The rise of tragicomic books
 A panel from Somerville-based artist Jordan Crane's 2002 work "Keeping Two" (left). A panel from "Mjau Beibi" (Meow Baby), 2003, by Norwegian artist Jason (right). |
COMICS ARE a medium, not a genre." That's been the mantra of comic-book aficionados ever since cartoonist Art Spiegelman won the Pulitzer Prize in 1992 for his masterful cat-and-mouse Holocaust narrative ''Maus." Today, instead of being relegated to the Comics (or worse, Humor) section of bookstores, ''Maus" and its descendants-Iranian cartoonist Marjane Satrapi's ''Persepolis," about her childhood during the Islamic Revolution, say, or globe-trotting journalist Joe Sacco's ''Palestine," about daily life in the West Bank and Gaza-are not infrequently shelved where they belong: in History, Biography, or Fiction.
To find out what's next in the evolution of this medium, consult ''Pictures and Words" (Yale), a newly published overview, edited by Roanne Bell and Mark Sinclair, of cutting-edge work in ''narrative illustration": that is, the telling of a story through images and text, or images alone. A glance at the book, which features 31 artists from America (including Somerville-based artist Jordan Crane), Britain, France, Finland, South Africa, Hong Kong, and 10 other countries, suggests that what's newest about new comic art is its range of subject matter, now as boundless as other narrative art forms, from novels to cinema.
''I think things shifted with 'Maus,"' claims Sinclair, a senior writer at the London-based magazine Creative Review, in an e-mail exchange. ''Nowadays, when Chris Ware can tackle American culture and family values, and Joe Sacco can provide an eyewitness account of post-war Iraq for [the British newspaper] The Guardian, one of the defining characteristics of the new work seems to be that there are no defining characteristics."
Joshua Glenn is associate editor of Ideas. E-mail glenn@globe.com.
