But Moore is right to question some aspects of today’s comics culture. The banal Hollywood industry of turning piquant comics (including his) into mediocre blockbuster films is boring, and there is potentially something absurd about a civilisation that thinks graphic novels are way cooler than actual novels. There’s a smug complacency about, say, the New York Times giving comics masses of review space. Are graphic novels just cultural capital for the university-educated who dig the postmodernity of the medium?
This is why I fell in love with Moore’s comics. Unlike cool graphic novels about urban angst, his comics really are comics with a restless unrespectability. His dark ideas and savage humour make his works less cosy and more dangerous than any rival. He puts the shame back into the grownup comic, and that is as it should be.
Guardian, I love you, but you’re embarrassing yourself (Part 1).
“There is potentially something absurd about a civilisation that thinks graphic novels are way cooler than actual novels.” Ah, the concept of a hierarchy of media – or the primacy of prose, for that matter.
Also, why exactly “should” there be shame in the grownup comic?