DAVE GIBBONS
It’s hard to say when comics became respectable. It was probably some time between 1992, when Art Spiegelman won a Pulitzer Prize for drawing himself as a human-sized mouse, and 2017, when someone paid £530,000 at auction for Robert Crumb’s drawing of two lascivious felines. While the subjects of Spiegelman’s and Crumb’s works are worlds apart—Maus is a family memoir about the Holocaust, while Fritz the Cat concerns a talking feline’s sex life—these works aren’t as different as they may seem. Even the most highbrow comics have always been a little bit ridiculous.
During roughly the same 25-year period in which underground comics crossed over into the realm of high art, the classic superhero genre got a modern makeover. Neil Gaiman’s Sandman comic book series introduced the genre to a literary crowd. Inspired by his rediscovery of a box of childhood comics, the novelist and short story writer Michael Chabon wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, a Pulitzer-winning novel about the golden age of comics in the 1940s. Chabon reserved the final line of his acknowledgements for Jack Kirby, the creator of the X-Men and the Avengers, citing him as an inspiration for not just that novel, but “everything else I’ve ever written.” Boyhood fandom had never seemed so acceptable.