comic, I can be enjoying the visuals, then I have to switch to the reading track to find out the details of what's going on. Back and forth, back and forth. It's bewildering, Enough to shake jelly and milk together into blancmange. That's my sweet brain you've got there. Actually, my assembly (see previous post). For those in the knowledge, there are some remarkable things that can be don with the layout of panels and the juxtaposition of the text, but it's still a chew. A right chew. At least for me.

3. Let's depart from the pejorative stuff and look at the positives. The artwork is stunning. Muscular. Delicate. Decorative. Pleasing. Varied. Colourful. Muted. Surprising. Graphic (of course!). In-your-face. Captivating. It's art in one of it's most plastic forms. Each time one comes into contact with it, the experience is wildly different. Yes, I know no-one steps in the same river twice and all that, but there's something about the reading of a comic book that is so different each time. Something different captures your eye or attention every time. That's not to coral the pleasures of reading a comic into the purely mathematical nature of combinations and permutations. Comics and graphic novels are things one can come back to time and time again. I would read a book and pass it on with no qualms (I'm lying a bit here to suit my argument) but it would be much harder for me to relinquish a graphic novel.

4. Comic books work well with fantasy and superhero genres. It's like strawberries and cream. the panels can be used to create closed spaces of intimacy between characters even in wider settings and yet explode to show vistas of brutality and destruction. But they also work well with others of the non-fiction variety. One of my favourites is comic journalism as practised by Joe Sacco. Who could forget the incomparable Maus by Art Spiegelman? Or the interest of Logicomix by Doxiadis, Papadimitriou and Papadatos? What about Persepolis by Marjane Sartrapi? I'm reading the astonishingly beautiful Habibi by Craig Thompson, which is fictional, but has human and supernatural elements that seem all too real. This is not stuff for kids.

5. Charm. There's something charming about certain types of comics. A visual touchy-feeliness beyond the purely artistic elements of form and tempo and composition. I'm thinking primarily of Watterson's Calvin and Hobbes where the pictures and content are so inextricably interwoven, its more like a fabric than a medium. I also get this with Watchmen, Alan Moore and Dave Gibbon's masterpiece. The art far surpasses even the greater sum of the whole. I know this is a somewhat contradiction, but that's how it feels.