In Praise of Comic Books

On what makes comic books special, and an argument against calling them "graphic novels".

When I was growing up, comic books were a major food group in my literary diet. At my youngest, they were the perfect bridge between picture books and the written word, part of the primitive period of moving from finger paintings to signing my crayon-scribbled name on my drawings. In my origin story, the short comic strips in the Sunday funnies aided this transition, teaching me to associate the squares of imagery with lines of text.

Comic books trained my eye to slow down, rather than skipping from page to page in a rush to the end. They taught me this patience through the artistry of their pictures, which were more advanced than the illustrations in simplified storybooks for first readers. Even in Hergé’s Tintin comics, which he famously kept minimalistic, there were full-page panels that contained so much detail that I’d drop onto my stomach, spread the book wide open on the floor, and get close up to take in the background characters, the subplots with Snowy the dog chasing somethi…