NY Times review of Museum show on African comic art

Late in our semester we'll be looking at the stranglehold that the super-heroe genre had on the comics medium in this country and how various institutions like the MSM (mainstream media) continue to represent the form as a child just starting to grow up. For some reason articles are seemingly required to express surprise that comics can be artistic or literary.

Here's a quote from a recent NY Times review of a museum exhibition of African comics:

"I guess there are people who still can’t fit the idea of “art” and “comics” into the same frame. But why? If handmade, graphically inventive, conceptually imaginative images — which describes practically everything in this show — aren’t art, what is? The same images are topical, and are meant to be seen in reproduction; does that alter their status as art? Goya, Daumier and José Guadalupe Posada would of course say no."

Is this paragraph really necessary? Read the whole article here. Not to be overly critical, but one could instead write "I guess there are people still writing about comics who only know comics by what the NY Times says about them, i.e. pop, zap, wow, comics aren't just for kids anymore.

This seems important to me not just from a pet peeve point of view, but also a substantive one.
In this article, for example, the above illustration is shown. The article says, "Visually neither style is intrinsically “serious.” You can’t know at a glance what you’re getting into. By contrast, right from its opening image — of a screaming woman carrying a bloodied child, done in full-blown social-realist style — there is no mistaking the didactic content of a story of female genital mutilation by the Senegalese artist Cisse Samba Ndar. "

Okay. That's true -- unless you actually know something about comics, in which case you immediately recognize the picture as a "swipe" from a 1985 American comic. Swipe, by the way, is a term of art in the field and does not necessarily have negative connotations. In this case, is the artist deliberately linking their struggles to super-heroes' battles in black and white, good vs. evil terms? Does his comic-reading audience recognize the allusion? Or was it just a reference without meaning. a swipe in the more negative sense? My concern is that major newspapers wouldn't know to even ask the question. Instead, the picture is incorrectly labled as "social-realist style" and the papers' readers never know the difference.

If you're interested in the history of this image, there's a nice piece here.
The reality is that this cover goes back decades before the crisis cover that has become the most common assiciation. Look at this early Batman cover from the 50s and a few others.