Comics are an integral part of our literary and social history. It is also the backbone on which the ever more popular videogame history. It can be argued that most videogames are essentially interactive comics delivered on new technology platforms. I believe that to truly understand the important role that comics play in todays trends in merchandise, marketing, pop culture and yes intellectual and common man literacy, we must look back at its history and comments from some of the best minds in literature. An overview of two books are highlighted below, enjoy and let us here your comments.

Arguing Comics – Literary Masters on Comics
An anthology charting the longstanding cultural conversation that the comics sparked when Art Spiegelman’s Maus-a two-part graphic novel about the Holocaust-won a Pulitzer Prize in 1992, comics scholarship grew increasingly popular and notable. The rise of “serious” comics has generated growing levels of interest as scholars, journalists, and public intellectuals continue to explore the history, aesthetics, and semiotics of the comics medium.

Yet those who write about the comics often assume analysis of the medium didn’t begin until the cultural studies movement was underway. Arguing Comics: Literary Masters on a Popular Medium brings together nearly two dozen essays by major writers and intellectuals who analyzed, embraced, and even attacked comic strips and comic books in the period between the turn of the century and the 1960s. From e. e. cummings, who championed George Herriman’s Krazy Kat, to Irving Howe, who fretted about Harold Gray’s Little Orphan Annie, this volume shows that comics have provided a key battleground in the culture wars for over a century.

With substantive essays by Umberto Eco, Marshall McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, Gilbert Seldes, Dorothy Parker, Irving Howe, Delmore Schwartz, and others, this anthology shows how all of these writers took up comics-related topics as a point of entry into wider debates over modern art, cultural standards, daily life, and mass communication.

Arguing Comics shows how prominent writers from the Jazz Age and the Depression era to the heyday of the New York Intellectuals in the 1950s thought about comics and, by extension, popular culture as a whole.

A columnist for the National Post (Canada), Jeet Heer has been published in Slate, the Boston Globe, the Guardian, the Comics Journal and many other venues.

Kent Worcester, a professor of political science and international studies at Marymount Manhattan College, is the author of C. L. R. James: A Political Biography. His work has appeared in the Comics Journal, New Statesman, Popular Culture Review, and numerous other publications.

Alternative Comics – A Study of long form comics or Graphic Novels
An exploration of the tremendous potential for self-expression found in groundbreaking comics and graphic novels
In the 1980s, a sea change occurred in comics. Fueled by Art Spiegel- man and Françoise Mouly’s avant-garde anthology Raw and the launch of the Love & Rockets series by Gilbert, Jaime, and Mario Hernandez, the decade saw a deluge of comics that were more autobiographical, emotionally realistic, and experimental than anything seen before. These alternative comics were not the scatological satires of the 1960s underground, nor were they brightly colored newspaper strips or superhero comic books.

In Alternative Comics: An Emerging Literature, Charles Hatfield establishes the parameters of alternative comics by closely examining long-form comics, in particular the graphic novel. He argues that these are fundamentally a literary form and offers an extensive critical study of them both as a literary genre and as a cultural phenomenon. Combining sharp-eyed readings and illustrations from particular texts with a larger understanding of the comics as an art form, this book discusses the development of specific genres, such as autobiography and history.

Alternative Comics analyzes such seminal works as Spiegelman’s Maus, Gilbert Hernandez’s Palomar: The Heartbreak Soup Stories, and Justin Green’s Binky Brown Meets the Holy Virgin Mary. Hatfield explores how issues outside of cartooning-the marketplace, production demands, work schedules-can affect the final work. Using Hernandez’s Palomar as an example, he shows how serialization may determine the way a cartoonist structures a narrative. In a close look at Maus, Binky Brown, and Harvey Pekar’s American Splendor, Hatfield teases out the complications of creating biography and autobiography in a substantially visual medium, and shows how creators approach these issues in radically different ways.

Charles Hatfield, Canyon Country, California, is an assistant professor of English at California State University, Northridge. His work has been published in ImageTexT, Inks: Cartoon and Comic Art Studies, Children’s Literature Association Quarterly, the Comics Journal, and other periodicals.

See the author’s Web site at www.csun.edu/~ch76854/.        256 pp., 60 illustrations, bibliography, index