Revolution is afoot in the Review.
In this year's Books of the Year, Mark Haddon, Philip Pullman and Sarah Waters all choose graphic novels such as Alison Bechdel's Fun Home and Marjane Satrapi's Chicken With Plums.
How progressive! For the first time, comics take their deserved place beside the latest from Philip Roth. Snobbery has at last been banished from the nation's literary pages. Or has it?
In fact, the snobbery is merely operating with a new precision. Look again at those picks. All of them are sad, semi-autobiographical tales about family and adolescence, except for Guy Delisle's Shenzhen - "a fascinating account of the Canadian author's experiences in southern China". No room for Batman, Spiderman and their comrades.
Caped crime fighters have always been an embarrassment to advocates of comics as legitimate literature. We are asked to forget that superhero comics invented all the techniques and conventions of the medium, and that, even today, they make up the vast majority of comics sold. An exception is often made for Alan Moore's Watchmen from 1987 - but that leaves us in an awkward post-modern contortion, where everyone is reading a clever deconstruction of the superhero genre without any experience of the style in its straightforward form.
Why should the proliferation of realistic tales about mundane lives be a sign of artistic maturity and validity? Different narratives work in different media. Fun Home and Chicken With Plums are enjoyable enough, but stories like that can be, and have been, told much better in prose or on film. Superheroes, on the other hand, are only really at home on the pages of a comic. If we are determined to appreciate comics, why not appreciate them for what they do best?
Authors such as Brian Michael Bendis, Mark Millar and Warren Ellis, /a> and Brian K Vaughn, whose work is complex, witty, moving and, above all, fabulously imaginative. The notion that there can't be a great comic about a superhero is as laughable as the notion that there can't be a great film about a gangster or a great novel about a spy or a great opera about a knight.
It's wonderful that comics have reached the point where not every article about them must have a patronising headline like 'Wham! Smash! Pow! Comics Aren't Just For Kids Any More!' But literary pundits should be open-minded enough to engage with the art form in its full glory, not just in its bloodless, gentrified form.
