Fractionals

Interesting by flawed article on comic strip and book scholarship. Buhle's contention that comics "[continue] to be conducted mostly in the netherworlds of superhero tripe" gets to the root of the problem here. Yes, early (i.e. pre-superhero) comics and underground comics provide rich material for scholarship, and can be works of art - but saying that all of the superhero genre is 'tripe' is just as fallacious as saying comics as a whole are, or science fiction is, or detective fiction is, and so on. Yes, an awful lot of superhero comics are nothing more than (often enjoyable) tripe. But genres are organised, not around quality, but around theme and tropes and so forth, and once the next generation to grow up on comics, the ones familar with Watchmen and the Invisibles and the Dark Knight Returns and the Authority, gets to academic age, maybe then we can have a non-blinkered appraisal of the superhero genre. This is a form which has been nothing less than modern myths, complete with repetition and symbolism, and when it is approached on its own ground I'm confident that at least some of it will bear fruit as works of art. Disregarding the vast majority of it as superhero tripe is as silly, short-sighted, and ultimately as dangerous as dismissing most music as worthless because it is 'popular tripe'.