New Century Coolbooks

“Out of the dark night, a hero emerges to save the faltering rhythms of pop cache! A hero uniquely suited to the needs of a populace trapped in the grinding malaise of early 21st-century retro obsession, a hero …”

Oh—wait. I got excited. Comics can do that.

The resurgence of comics in American pop culture isn’t surprising. They were largely forced underground as a casualty of the reactionary political and cultural currents of the 1950s. But the comics community continued moving forward, and mainstream pop is catching up. After cheesy Batman and Wonder Woman ’70s television and old-school Superman movies, Tim Burton’s Batman movies took a step in the right direction, cued by Frank Miller’s gothic noir interpretation. Occasionally, a movie like Crumb or Unbreakable surfaces. In the late ’90s and new millennium, we suddenly get not only the X-Men and Catwoman (eek), but The League of Extraordinary Gentleman, Ghost World and Hellboy. Comics flava shows up on lunchboxes, T-shirts, commercials. And considerations of comics themselves are everywhere from the New York Times Book Review to, well, Paste. Why are we so excited?

Elsewhere, mainstream culture seems stuck in recycle mode: hippie chic, disco fun, preppy glam, ’80s ick, punk touches, grunge groove, hip-hop homage. And besides killer new eye candy and panoramics, no Hollywood revolutions (you know, besides The Lord of the Rings). It’s like the fin de siècle of cool. Enter comics. Although they share elements with film, animation, books and photography, nothing does what comics can—and we’re finally ready to see it.

Highly layered texts compose comics narrative: voice/thought bubbles; narrator boxes; artwork; framework; sound, color and emotive iconography; indicative font—every bit visual, dense and immediate. Taking in the artwork, you also map verbiage to positions and perspectives occupied by character or narrator. Font or placement sometimes provides clues. Iconographic marks—like speed lines behind a car—must be interpreted as sound, movement or state of mind. Variable framing requires readers to connect narrative across pages. Even when some layers aren’t employed, a comic’s composition demands a different kind of reading than do movies or straight text.

Part of comics’ immediacy may stem from our experience of arrested images. Why does a photograph of a decrepit country barn you’d drive right past catch the eye? Suddenly it’s a monument—history we recognize precisely because the moment has been frozen. Iconic, symbolic, interpretable, the image prompts a rare awareness of surroundings and self. A comic’s every frame has shades of this effect, with an unusual capacity to communicate emptiness, relativity or inexorability of time, as well as distance and crystallized emotion.

Indeed, it’s not possible to interact with comics on only one level—and as a corollary, we can’t avoid inserting ourselves into every layer. In this way, comics allow us to create stories that reflect our life experiences. Recent comics readily present a narrative chronicling the difficulties of isolated postmodern existence as those of familiar pulp genres like superheroes or adventure. Fewer stock characters and limitations often lead to a keen depiction of modern archetypes—paradoxical as this seems. Chris Ware’s Jimmy Corrigan, a perfect example, spends frames worth of time eating cereal or listening to the phone ring, enduring an exquisitely quotidian experience of ennui. Or, a new kind of heroine: Street Angel’s skateboarding martial arts expert, the homeless teenager Jesse Sanchez, who battles “ninjas, drugs, nepotism, and pre-algebra” on the streets.

So, comics offer us new archetypes of human experience, represented in images with interpretable layers. Whew! No wonder we get sucked in. Falling into the interstitial space, I read … myself. Corrigan sits on the edge of his bed while the day passes outside his window frame by frame, and my loneliest moments haunt me with the piercing poignancy of changing sunlight. Shi leaves yakuza bloody and mutilated, and my warrior self feels searing past wrongs and their revenge. Catwoman, my anarchist, treads lightly, amused by her ambiguous ethics. The girl who becomes Promethea enacts my part as a Chosen One who will maintain the cosmic balance. All I can’t be, all that sleeps in me, all the facets of me that are undeniable—the desires and fears of humanity play out before my eyes. When reading comics, we experience ourselves as the humans we are—and as the humans we wish to be.