The Daily Cross Hatch talks to Tom Hart some more:
You said that most people think about the graphic novel. I don’t know if it’s the case so much anymore, but for a long time, it seemed like the newspaper strip was people’s entry into the world of comics.
I’m always surprised with young people—20-year-olds and such—that the strip is their entry point into comics. I guess it was mine, at that point, too… But for adults, I don’t know, I think the word is getting out. A lot of them have seen things floating around. A lot of adults have read Maus or Persepolis. I had one student walk in this semester, who not only knew who Dan Clowes was, and had actually been in Art Speigelman’s studio, and all of these other pearls that she keeps revealing in the class, like “when I was talking to Charles Burns…” “You were talking to Charles Burns?” But I think she’s new to actually drawing them. She’s been thinking about them a lot, and even writing about them, perhaps. There’s a weird amount of knowledge out there that isn’t on the surface. But I think the high profile books like Maus and Persepolis have helped a lot, and The New York Times Magazine. There’s a weird point that we’ve reached, where it’s not so strange to talk about these things.
Tom Spurgeon chats up writer, scholar and editor Jeet Heer about the Gasoline Alley books and other things:
SPURGEON: How do you feel the audience has changed for writing about comics since you’ve been doing it? Is your own writing different to reflect any perceived changes in the audience? Are you able to write more sophisticated and longer pieces now, for instance?
HEER: When I first started writing, every article had to be introductory and rudimentary. You know the genre: “POW! BAM! Comics Aren’t Just For Kids Anymore.” That’s really changed in the last two to three years. You can expect readers to know about Maus now, so you don’t have to start with a potted history of comics or justify why you are writing about comics in the first few paragraphs. The pleasure of writing longer articles, like my 7000-word essay on Winsor McCay for The Virginia Quarterly Review, is that you can get even farther away from elementary writing and explore topics in depth. I’ve noticed that other writers are doing this as well: Sarah Boxer in the New York Review of Books and Douglas Wolk in Salon. It’s a welcome trend, showing a more receptive and sophisticated audience.
