In the book review section of the Times this weekend there's actually a smart and respectful piece on the current state of comics. For our purposes the discussion of the reviewed book's bias against super-hero comics is the most relevent passage, to wit:
"He is indifferent, even silently hostile, to superheroes, none of whom appear anywhere in the book, aside from an ironic use of hero-comic ideas in a lovely piece, a child’s dreamscape, by Ware. While Brunetti echoes the disdain for reductive distinctions between high and low that comics defenders have employed since the critic Gilbert Seldes praised “Krazy Kat” in 1924, he imposes a hierarchy of his own. There is no question that the vast bulk of superhero comics are factory-made product, rather than works of individual expression; still, at least a few mainstream comics published in recent years — including a series of Batman stories drawn by David Mazzucchelli, who has other work in the anthology — are as artful and subtle as some stories in this book."
Read the whole piece here.
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