Next up on my reading agenda is this New York Review of Books essay on the graphic novel:

Comic books, the rock ‘n’ roll of literature, have always been a rigorously disreputable form of junk art for adolescents of body or mind. Hyper-energetic, crude, sexually regressive, and politically simplistic, comics—like rock (and, in recent years, hip-hop)— give fluent voice to their audience’s basest and most cynical impulses. These are their virtues, arguably, as outlets for emotional release and as social counteragents.

(Via Arts Journal.)