Tuesday, December 14, 2010

The Golden Age of Comics? Right Now.


Neil Gaiman, for NPR, discusses the state of comics today.

From the piece...

Gaiman, author of The Graveyard Book, Coraline and The Sandman comic book series, among others, was eventually commissioned to write a story on comics for one major newspaper. "I interviewed everybody. I got unpublished art. It was going to be the first big and important piece on what was going on back then," Gaiman says. But when he submitted the piece, he waited ... and waited ... and "heard absolutely nothing."

Another editor told Gaiman that one comics-related story per year was enough for the newspaper. "You are not getting it," Gaiman recalls thinking. "There is such big and important stuff happening."

In the decades since, the audience for comics has grown dramatically. Gaiman is thrilled at how comics, once a niche market for a small population of passionate fans, have taken hold in American culture.

"That you can go into not only a comic book store, but frankly, any large bookstore, and be overwhelmed by the choice in the graphic novel section ... It's like the golden age," he says.

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