04:13 PM EST on Thursday, March 23, 2006

NEW YORK

Call it the paradox of the marginal. Any art form that hovers at the fringe of cultural recognition for long enough ends up defining itself by its outsider status; once accepted, however, it finds itself in an identity crisis. It happened with jazz -- a term originally connoting triviality and insignificance -- which wrestled for decades over how seriously to take itself (is it still jazz if it's played by white people in a concert hall?), and it continues to happen with cinema, vacillating as it does between high art and commercial entertainment.

More problematic is that perennially misunderstood hybrid of illustration and literature that Scott McCloud has deemed the "invisible art." It has also variously been called "sequential art," "vernacular narrative," and "graphic media," although most of us refer to it as "comics."

Whatever this is seems to have a slippery quality, which has proved especially resistant to categorization. Ancient glyphs, illuminated manuscripts, the predellas of medieval altarpieces, Victorian flip books, the willowy serif of Rodolphe Toffler, the austere expressionist woodcuts of Lynd Ward, the haunting watercolor diaries of Charlotte Solomon, the lugubrious storybooks of Edward Corey -- they each share a pared-down and immediate quality that remains difficult to nail down, but that separates them definitively from other forms.

So much so, in fact, that comics have rarely enjoyed the same critical or popular attention. Within the past several years, however, we've seen a huge turnaround. Comics have been discussed not only in eccentric journals, such as N+1 and Bomb, but also in the pages of The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The New York Times Sunday Magazine.

This is to say nothing of the recent slew of movies based on comics -- Spider-Man, XMen, The Fantastic Four, Sin City, Hellboy, Batman Begins, etc. -- all of which indicate that the medium has been steadfastly coming into its own.

But how long will the fanfare last? Will comics carve out their own permanent section of the bookstore, finally distilled from the science-fiction and fantasy shelves? Will they crystallize into a grand tradition, like ballet or sculpture, with ever progressive developments and unique styles?

Or will they briefly bask in the sun, only to slink back into their exclusive little niche, like free jazz and punk rock?

I have no idea, and no one else does, either. But a more pertinent question might be, what future should we be rooting for? Remember, when ragtime and stride caught on, they disintegrated into a vanilla haze of bourgeois grandeur, from which they never recovered. Bauhaus became Levittown. Radical graffiti art of the '70s became fashionable wristwear of the '80s. Whole movements and schools of thought can be crushed by over-exposure and hype.

So which is it? Haughtily redundant or indignantly obscure? Me, I'm holding out for a third option: that contemporary comics sidestep the trappings of both before the art form calcifies into a generic novelty.

As it stands, the "invisible art" has a very visible Achilles heel. while adult comics are both formally and conceptually distinct from those targeted to children, the two share a key element. As everyone knows, kids' comics tend to feature a superhero of some kind who masquerades as an everyday schmo-a Clark Kent or a Peter Parker, say -- whereas "grown-up" comics favor the anti-hero -- the lowly everyman, the social mutant who possesses a secret inner life.

Interestingly, young-adult-oriented comics are very frequently a fusion of the two. Misguided crimefighters, scapegoat vigilantes and washed-up adventurers all find good company among teens. But it doesn't take a degree in literary theory to identify the same tired archetype, the introverted and maladroit nebbish, as the common thread.

Towering atop the old guard of contemporare adult comics is R. Crumb, whose scrawny, lascivious nail biters cower at the threat of barrel-chested jock warriors and voluptuous succubae.

Harvey Pekar, whose American Splendor strip was recently adapted into a feature film, employs a host of illustrators to depict himself as the slobby, gravel-throated misanthrope he is. Art Spiegelman, in his most recent work, In the Shadow of No Towers, similarly features himself as a huffing, bedraggled artist, complete with shaving scars and a receding hairline. The series that deservedly won Ben Katcher his "genius" award from the MacArthur Foundation details the wanderings of Julius Kniple: Real Estate Photographer, a pudgy homunculus, through the vertiginous landscape of the old Lower East Side.

Meanwhile, a younger generation of comics artists has not fallen far from the tree. Daniel Clowes's fiendishly deadpan Ghost World series, also successfully adapted, follows two terminally ironic teenage misfits through John Waters-style suburbia.

Craig Thompson's effortlessly rendered travelogue-in-pictures, Carnet de Voyages, begins with the recently heartbroken artist fleeing to Paris, where he roams the streets wallowing in despair and complaining of tendinitis. Chester Brown's I Never Liked You is a small delight of minimalist composition and pacing, yet the pedestrian and weaselly ineffectual title character is dangerously reminiscent of the stock role one saw in '80s sitcoms.

Finally, Chris Ware's most ambitious creation, Jimmy Corrigan: Smartest Kid on Earth -- very possibly the most intricate and visually ravishing graphic novel to date -- features a young man drawn deceptively as a withering geriatric cripple, who clings to his manipulative mother and shrinks at every opportunity to take charge of his life.

Perhaps it is the natural state of marginal media to represent marginal subjects. Or maybe there's something in the nature of the form as it is generally understood to be -- a platform targeted to grownups who still read the funny pages -- that comic-book artists play to. Whichever the case, the results can be narcissistic and at times very trying.

In the pictorial introduction to last year's beautiful McSweeney's comics issue, for instance, Mr. Ware laments how cartoonists as a group are always getting "shafted," "never [get] respect," and "rarely [get] laid." Later in the same issue, Mark Beyer, of Amy and Jordan fame, goes so far as to appear himself at the end of a strip, to literally weep over his bad reviews.

Not that all comics are so self-pitying. More dignified are the illustrated memoirs of Iranian artist Marjane Satrapi, whose masterful Persepolis depicts her own excruciating childhood during the Islamic Revolution with honesty, wit, and fearlessness.

There are other refreshing exceptions - David B.'s Epileptic comes to mind, as does R. Kikuo Johnson's Night Fisher, Adrian Tomine's Optic Nerve, Peter Blegvad's marvelously surreal Book of Leviathan, and the exquisite graphic journalism of Joe Sacco -- but far too few.

The challenge for the next crop of graphic and comic-book artists, or perhaps the next challenge for this crop, will be to transcend the cloyingly juvenile stereotype of their forebears and seize upon a wider terrain of narrative possibilities.

For every established platform of expression, there are a hundred near-misses. Why didn't Zoetropes, magic-lantern theaters, or, for that matter, 3-D movies ever move beyond mere passing curiosities? Will podcasts rise to become part of the thoroughfare, or will they tread water, like hypertext and electronica? Will video games one day achieve artistic credibility?

Again, I have no idea All I can submit is that self-consciousness is a death sentence. The test of any medium, any artist, any style, is plasticity: the capacity to shift and adapt to the circumstances surrounding it. Cinema has had the advantage of technical innovation -- sound, color, video, computers -- to help keep things fresh; comics are stuck with ink and paper. If its practitioners remain so in love with their own fringiness that they refuse to evolve, take unexpected turns, creatively blur the boundaries of their craft, then this otherwise furiously living art will doom itself to a limbo of the eccentric middlebrow - a Disneyland run by Fritz the Cat.

Alex Rose is a New York writer and filmmaker.