Sara Miner Literature of Comics

Reading underground comics was a pretty big shock considering just how tame mainstream comics were. I feel like superhero comics and what's sold commercially are read to see what sort of life society would be best to live and then underground comics are more of a guilty pleasure to make the reader feel like they're not the only ones having those sort of thoughts under the surface. Their purpose is more so for the creator to just get al of their thoughts out creatively. Kind of like throwing a bunch of darts at a target all at once, the more you throw the higher the chance of hitting the target.

With comics gaining more commercial popularity among average people, the comic industry started to outgrow the limitations of the comic strip format. Through the growth of consumption of comics came a sort of need for comic creators to find a new format for conveying their ideas. This need for innovation fostered the creation of what we call today the Graphic Novel. I read A Contract with God, a graphic novel from the man that coined that term, Will Eisner. Through this work, the difference between more commercialized comics like superhero stories and strips became very clear. The subject matter became darker and more akin to real life rather than a romanticized story or joke with an impossible punchline. There became much more writing and character depth, much like a real novel, and the art felt as though there were less limitations because there was more of a focus on the mood of each panel than there was on fitting a certain style to make it more marketable.

I never really read into superhero comics much as a kid cause I thought it was a boy thing and I just never had access to them. As I grew older and heard other people talking about them and their movie adaptations, I wanted to know more about them and get more into them, but now that I've actually read some of them I don't think I should be all that sad about never reading them before. I had read the Batman Dark Knight series before for a high school english class and thought it was cool, so knowing now how those comics used to be before getting freed up by the sort of Graphic Novel movement was pretty shocking. I thought the Adam West batman show was sort of exaggeratingly simple for a reason but its surprising to see that that's just kinda how superheroes were made out to be in the beginning.