There is a common misconception that comics are for children; worse, there is a misconception that comics are for uneducated people who read at a low level. This simply isn’t the case. Comics and graphic novels can tell compelling, emotional, dark, adult stories.
The first graphic novel I read was in an undergraduate class at Maryville University of Saint Louis in a class taught by Dr. Jesse Kavadlo titled Adolescence in American Literature. When I first opened Hole by Charles Burns, one of our texts for the semester, I was immediately struck by the stark contrast on each page — the entire graphic novel is in black and white, void of color.
Black Hole, written and illustrated by Burns, is a limited run of twelve comics (1995-2005) originally published in Kitchen Sink Press, then Fantagraphics. Compiled into a hardcover book in 2005, Black Hole follows a group of teenagers in 1970s suburban Seattle who are confronted by a sexually transmitted disease that manipulates the host’s body into a grotesque, macabre form. From lizard tails to constantly shedding skin from a tear on the back to mouths forming along the neck, Black Hole is not for children. There is sex, death, body horror, gore, and drug use. I devoured this graphic novel in one sitting, captivated by the trippy, otherworldly illustrations and the characters’ traumas and troubles.
Black Hole won the 2006 Harvey Award for Best Graphic Album of Previously Published Work and the 2006 Ignatz Award for Outstanding Anthology or Collection. This is not your typical Marvel superhero comic; Burns’ work contains literary themes that are essential to the rapidly expanding canon of American literature.
In another of Dr. Kavadlo’s classes, New Voices, New Forms in American Literature, I read Maus by Art Spiegelman. Maus is an autobiographical graphic novel in which Spiegelman speaks to his ailing father about surviving the Holocaust. The humans are depicted as mice, the Nazis are depicted as cats, and Spiegelman does not shy away from showing us the graphic violence his father endured. This was Spiegelman’s way of connecting with his father, sharing his father’s story, as well as healing from intergenerational trauma. Maus won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992.
Additionally, I read Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’ Watchmen for a Philosophy class. Comics were fundamental in my collegiate studies.
If you’re still not convinced, Keanu Reeves and Matt Kint’s BRZRKR is a bloody, gritty tale about a man trying to discover his true purpose. Maia Kobabe’s Genderqueer is an autobiography of the author’s experience with queer identity. Smash hit TV show The Walking Dead was inspired by the comic books of the same name by Robert Kirkman and Tony Moore. Comics can be just as moving and meaningful as literature — they are a valid form of storytelling.
