3/6/09: Graphic novels really are good literature

If you’re like me, you’re reading this column either in line at the local cineplex while waiting for your prepurchased ticket to be torn before you’re allowed to find the best possible theater seat from which to view the “Watchmen” movie released today, or while being distracted by mental review of its triumphs and flaws after having seen it last night at a midnight screening, or both.

That’s right. Sometimes I read over my own columns, occasionally while waiting in long lines.

But if you’re thinking about whether that makes me narcissistic or obsessive, or both, you’re missing the point, which is that I can’t wait to see this movie.

If it’s half as fascinating and intricate as the graphic novel it’s based on, it will be well worth watching.

For the “true believers” in comic books, I should admit that I’m a Janey-come-lately to the whole scene: I started reading comic books in anthology form around this time last year, with the first volume of “Cerebus,” a 300-issue independent comic created by Canadian Dave Sim.

While having read the entire “Cerebus” series should earn me some nerd cred, I don’t have the background in Silver Age comics that true lifelong fans have. Before last year, Comic Book Guy from “The Simpsons” was my only real contact with comic book fans — and he’s a cartoon. But since then, I’ve come to appreciate what comic books can do.

Traditionally, comic books haven’t gotten much respect, and neither have the people who love them.

The knee-jerk impulse to dismiss comic books “because they have pictures” might come partly from residual guilt over preferring film strips to lectures, or field trips to, well, anything, in school, combined with the axiom “reading is good for you.” But there’s no evidence that children or adults learn best from line after line of text. In fact, there’s plenty of evidence to the contrary.

We can stop feeling guilty for liking to look at pictures, in other words.

And beyond learning styles, graphic novels are able to tell stories that neither books nor movies can tell — because description of the level of visual detail included in even a single panel of comic is impossibly dense in an ordinary novel, while moving pictures go so quickly as to make serious frame-by-frame study impractical.

Alan Moore, writer of “Watchmen,” is largely credited as the guy who figured out how to tell a story that could only be told in comic form. It was considered the unfilmable comic book.

Now, of course, it’s been filmed.

But that kind of genre bending is just what comic books these days are thriving on.

Beyond the summer box office successes of “The Dark Knight” and “Iron Man,” which were based on comic book series, memoir comics such as Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis” have garnered critical acclaim and new fans — new fans who dig back into the oeuvre of artists who preceded their favorites and discover an entire alternate history of literature.

And it is literature. That wasn’t a typo or poor word choice.

The characterization of memoir comics isn’t in question; these are actual people, who choose to tell their stories with pictures included, and to some extent, this still-emerging subgenre has legitimated what most people see as a world of superheroes.

But fictional comics — even superhero ones, though those aren’t nearly the breadth of comic art — don’t need legitimizing, any more than text-only fiction does. George Eliot’s “Middlemarch” is one of my all-time favorite novels, but it has nothing on “Watchmen” in cast of characters, plotting or execution.

So if you’re not in line for “Watchmen” right now, I recommend it.

Better yet, read the book.