Comics are "On the edge of breaking through to the public at large"...again.

I see this stuff in the press every year or so but it just never happens. something trumpets that FINALLY people will see comics for what they are (great) instead of some kids dime novel--a thing it has not been in decades. i wish for the sucess of so many deserving, talented people. the comic industry deserves its over-due public adoration

Journalists have been heralding the rise of the graphic novel for decades. Ever since Will Eisner published A Contract with God in 1978, the adult comic book has hovered on the scene, always imminent, occasionally praised as a serious art form—as in the case of Art Spiegelman’s best-selling Maus (1986)—but mostly confined to the margins. Recently, it seems, the genre has once again reached that critical-mass, any-day-now moment.

“Graphic novels come of age,” Peter Schjeldahl boasts in the Oct. 17 issue of The New Yorker. His essay describes the genre as “unexpectedly complex and fertile,” an avant-garde artistic breakthrough. (Curiously, he also calls it “a young person’s art” and refers to the “taxing” challenge it poses for the consumer: the demands of both reading and looking at a story.) Mr. Schjeldahl trots over much the same territory (and touts the same handful of artists) covered last year by Charles McGrath, a former editor of The New York Times Book Review, who waxed on in a Times Magazine cover story about the “newfound respectability” of graphic novels as a “vernacular form with mass appeal.”

Whatever. go all of Marjane Satrapi's books. they're damn good for anyone with working eyeballs and 2 brain cells working together. (Unless you're my pal gorj. who is scared to read them for some reason).