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During the first decade of this century, a raft of practitioners, academics and journalists (in the English speaking world) advocated for a re-evaluation of the snobbishness held by the gatekeepers of high culture towards the medium of comics. While still several paces behind the Franco-Belgian celebration of bande dessinée as the 'ninth art,' the crusade has had a profound impact on the way comics are covered in the media and equally important, their inclusion in bookstores and libraries. For the former, it was an easy response to market demand: when journals like the New York Times, London Review of Books and Observer give glowing reviews to the latest graphic novels, people are going to want to read them and want more accessible places to exchange money for content. For public libraries, the decision was borne partly by a desire to attract young readers and by progressive librarians who saw the literary value in the formerly maligned medium. While the cloth may come from the same bolt, public and academic libraries are cut slightly differently. School librarians face a bit more scrutiny for making shelf space for comics. While these attitudes have changed significantly, I would guess that most school library collections still feature more adaptations of classics, 'literature,' Shakespeare and established volumes like Tintin and Maus than contemporary comics and graphic novels. I hope I'm wrong, but prejudices die hard. By including the above list of more academically acceptable works, the aim is not to discourage their shelf appearances. We owe a lot to these works. Many of the articles written to promote comics from the cultural gutters shielded their arguments behind the unimpeachable works by the likes of Art Spiegelman, Marjane Satrapi, Joe Sacco and Lynda Barry. While the endeavour paid off, our new challenge is to engineer the infrastructure needed to bridge the gap between the darlings of the literati and the perception that everything else is just muscles in pyjamas.
The reality is far more nuanced and the range of genres tackled by comics is only limited by pioneering effort. The mechanics of the medium alone are an excellent resource for teaching literacy, visual literacy and multimodality. Superheroes give us an easily understandable platform with which to discuss topics like ethics, postmodernity...