Still drawn to comics

Back in the 1970s, when Art Spiegelman was a "self-important squirt" and before he would go on to spend 13 years creating

Maus

, his two-volume Holocaust masterpiece, he was intent on breaking what he saw as the last comic taboo standing.

"He dared to call himself an artist, and call his medium an art form," Spiegelman writes of his "wild-eyed, ink-swilling" younger self in Breakdowns: Portrait of the Artist as a Young %@&*!, his oversized new book that collects and expands on his early work.

But Spiegelman, who will appear at the Pennsylvania Academy of the Fine Arts on Saturday and at the Philadelphia Free Library on Nov. 6, sometimes thinks that, had he known his ambitions would have been so fully realized, he would have gone into a more useful line of work.

"To the degree that the things I was poking around at have come to pass, I feel like I'm living in this Philip K. Dick world where all my idle fantasies have come true," the artist says, talking from his studio in New York.

Those fantasies included pipe dreams "that comics could be in museums, in the front of bookstores, and taught in university and high school curriculums," along with the notion that comics for comics' sake could be taken seriously, "as long as being serious doesn't exclude humor."

This fall in Philadelphia, with a rich offering of exhibits and events celebrating graphic lit, evidence abounds that Spiegelman's ambitions for the medium have been achieved.

What to call this genre? Spiegelman dislikes the common term graphic novel. He calls his idea-packed Breakdowns a "graphic novelty." Cartoonist Jessica Abel says, "Comics is the name of the medium. The only more high-falutin' version that functions is graphic narrative. Why use it when you have something like comics?"

Whatever you call it, bookstore shelves dedicated to graphic lit are lined with noteworthy new titles. There's Jonathan Ames and Dean Haspiel's The Alcoholic, and Alissa Torres and Sungyoon Choi's post-9/11 memoir, American Widow, the latest in a graphic-memoir trend that has included best-selling comics such as Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's coming-of-age-in-Iran series, and Fun Home, Alison Bechdel's 2006 memoir of growing up with a closeted gay father.

There's David Heatley's eye-popping My Brain Is Hanging Upside Down, and Chip Kidd's Bat-Manga!, a collection of Japanese Batman strips drawn in the 1960s. There are overstuffed compendiums, including the 2008 Best New American Comics, guest-edited by Lynda Barry, and Anthology of Graphic Fiction, Cartoons & True Stories, Volume 2, edited by Ivan Brunetti.

Perhaps the most anticipated release of the season is the giant-size, avant-comics anthology Kramers Ergot, which Spiegelman calls "the first new paradigm for avant-garde comics since RAW." High praise, since RAW was the journal he edited with his wife, Françoise Mouly, in the 1980s.

That's only scratching the surface in a comics-oriented world where The Simpsons is the longest-running show currently on American TV, and superheroes fly through the air in Hollywood blockbusters with ever-increasing frequency.

"There's a lot of stuff going on with comics that's really exciting," says Abel, who is the Best New American Comic series editor along with her husband, Matt Madden, with whom she also wrote Drawing Words & Writing Pictures, a textbook she teaches from at Manhattan's School of Visual Art. "There was a radical change somewhere in the neighborhood of 2001, and ever since then we've been riding some kind of wave."

The watershed moment was the 2000 publication of Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan, the Smartest Kid on Earth, a dazzlingly detailed story of a shlumpy Chicagoan that "helped people who weren't looking at comics come back to them," Abel says. And graphic literature has increasingly made its way into the movies, as with Cleveland everyman Harvey Pekar's American Splendor in 2003. The genre boasts both established masters such as Robert Crumb and Spiegelman, or Jaime and Gilbert Hernandez - whose Love & Rockets, New Stories, No. 1, was just published - and geniuses in the making, such as 25-year-old Dash Shaw, who created the family-drama comic success of this year, Bottomless Belly Button.

Add to all that the Japanese manga, as popular with girls as the men-in-tights genre has traditionally been with boys. Your local Barnes & Noble or Borders now has a specialized area large enough "for kids to be lying on the carpet reading comics all day," Abel says.

"Can the market bear all of this?" Kidd wonders. "We'll see."

"There's so much happening, it's almost impossible to keep up with it all," says Brunetti, who completed his first Anthology in 2006 and immediately set about working on a second, which includes works by Philadelphia's Burns and the Philadelphia-born Crumb, along with early-20th-century master Winsor McCay, maker of Little Nemo in Slumberland, and New Yorker cover artist Saul Steinberg.

Online comics, too, are a growth industry. Haspiel, who has illustrated both The Alcoholic and Pekar's powerful 2005 book, The Quitter, says his artistic approach for the Web is the same as for paper.

"It's just like film and literature," Haspiel says. "It's what you say and don't say, what you show and don't show. You can do anything with a blank piece of paper. I can take you anywhere with my pencil."